Page 2 of 2 Checkered record of the world's policeman
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
and the United States itself, where as town sheriff in Moundsville Virginia in
1986, he played a key role in crushing an inmate rebellion arising from
wretched prison conditions.
Torture including sensory deprivation, rape, lashings and the use of
electroshocks was widely documented in facilities under US oversight in
Vietnam.
Frank Walton, head of the OPS in Vietnam and a former Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) chief, sanctioned a report stating that non-cooperative
prisoners, whom he referred to as "reds who keep preaching the commie line",
were "isolated in their cells for months" and permanently "bolted to the floor
or handcuffed to leg-irons", which was standard practice shaped by the war
climate.
Not surprisingly, the prisons provided an important base of recruitment for the
revolutionary forces, contributing to their
ultimate victory in 1975. After a tour of penal facilities in the Mekong Delta,
senior American adviser John Paul Vann commented, "I got the distinct
impression that any detainees not previously VC [Viet Cong] or VC sympathizers
would almost assuredly become so after their period of incarceration."
Police programs in Vietnam culminated in the notorious "Operation Phoenix",
whose aim was to eliminate the Viet Cong infrastructure (VCI) through use of
sophisticated computer technology and intelligence gathering techniques, and
improved coordination between military and civilian police intelligence
agencies. In practice, Phoenix spiraled out of control and led to
indiscriminate violence.
Internal reports pointed out the widespread corruption of American-trained
cadres who used their positions for revenge and extortion, threatening to kill
people who refused to pay them huge sums. "VC avenger units," regularly
mutilated bodies and killed family members of suspected guerrillas. While the
quantity of "neutralizations" was reported to be very high in many districts,
there were "flagrant" cases of report padding, most egregiously in the province
of Long An where Phoenix advisor Evan Parker Jr noted that "the numbers just
don't add up". Dead bodies were being identified as VCI, rightly or wrongly, in
order to fulfill quotas.
The catalogue of agents listed as killed included an inordinate number of
"nurses", which was a convenient way to account for women killed in raids on
suspected VC hideouts. A Phoenix operative who had served in Czechoslovakia
during World War II tellingly commented, "The reports that I would send in on
the number of communists that were neutralized reminded me of the reports
Hitler's concentration camp commanders sent in on how many inmates they had
exterminated, each commander lying that he had killed more than the other to
please Himmler."
These comments epitomize how the police training programs helped to facilitate
state repression and terror under the rubric of internal security and
modernization. The attempt at social control through imposition of an Orwellian
regime of mass surveillance and torture lay at the root of the wide-scale
humanitarian abuses, which fit with a much larger historical pattern.
The violence comes full circle in AfPak and Iraq
The violent history of US imperial intervention is being played out today in
Afghanistan and Iraq, where police training programs are central to
American-backed political repression and terror. Management of the programs has
been especially poor given cultural and language barriers, deeply entrenched
hostility towards foreign intervention among the population, and administrative
incompetence.
In addition, the problems have been exacerbated by the increasing reliance on
private mercenary corporations such as DynCorp and Blackwater (re-named Xe),
and on tainted police advisors linked to human-rights violations and
malfeasance.
In Afghanistan, after almost nine years and $7 billion spent on training and
salaries, an internal report concluded that "nepotism, financial improprieties
and unethical recruitment practices were commonplace" among the American-backed
forces, which engaged in widespread criminal activity and bribery and were
"overmatched in counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics operations".
American police advisors, whose background as small town cops did little to
prepare them for policing in a war zone, made six figure salaries, 50 times
more than their Afghan counterparts, who resented their presence. According to
a recent poll, less than 20% of the population in the eastern and southern
provinces trusted the police, who are poorly motivated and whose poor
performance has contributed to political instability and the resurgence of the
Taliban.
A taxi driver interviewed by RAND Corporation analyst Seth G Jones tellingly
commented, "Forget about the Taliban, it is the police we worry about."
Despised and feared, the Afghan national police have been continuously
controlled by ethnic warlords paid off by the CIA and are central to what
Ambassador Ron Neumann characterized as the pattern of "repression and
oppression" gripping the country.
They have routinely engaged in shakedowns at impromptu checkpoints, shot at and
killed stone-throwing or unarmed demonstrators, stolen farmers' land, and
terrorized the civilian population while undertaking house-to-house raids in
military-assisted sweep operations. They have further intimidated voters during
fraudulent elections, including the one that brought President Hamid Karzai
back to power in 2009. According to village elders in Babaji, police bent on
taking revenge against clan rivals carried out the abduction and rape of
pre-teen girls and boys.
These kinds of abuses fit with a larger historical pattern, and are a product
of the ethnic antagonisms and social polarizations bred by the US intervention,
and the mobilization of police for military and political ends.
The open support by the George W Bush administration for torture and other
harsh methods strengthened the proclivity towards indiscriminate violence.
The International Red Cross reported massive overcrowding in Afghan prisons,
"harsh" conditions, a lack of clarity about the legal basis for detention, and
people being held "incommunicado" in isolation cells where they were "subjected
to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions". An undisclosed
number have died in custody, including several thousand who were transported
under the oversight of CIA-backed warlord Rashid Dostum in unventilated
containers, where they suffocated to death or were shot.
Corruption has been a major problem as police routinely accept kickbacks from
black-market activities. Fitting a historical pattern, the State Department and
CIA have maintained close ties with top officials who are directly involved in
the narcotics trade, causing production to rise to over 8,000 tons per annum.
The president's own brother, Ahmed Wali, a CIA "asset" who heads a paramilitary
group used for raids on suspected Taliban enclaves has used allegedly used drug
proceeds to fund state terror operations, including the intimidation of
opponents in the election of 2009.
Karzai's 2007 appointment as anti-corruption chief, Izzatullah Wasifi,
meanwhile, spent almost four years in a Nevada prison for trying to sell heroin
to an undercover police officer. A CIA officer commented that during the
US-NATO occupation, "Virtually every significant Afghan figure has had brushes
with the drug trade. If you are looking for Mother Theresa, she doesn't live in
Afghanistan."
Cheryl Bernard, a RAND analyst and wife of Zalmay Khalilzad, UN Ambassador of
the Bush administration, explained one of the key reasons for the lack of good
governance: "To defeat the Soviets we threw the worst crazies against them.
Then we allowed them to get rid of, just kill all the moderate leaders. The
reason we don't have moderate leaders in Afghanistan today is because we let
the nuts kill them all. They killed all the leftists, the moderates, the middle
of the roaders. They were just eliminated, during the 1980s and afterwards."
The US continues to tolerate high-levels of corruption out of perceived
geopolitical expediency, claiming that it is engrained within the political
culture of Afghanistan and other "backward nations" in which it intervenes. In
reality, however, it is a product of historical contingencies, the breakdown of
social mores caused by the war-climate and the need of elite officials lacking
popular legitimacy to obtain money for counter-insurgency operations.
Similar factors were at play in the 1960s when Vietnam and Laos were at the
center of the world drug trade, benefiting from American backing of corrupt
officials who controlled the traffic, with the CIA overseeing the production
and sale of opium by Hmong guerrillas in order to finance the secret war
against the Pathet Lao.
History is thus coming full circle in Afghanistan, which now produces 93% of
the world's heroin and has been characterized by even Fox News, a major
champion of American intervention, as a "narco-state".
Drug money has corrupted all facets of society, crippled the legal economy and
made it nearly impossible to carry out the simplest development projects while
most of the population lives in crushing poverty. As in South Vietnam under US
occupation, the main airport has become a major trans-shipment point for heroin
and positions for police chief in many provinces are auctioned off to the
highest bidder due to their enormous graft value. Securing a job as chief of
police on the border is rumored to cost upwards of $150,000.
In another parallel to Vietnam, rampant human-rights violations have driven
many people into the arms of the insurgency. A 2009 report by Commanding
General Stanley A McChrystal describes Afghan prisons as a particularly
important recruiting base and "sanctuary [for Islamic militants] to conduct
lethal operations" against government and coalition forces, including the 2008
bombing of the Serena hotel in Kabul which was allegedly planned without
interference from prison personnel.
McChrystal, a former Special Forces assassin, notes that "there are more
insurgents per square foot in corrections facilities than anywhere else in
Afghanistan". These comments suggest that the recent Obama "surge" represents a
costly and futile escalation of a conflict in which the US has no prospects of
victory.
Beginning in 2004, as war increasingly spilled over into Pakistan, the State
Department provided tens of millions of dollars in technical aid, training and
equipment to the Pakistani police. The central aim was to fight the Taliban and
consolidate the power of military dictator Pervez Musharraf and his successor
Ali Asaf Zhardari.
American advisors introduced a computerized security and evaluation system to
monitor all movement across the border, created special counter-narcotics units
and a police air wing which was supplied with three caravan spotter planes and
eight Huey helicopters to aid in counter-insurgency operations. Police play a
vital role alongside mercenary firms such as Xe operations in identifying
targets for CIA predator drone attacks which have killed hundreds of civilians,
including over 100 during an errant strike on the village of Bola Baluk.
As in Afghanistan, militarization has enhanced the already repressive character
of the police and contributed to the intensification of a vicious civil war in
which over two million people have been rendered refugees. Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) meanwhile is deeply caught up in the heroin
traffic, with the usual CIA collusion, and has been infiltrated by pro-Taliban
elements, revealing the futility of American training programs and
intervention.
In Iraq, much as in Vietnam three decades earlier, American training programs
have contributed to the shattering of the societal fabric. The mission was
initially headed by Bernard Kerik, former New York City police commissioner who
won fame in leading rescue efforts at ground zero after the September 11, 2001
attacks and was later convicted and sentenced to four years in prison on
charges of tax fraud and public corruption.
In spite of hundreds of millions in funding, the Iraqi National Police (INP)
remains under-equipped and riddled with cronyism and corruption. Police were so
poorly motivated and paid that many sold their bullets and uniforms on the
black market.
Historically, the forces trained by the United States to subdue their own
countrymen have taken on the air of paid mercenaries with little loyalty to
their benefactor or the cause that they purportedly represent. Iraq is no
exception to this general rule.
A State Department report noted that because of poor morale, Iraqi police have
been rendered "ineffective and have quit or abandoned their stations". They
were infiltrated by sectarian militias who used American weapons to engage in
ethnic cleansing and brazenly drove through city streets in daylight hours with
dead bodies in the backs of their trucks.
Militarized units routinely fired into crowds of unarmed demonstrators and had
a history of going on forays into Sunni neighborhoods just to punish civilians.
Several dozen investigative journalists and 200 prominent academics who opposed
the US invasion were among those assassinated. Jerry Burke, one of the original
police trainers who served two tours in Iraq, told reporters in 2007 that the
INP was unsalvageable and that many of its members should be prosecuted for
criminal human-rights violations, war crimes and death squad activities.
A central US focus was on training heavily armed commando units, recruited from
Saddam Hussein's Special Forces after the reversal of the de-Ba'athification
policy, whose primary mission was to "neutralize" high level insurgents.
American strategy in this respect was modeled after the Phoenix program in
Vietnam, of which Vice President Dick Cheney was particularly enamored, and
also bore heavy resemblances to practices in Central America during Ronald
Reagan's terrorist wars of the 1980s. In 2004, Cheney openly called for the
"Salvador option," referring to the US role in training paramilitary units to
assassinate left-wing guerrilla leaders and their supporters during El
Salvador's dirty war, largely with the aim of intimidating the population into
submission.
James Steele's appointment as a top adviser to Iraq's most fearsome
counterinsurgency force, the 5,000 man Special Police Commandos, exemplified
the continuity in US policy. Steele served with the Green Berets in Vietnam,
further honed his tactics training Contra forces in Nicaragua in the 1980s,
then led a special forces mission in El Salvador where his men were implicated
in serious human-rights abuses, including "disappearances," torture and the
massacre of civilians.
Journalist Dahr Jamail wrote that it was no coincidence daily life in Iraq came
to resemble "what the death squads generated in Central America ... Hundreds of
unclaimed dead at the morgue - blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed,
garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bag still over their heads.
Many of their bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound".
By training and arming Iraqi police officials notorious for corruption,
beatings, kidnappings and mass executions, American advisors contributed to the
bloodbath in Iraq. The continuity in personnel and practice from past
interventions shows the violent consequences of US training programs.
American advisors favored hard-line commanders, like Adnan Thabit, whom close
aides compared to the "godfather" and who threatened to kill the one journalist
brave enough to interview him. On October 5, 2006, US military forces removed
the entire 8th brigade of the 2nd National Police Division from duty and
arrested its officers after the brigade was implicated in the raid of a food
factory in Baghdad and the kidnapping of 26 Sunni workers, seven of whom were
executed. The Los Angeles Times reported that at the Baghdad morgue, "dozens of
bodies arrive at the same time on a weekly basis, including scores of corpses
with wrists bound by police handcuffs".
In December 2006, the Iraq study group portrayed a grave and deteriorating
state of affairs, noting that "the Shi'ite dominated police units cannot
control crime and they routinely engage in sectarian violence, including the
unnecessary detention, torture and targeted execution of Sunni Arab civilians.
Many police participated in training in order to obtain a weapon, uniform and
ammunition for use in sectarian violence."
A Human Rights Watch report around the same time detailed police methods of
interrogation in which prisoners were "routinely" beaten with cables and pipes,
shocked, or suspended from their wrists for prolonged periods of time - tactics
associated with Hussein's dictatorship. Iraqis frequently complained of police
breaking into homes, extorting money for ransom and arbitrarily conducting
arrests. One interviewee commented, "This isn't a police force, it's a bunch of
thugs." What all these reports ignore is the systematic US responsibility for
the training and methods that produced such outcomes.
As a symbol of foreign oppression, the INP became the frequent target of
insurgent attacks. Nearly 3,000 police were killed and over 5,000 injured
between September 2005 and April 2006 alone. In a reflection of the violent
climate bred by the occupation, a number of high-ranking police officers,
including the head of the serious crimes unit in Baghdad, were shot dead by US
soldiers who thought that they were suicide bombers. Iraqi police have
condemned the Americans as cowardly for not taking the same risks to their
lives as they were ordered to take, and for being better protected from attack.
A police lieutenant in Baghdad commented that "the [Americans] hide behind the
barricades while we are here in the streets without even guns to protect
ourselves".
As in the Philippines, Haiti and Vietnam earlier, American advisors held racial
stereotypes of Iraqis and a paternalistic and colonial mindset that bred
resentment. In a memoir of his year in Iraq, Robert Cole, a police officer from
East Palo Alto, California and a DynCorp employee, explains that these
attitudes were engrained in a mini-boot camp training session, where he was
"brainwashed, reprogrammed and desensitized" and "morphed" into a "trained
professional killer".
Cole reports being told to shoot first and think later and to instruct police
to do the same. "If you see a suspicious Iraqi civilian, pull your weapon and
gun him down," he was told, "you don't fire one or two shots ... You riddle his
sorry ass with bullets until you're sure he's dead as a doorknob."
This is an inversion not only of democratic police methods but even of Western
counterinsurgency doctrine which, at least in theory, advocates a moderation of
force in order to avoid antagonizing the population and creating martyrs for
the revolutionary cause. It is no wonder that the scope of violence and
human-rights abuses in Iraq has been so high. In spite of all the bloodshed and
negative reports, however, the Iraq Study group actually recommended expanding
American police training in the misconceived belief that more resources and aid
could help professionalize the force (as Obama is now doing in Afghanistan).
This was a crucial dimension of the much vaunted "surge". Efforts were
initiated to include Sunnis in the police and purge corrupt members who engaged
in sectarian violence, including the head of the Ministry of the Interior,
Bayan Jabr, a Shi'ite extremist who oversaw a torture chamber beneath his
offices in which survivors were found with drill marks in their skulls.
Nonetheless, extrajudicial violence and killings have remained endemic. On
March 16, 2009, the New York Times reported, for example, that police officers
abducted and killed six prisoners released from Camp Bucca in revenge for their
days as insurgents. These actions appear to be routine.
Since the "surge," police have been delegated more responsibility in manning
checkpoints and aiding in combat operations, thus increasing opportunities for
extortion and abuse. To what end? Robert M. Witajewski, a top civilian police
trainer and director of the embassy's Law Enforcement and Correctional Affairs
program expressed concern that in "over-militarizing the police", the US was
potentially "creating an entity that could cause a coup down the road".
There are plenty of historical examples which bear out these fears. Few in
Washington appear, however, to acknowledge them.
In response to the wave of neo-conservative analysts extolling the virtues of
empire in the aftermath of 9/11, Chalmers Johnson writes in Nemesis: The Last
Days of the American Republic that the idea of "forcing thousands of
people to be free by slaughtering them - with Maxim machine guns in the 19th
century, or 'precision munitions' today - seems to reflect a deeply felt need
as well as a striking inability to imagine the lives and viewpoints of others".
He added that "all empires require myths of divine right, racial pre-eminence,
manifest destiny or a 'civilizing mission' to cover their often barbarous
behavior in other people's country".
American imperial intervention throughout the long century from the conquest of
the Philippines through the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq has indeed
sown much human misery and violence.
While it has helped to vanquish some genuinely totalitarian forces, such as the
Nazis and imperial Japanese, all too often those at the wrong end of the guns
have been supporters of nationalist and social revolutionary movements seeking
badly needed social change. Many were driven underground through repression and
as a result of the US refusal to implement internationally sanctioned
diplomatic settlements, such as the Geneva Accords of 1954 in Vietnam. Like
previous colonial powers, the US has also often helped to exacerbate ethnic
divisions and conflict, as in Afghanistan and Iraq today, with disastrous
results.
US police training programs exemplify the dark side of the American empire.
They have been crucial in advancing American power and in perpetuating and even
creating the particular types of repressive regimes that emerged under US
guidance - namely regimes which were dependent on foreign aid for their
survival and developed repressive surveillance and internal security
apparatuses to quash dissent.
While American strategic planners hoped that the police programs could provide
the social stability for liberal-capitalist development to take root, the
programs often spiraled out of control and empowered rogue forces, which used
the modern weaponry and resources to advance their own power and to suppress
personal rivals.
American police training furthermore spawned endless cycles of violence and in
turn contributed to the delegitimizing of American client regimes and the
empowerment of resistance movements because of the abuses that they inflicted.
Police programs epitomize the limits of American social engineering efforts and
power and unintended consequences of US covert manipulation.
Many of the worst features of American police training programs have been
evident in the contemporary occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, which sought
to incorporate methods that were honed in previous interventions. That these
methods bred horrific consequences was of little importance to policy-makers
for whom the ends seemingly justify the means.
While differing political contexts have ensured different results historically,
there are some patterns that emerge as universal, namely the role of the United
States in imparting sophisticated policing equipment and trying to
professionalize the internal security apparatus of client regimes as a means of
fortifying their power and repressing the political opposition.
New technologies have been developed to try and hasten the efficiency of this
latter task, though the overriding goal has remained the same, from the
Philippines occupation forward.
American society is at a crossroads: it can continue to pursue the destructive
path of empire, leading to endless cycles of violence and warfare as well as
environmental degradation and economic hardship and political repression at
home, or it can adopt a more humble, non-violent approach to foreign policy and
thus serve as a beacon for world peace while redirecting the country's
resources towards constructive ends.
There is still time to embrace the non-violent option, although the Obama
administration is moving in the wrong direction, and time is getting short if
our civilization is to survive with its moral integrity intact.
Note
1.) A fully annotated version of this article is available at
Japan Focus.
Jeremy Kuzmarov is an assistant professor of history at the University of
Tulsa and author of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the
Modern War on Drugs. He wrote this article for The Asia-Pacific Journal.
(This article was first published by Japan
Focus. Republished with permission from Japan Focus.)
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