The United States and Global Terrorism – The Three-Pronged Attack:

British Christian philosopher, Alan Storkey's most recent book "Why We War" [2014] lifts the lid on much of the war myth-making that attends the global political scene and particularly the development of the arms industry-created appetite for war that made the 20th century the bloodiest in humankind's history. Chapter 18 of his book is reproduced here with the author's permission:

United States Terrorism in Latin America, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland

Unbelievable though it seems, much of the world’s terrorism can be traced to the United States and the West. In three areas terrorism was taught to fighters by the United States. First, from the fifties onwards the United States sponsored terrorism in many Central and Southern American states which had elected left-wing regimes in order to destabilize them and make them pro-American. That was especially Republican Party policy, but Democrats also did some of it as well. Second, in order to destabilize the USSR in Afghanistan and other regions, the United States poured a vast amount of weapons, training and support to potential opposition groups and produced academies of terrorists who have now spread and multiplied into a large Anti-American Islamic movement. Third, the American Irish, often with the nod of Democratic politicians, have funded and supplied arms to the IRA for several decades and produced a pattern of terrorism in Britain that has done untold damage and been replicated elsewhere. More than this, all over the globe, western governments, companies and military establishments have channelled arms to those who might create problems for our supposed enemies. Through these processes the West has created the terrorism about which it now so loudly complains. This process was not accidental. It grows out of a policy orientation in relation to the Cold War. Rather than try to fight Communism directly with our troops, it was argued, why not equip others to do the same business for us? It meant American troops did not die and it was necessary to prevent the world-wide spread of Communism. It was a long-term strategic policy and it involved the equippers, the arms companies, in another major growth market. Here they did not even need to sell weapons abroad. The CIA and the Pentagon often paid for them and gifted them abroad.

Cuba, Central and South America.

The United States has a long sloppy, undemocratic history of getting its own way in Central and South America, the Philippines and other parts of its area of influence. Gun-running and arms have long been part of this ethos. As John Coatsworth has pointed out, “between 1898 and 1994 the United States’ Government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least forty one times.[i] Another Chinese list of interventions, not necessarily successful tops out at over a hundred, while a further list moves up to one hundred and thirty. Clearly, we cannot cover all of these, but they do not seem to be accidents, but the result of systematic “policy”. Let us look at the ousting of President Huerta from Mexico in April, 1914. The US Government under President Wilson was worried by an arms shipment coming in to bolster the Mexican Government and occupied the port of Veracruz with a big naval presence. The arms shipment to Mexico, in fact, originated from the Remington Arms Company in the United States. The arms and ammunition had been shipped via Hamburg to give Remington Arms a means of skirting the American arms embargo. US arms fighting US arms. In 1916 the Marines occupied the Dominican Republic, staying in control for eight years and setting the scene for the horrific military dictatorship of Trujillo. He was a military man and wanted a first class air-force. He imported Curtis-Wright fighters in the 30s, Boeing Flying Fortress bombers and 18 P38 Lightning fighters in the 40s and Mustangs in the 50s. The United States Government got a bit sniffy in the early 60s because he wanted an airforce that was too good and he was a beastly dictator and in 1960 the guns that would murder him were smuggled through in food cans.[ii] We could look at a vast number of other such interventions. They have a similar character. Often the US military thought they were introducing order to relative chaos. Yet often they were intervening to support a major US multinational growing and selling bananas or sugar, and the actual effect was to create a military dictatorship buttressed by the arms imported from the States or Europe. What on earth does the Dominican Republic need a sophisticated air force for when there are poor in the streets. Eisenhower and Carter knew what a liability Trujillo was after the States had spent decades arming and supporting him. Arms sales do not make sense. They are not part of a sensible strategy, but just push towards incompetent militarism.

We could talk of Nicaragua and American support of the Somoza regime or Guatamala where in 1954 the CIA engineered the overthrow of the democratically elected Government of Jacabo Arbenz with arms, training and direct military pressure because it was deemed too socialist. The result has been a series of evil military dictators. We could look at Chile and Allende. The point is not to look at the political naivety of these CIA and Presidential interventions, but to examine the part played in the whole process by arms. The United States has been by conviction both anti-imperialist, since it rightly shook off the British yoke, and pro-democratic. Neither is these convictions is unreal throughout American history, though both are deeply compromised by this history of military intervention and military aid. You cannot be anti-imperialist and jump in with the marines whenever you feel like it. You cannot be democratic and back military dictators who wipe out thousands of their opponents. My conclusion is that most Americans have not ever seriously thought about arms. They have been forced to lap it up with Cowboys, Indians and Corn Flakes, and by the propaganda machine of scares, fears and the gun lobby. In this area most Americans are mentally retarded, not insincere. This is not genetic. Many British, Arabs and Africans are the same. It is just that they have not had the occasion to reflect on arms and their consequences. When they do think, they could change fairly rapidly.

The Bay of Pigs Terrorist Attack.

The archetypal case of this in the late 20th century was that of Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion. It was another terrorist attack against the Cuban Government, backed by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy. We tend to begin considering it in relation to Castro, but, of course, the real damage was done before then. Batista was a former army sergeant, yes, and another one. He returned to power in a coup d’etat in 1952. The United States had just signed an agreement to install an Army, Navy and Air Force mission on the island and to provide military equipment under a mutual defense assistance act, so, of course American arms flowed in on a regular basis, because President Batista was a vassal military client of the US, was anti-communist, and liked buying arms. He was also linked in with the United States through the massive Guantanamo military base covering 45 square miles. This base was seized in 1898 and leased for 99 years in 1903 for $2-3,000 dollars a year for the United States navy. Batista ran a military dictatorship and the United States supplied most of his weapons.

But what of Castro? He became the focus of the opposition, initially quite distant from the Cuban Communist Party. Gradually, he became a guerilla leader of a few troops. Where did his arms come from? Again, most of them came from the good old US of A. America armed Castro? Well, yes. Some were stolen out of the Guantanamo base, but mainly they were just imported through Miami. “In the business of getting weapons, the rebels look at Miami as a housewife regards a supermarket. It is the funnel through which supplies, purchased in different parts of the United States, are poured. Private planes are airlifted from isolated airports, carrying every pound allowable. Speed boats take off all the way from Fort Lauderdale to tiny islets near Key West, not only with weapons, but recruits for Castro’s small army. Others were brought in.” Soon a million dollars of arms a year were coming in to support the revolution. “Buyers negotiate with arms dealers in New York, Washington, Hartford and Los Angeles. M1s, carbines, Thomson sub-machine guns, automatic pistols, shotguns, .75mm. antitank guns and grenades are wanted most. Purchasing agents are busy, on a smaller scale in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Costa Rica and even Europe.” [iii] One American pilot in his 29th trip ferrying arms, including 100 M1 rifles and 30,000 rounds of ammunition the previous week, crash landed at the US Guantanamo base on 16th August, 1958 at night by mistake.[iv] “Oops, slight mistake. Could you please tell me the way to the Communist revolution?” Once again, American arms sales had generated an international headache.

But Castro threatened to change things. He ended gambling on the island which was largely in the hands of gangsters and got rid of other seedy areas of life. Now there’s a move to annoy Las Vegas businessmen. He nationalized the assets of the rich, including a proportion that were American owned, and he asked the United States to leave Guantanamo Bay, refusing to cash the cheques sent in payment of the lease. This, of course, was seen as unacceptable, though really it was not if you did not want to be America’s poodle, and immediately another coup plot was hatched focused on Miami and the new set of rich Cubans who had moved across the water and wanted to topple the new Castro regime so that they could get back to their money making ways. The Bay of Pigs episode had all the characteristics of state sponsored terrorism, including the ability to bungle the situation. The CIA had planned the attack and received qualified support from Eisenhower, and stronger backing from Nixon. Yet, they were unable to undertake the training and arming of the Cuban invasion force before Eisenhower left office. When Kennedy was asked, he was against any US troops being directly involved or substantial US air force support. The CIA organization under Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, Howard Hunt, William Robertson, Sheffield Edwards, David Philips, Grayston Lynch and George Bush was energetic in its preparations, working round Kennedy’s reservations. The attack involved training the Cubans in Guatamala and constructing a $1.8 million airport there. The overall budget agreed by Eisenhower was $13 million, involving substantial arms shipments. The Many of the arms dropped in Cuba did not reach the rebels but were picked up by Castro’s men. This included eight tons on the day before the invasion. Kennedy insisted that the prior bombing raid was carried out by eight B 26 bombers, not the eighteen originally planned. The United States harassed Cuba from the air, burning sugar crops and dropping nuisance bombs, and everybody knew that the invasion was likely to take place. When it did occur, Castro was ready and mounted an effective attack defeating the invasion. Blatant United States lies about captured “Cuban” planes were seen by everyone to be false, and a discredited operation was laid bare for all the world to see.[v]

Yes, you did notice George Bush’s name there. A good deal of evidence exists that Bush was working for the CIA around this time, though he denied it in later testimony. After the failure of this operation, which the CIA blamed on Kennedy, Allen Dulles was fired for a botched job. Now we are now into the territory of the conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of Kennedy, and we cannot go there. But we can note the antipathy between the Kennedy presidency and the CIA operations people. We also note that the Cuban missile crisis which followed later, largely arose because the Bay of Pigs invasion pushed Castro into the orbit of the USSR. The levels of failure resulting from this military excursion cannot be overestimated. .

Castro was a socialist ruler who provoked the anti-socialist attitude of the CIA and the Eisenhower administration. The corrupt Batista regime had access to United States' arms, and so again the United States had armed its enemy. We can see this brew present in Kennedy’s Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion. It was largely the work of a murky CIA policy of supporting agents, handing over weapons and trying to destabilize a democratically elected. The Bay of Pigs fiasco occurred in April 1961 and had been suggested by Nixon, set up by Eisenhower through the CIA, and was finally agreed by Kennedy shortly after he become President. The CIA trained the Cuban exiles who carried out the attempted coup in camps in Guatemala and Florida. They were given American arms including tanks and other weapons and they were flown over to Cuba in unmarked American planes. However, it was a botched coup, it received no support from the Cuban population and American boats picked up some of the Cuban survivors. It did damage both by moving Castro to a stronger Marxist-Leninist position and in generating the Cuban missile crisis a year or so later. From start to finish the Bay of Pigs invasion was dishonest, a gratuitous attack on a neighbour carried out through terrorist ideology.

United States’ Terrorism in the United Kingdom.

The British and the Americans are supposed to have a special relationship, but with friends like Americans who needs enemies. For decades the American Irish have supported terrorism in Northern Ireland and mainland Britain in spirit, with money and with arms. Without American support the IRA would scarcely have got underway and certainly not continued. American money offered a career and income to terrorists who became cynical professionals who learned to exaggerate talk about grievances into a money raising industry in the States. I remember in 1980 in Grand Rapids hearing a radio appeal for money for the “poor Irish orphans” and asking naively what accident had happened, and being laughed at for not realizing that this was money flowing to IRA terrorists. It was going to pay their salaries, buy arms and explosives and equip a professional terrorist movement for taking on the UK Government. This movement involved long-term bombing in Northern Ireland, major bombs on London, Manchester and elsewhere on the British mainland and an attack on the Conservative Party Conference that nearly wiped out the United Kingdom Prime Minister and Cabinet. It practised regular shooting at British soldiers and murders on the streets and had enough weapons and explosives to run a campaign lasting decades. The cost of coping with this terrorism and meeting with damage has amounted to billions of pounds.

Support in the United States was highly organized. Here is not the space to detail the various stages of development of Sein Fein, the IRA, the Real IRA, the Provisionals and other groups. Whether by Irish Northern Aid, or the New York-based Irish Freedom Committee, money has been channelled to the long process of terrorism in substantial amounts. This was done publicly with strong political support. Regular fund raising visits were supported at the highest levels collecting great piles of dollars to take back home. “McLaughlin met with members of Congress and the media in Washington and Friends of Sein Fein held a reception at its Capitol Hill offices on Wednesday evening. (An Phobacht 20/3/97) Senator Ted Kennedy urged the movement on, “It’s time for the Prime Minister (Major) to bite the bullet.” Why, who is firing the bullet, Mr Kennedy? “Dublin Sein Fein Councillor Christy Burke this week began a three week visit to the US on behalf of Sein Fein president Gerry Adams. “I will hope to emphasize the unrelenting need for renewed support and pressure from Irish America in forcing movement in what is a worrying stagnant time and bringing about the ultimate goal of a 32 County Socialist republic.”

(An Phobacht 19/11/1998) “Worryingly stagnant” seems to have meant that no bombs had gone off recently. Money has flowed into terrorism from the American Irish on a vast scale and for a time the arms did as well. Sean Boyne’s study of the known IRA arms caches identifies 17 of the 27 as coming from the United States.[vi] Hundreds of weapons and perhaps a million rounds of ammunition were leaked out of a US Marine Base, Camp Lejeune between 1973 and 1977.[vii] This was more or less publicly sanctioned terrorism, though later the FBI did pursue weapons movements with integrity and to some effect. The political home of this terrorism was Irish Democratic groups where there was a culture of happily allowing weapons and explosives to be used in the United Kingdom as long as a few whitewashing assurances were given.

The sheer hypocrisy surrounding the United States’ response to the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon beggars belief. It was a terrible event and the mourning for those whose lives were lost was and is genuinely shared in Britain and elsewhere. But the reaction from President Bush was to declare war on terrorism and those who support terrorism! Hey! Hallo? Is anybody at home? You have been supporting terrorism for decades. Does anyone remember? IRA bombs. Blowing up Conservative party headquarters at the Brighton Conference. Anyone there? Actually, of course, there was a response to polite British diplomatic moves and noises of, “Hem. Hem. Bye the way, do you think you could please unfund Irish terrorism?” The funds dried up and peace has substantially returned to Northern Ireland. If it was ended then, it could have been ended decades earlier. We are left musing on the inability of millions of people within the United States to recognize that they were supporting and funding terrorism. Words like “hypocrisy” and “whited sepulchres” come to mind.

Probably the American donors did not even take the issue seriously. It was like supporting the local football team, our side, our tribe. But the costs were serious. A while back one of my students went to Israel for Christmas on a tour of the Holy Land. He was a good friend, wise, courteous, great fun, and with a good marriage and a child on the way. He had a great time there, but on the way back through Tel Aviv airport there was a security alert. Suddenly soldiers emerged. My friend flipped. He was restrained on the journey home, and I remember helping hold him down all night. His recovery from psychiatric illness took a year or more. He was from Northern Ireland and had grown up with security alerts, parental worry and the occasional crisis with dangerous weapons. The trigger of the security alert must have opened the fear and suffering shared by a whole community of bombs, shooting, knee-capping and intimidation and it was too much for him. That gives us a small idea of what the suffering is like. So it is with all terrorist activity. The self-righteousness of the terrorist is matched by the suffering of others.

[i] John H. Coatsworth “United States interventions – What for?” ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America

[ii] Inigo Guevera “Dominican republic since 1945” ACIG Journal 1/9/2003 http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_153.shtml

[iii] “Miami Underground” Man’s Magazine, April 1959 Vol. 7 No. 4, 24-5,86-90

[iv] Paul Wolf “Gringos in the Revolution” (Cuba 1956-62)

[v] Playa Giron “The Bay of Pigs Invasion” National Security Archive.

[vi] Sean Boyne “Uncovering the Irish Republican Army” Jane’s Intelligence Review (1/8/1996)

[vii] FAIR website 5/9/2008