A letter to Robert Scheer on torture

Dear Robert Scheer,

I am writing to thank you for your comments on torture last Friday, 10/19/07, on Left, Right & Center (LR&C)....

You mentioned the "Fort Hunt Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII" 10/6 article in the Washington Post. These state-side WWII interrogators seem convincing when they claim not to have done anything to unsettle the American myth that "we do not torture."

With respect to the issue of the use of torture by Americans in WWII, I wanted to draw your attention to a book review I read yesterday in the NY Review of Books. The book is After the Reich: The Brutal History of Allied Occupation by Giles MacDonogh and the article is "Cruel Allied Occupiers" by Patricia Meehan. It seems the Fort Hunt interrogators were the state-side exception when it came to US interrogators of WWII. From the book:

-----The Americans had used methods similar to those employed by the SS in Dachau. One of these was keeping the prisoner for long periods in solitary confinement.... Worse still were the mock executions.... More conventional methods of torture included kicks to the groin, deprivation of sleep and food, and savage beatings. When the Americans set up a commission of inquiry into the methods used by their investigators, the found that, of the 139 cases they examined, 137 had "had their testicles permanently destroyed by kicks received from the American War Crimes Investigation team."-----

In America's Anti-Torture Tradition, Robert Kennedy Jr makes the point that an anti-torture stance goes to the root of the American tradition, connecting it to George Washington and the American Revolution. But you have to wonder how complete his research is when he argues that Ike guaranteed the fair treatment of Germans. Perhaps he should read MacDonogh's book?

I'd be interested in what you think about these points on torture. I will be speaking on torture at Stanford's Center on Ethics in January. I know you are busy, but it would be great if you could make it. The time is yet to be determined. Thanks for your time.

Best wishes, Eric

My Answer to MoveOn’s ad: it’s clearly “General Betray Us”

I’m not sure I can add much to Cindy Sheehan’s and Kieth Olbermann’s slamming of Bush and the yes-vote Dems on the MoveOn ad issue. Olbermann is particularly strong on the very American line between the military and politics. Sheehan is particularly strong on why support for MoveOn is critical, but also why MoveOn needs to distance itself more from the Dems and less from what she considers the real peace movement.

My disgust goes out mostly to the yes-vote or no-vote-at-all Dems. One of the most important outcomes of the Senate vote on 9/20/07 to repudiate an ad from MoveOn.org that referred to Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us” is a surprisingly neat division of the Democratic faction of the corporate party.

It seems to me that the “yes” voters would constitute the “fanaticism tolerant” faction of the Democratic faction (if not just the fanatical faction), whereas the “no” voters would simply be those who have to be a part of this faction, and this one-party system, in order to get elected.

I would be more disgusted by the charade of this Senate repudiation if this type of thing weren’t so common. To paraphrase a celluloid Colonel, America can’t handle the truth.

(Progressive voters, by the way, should scratch off any presidential candidate not clearly on the “no” list--even though I am not a Clinton fan. Feingold-Boxer for ’08?)

Democrats Voting to Condemn MoveOn.org:

Baucus (D-MT), Bayh (D-IN), Cardin (D-MD), Carper (D-DE), Casey (D-PA), Conrad (D-ND), Dorgan (D-ND), Feinstein (D-CA), Johnson (D-SD), Klobuchar (D-MN), Kohl (D-WI), Landrieu (D-LA), Leahy (D-VT), Lincoln (D-AR), McCaskill (D-MO), Mikulski (D-MD), Nelson (D-FL), Nelson (D-NE), Pryor (D-AR), Salazar (D-CO), Tester (D-MT), Webb (D-VA)

Demsocrats Who Voted ‘No’:

Akaka (D-HI) Bingaman (D-NM), Boxer (D-CA), Brown (D-OH), Byrd (D-WV), Clinton (D-NY), Dodd (D-CT), Durbin (D-IL), Feingold (D-WI), Harkin (D-IA), Inouye (D-HI), Kennedy (D-MA), Kerry (D-MA), Lautenberg (D-NJ), Levin (D-MI), Menendez (D-NJ), Murray (D-WA), Reed (D-RI), Reid (D-NV), Rockefeller (D-WV), Sanders (I-VT), Schumer (D-NY), Stabenow (D-MI), Whitehouse (D-RI), Wyden (D-OR)

Democrats Not Voting:

Biden (D-DE), Cantwell (D-WA), Obama (D-IL)

In addition to the Senate repudiation, the MoveOn ad has been the talk of right-wing news. The repudiation, however, has also galvenized MoveOn members like me, and thousands of non-members have emailed to show support:

"I'm currently in Iraq. I do not agree with this war, and if I did support this war, it would not matter. You have the RIGHT to speak the truth. We KNOW that you support us. Thank you for speaking out for being our voice. We do not have a voice. We are overshooted by those who say that we soldiers do not support organizations like MoveOn. WE DO.

YOU ARE OUR voice."

"I have given a son to this country. My brother, my father, my uncle have all served honorably and bravely. I am a loyal American. I am outraged and sick to death of the tactics this administration uses to try to silence dissent to a war that is unjust, built and maintained on lies, political power, and greed. I was content to let others fight more loudly, but no more."
–Sharyn W., NC

"I am a prior soldier who served in Iraq for 13 months, and am now an expecting mom with a husband who is deployed in Baghdad. I don't think I can ever forgive the Bush administration for the lies that tricked America into this war and hurt my family so badly. I am ashamed of those American politicians who would condemn an organization for practicing the Freedom of Speech that so many soldiers have died for. "
–Danielle B., OH

"As a US Navy veteran and an Iraq war veteran of over a year I want to ask, What has happened to us? What has happened to our voice? Where is this country going with stopping free speech and free press? ... Every time I think of the long nights I had in Anbar remembering what I was fighting for, well here it is.... "
–Ahmad H., LA

MoveOn has also received record contributions for their next political ad, "Betrayal of Trust," another truthful, hard-hitting ad, this one about how the GOP's so-called support of our troops keeps them longer in Iraq by keeping their tours unreasonably long.

Regardless of any potential tactical blunder of the "General Betray Us" ad, of throwing such a corporate-media-syntonic bone to the rabid fanatics of the large right-wing faction of the corporate party, MoveOn’s position, clearly stated in the ad and backed up thoroughly on their web site, was to simply suggest the obvious truth: General Petraeus mislead the American people in 2004 with his Washington Post op-ed piece, and did the same during his recent testimony in congress. He has clearly betrayed us, his country, his duty, his profession, and the oaths he repeatedly took to serve the constitution and to tell the truth.

Paul Krugman had it right in his 9/3/2007 NYT Op-ed column, “Snow Job in the Desert,” which made an excellent comparison between Colin Powell’s WMD address to the UN and Gen. Petraeus’s then upcoming testimony to congress. In both cases, “the political and media establishments swooned” as the Generals presented doctored evidence in the attempt to make the Bush administration’s lies seem true, their folly seem reasonable, their folie seem sane. Both Generals have clearly betrayed the American people and their country by being followers and not leaders, by being overly loyal to their boss and their political careers.

The only solid evidence these two testimonies gave was for the fact that, since George Washington, generals more and more should stay generals and keep out of politics. Powell never ran for President, though a 2004 bid would have been welcomed because anyone is better than Bush. His UN address would have haunted him in the general elections, of course, but many Republicans are still making the same arguments he made to the UN, so he may have had a chance in the primaries.

Three things have struck me about the career of General Petraeus. First, Bush’s grand warrior didn’t see combat until he arrived in Iraq four years ago as a Major General (!). This veteran and Air Force Academy graduate knows that this is really unusual. Second, his military effectiveness there has come under considerable criticism (of course, in utter contrast to the administration’s obviously effective staging). And, third, there is a credible report that he wants to be president someday.

The latter makes more sense when you consider how inappropriate it is for an Army General to write any op-ed piece while in command during a war, and particularly one that was so blatantly partisan, one so blatantly timed to influence the elections, and one that can now be seen as so blatantly untrue. Beyond kissing Bush’s ass, few besides Gary Hart and Rachel Sklar have mentioned that this presidential election season op-ed can also be understood as the General writing his own report card for the job he had been doing in Iraq. The Democrats never should have allowed Petraeus to testify since they should have known he would once more be giving himself and Bush a B+ when they are obviously failing.

Rachel Sklar, however, is significantly off the mark in her Huffington Post piece. She states that the basic evidence against Petraeus is not “enough to damn the Petraeus report on its own, not by a long shot.” Her reasoning here strikes me as more swooning over uniforms, rank, and medals: “There are four stars on his shoulder that didn't get there by being on the sidelines.” No, he’s been in the game, but the game has only recently included war: he had only two stars before he saw combat at all. Kissing ass to Bush secured the other two.

Sklar includes most of the important evidence against Petraeus. She summarizes Krugman’s main two points: “(1) Petraeus, whose assertions are being so eagerly awaited, has been wildly wrong before; and (2) The publication of that op-ed so close to an election is suggestive of a political/partisan interest.” Actually, Krugman’s first main point is that Petreaus lied in 2004. In other words, Petraeus “betrayed us” in 2004. His second point is that the op-ed piece is much more than “suggestive” of inappropriate partisan politics.

When you combine his crass partisanship, the inappropriateness of the op-ed piece, the fact that Petraeus is clearly a Bush kiss ass with political ambitions, and Hart’s point that “(3) The credibility of the report [and the congressional testimony] is affected when the reporter has a stake in the outcome,” it seems to me that there is clearly more than enough evidence here to substantiate an answer to MoveOn’s question.

Moreover, this military fetish is itself a huge problem in our unbelievably militaristic nation: the swooning, the pedestal granted to the uniform, etc. Remember, we live in a country where “support our troops” means keeping them in Iraq to either die, get maimed, or suffer from PTSD (and then be neglected by the VA). According to the GOP (and too many in the Democratic faction of the corporate party), “support our troops” also means we have to kowtow to four-star generals even though they got their stars mostly by being kiss-ass politicians and liars—and not by being a great warrior.

Krugman is an economist and his 9/14/07 column “A Surge, and Then a Stab” simply asks us to follow the money when we think about the current state of the Iraq war. He makes it clear where the smart money is going: out of Iraq. Bush crony Ray Hunt and his Hunt Oil know this. The column also makes it clear that Bush and crew know this.

Petraeus is a member of Bush and crew. The plan seems to be to keep the money and blood flowing while hoping for something better—but, if that something better doesn’t come, Bush’s tenure is almost over (thank god!) and Cindy Sheehan, the peace movement, MoveOn, and even some Dems can be blamed like the peaceniks were for Vietnam. Bush has obviously been laying the groundwork recently for this type of revisionist history with his troubled, bizarre and hypocritical comparisons of Vietnam and Iraq. Laying the groundwork for right-wing revisionist history is the only explanation I can muster for this odd move. I don’t look forward to the Rambo equivalents of tomorrow where the hero is bemoaning the MoveOn ad.

SERE and American Torture: A Speech Given at the 8/18/07 San Francisco Protest of the American Psychological Association

Photo by John Han



Nervous and with the sun directly in my face, I was introduced as a psychoanalyst with a private practice in Oakland who is not a member of the American Psychological Association, and who is a graduate of the military's S.E.R.E. or Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program.

The speech:

The military’s "sear" or "seary" program is S-E-R-E: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. It is a school designed to teach officers and special forces--particularly pilots--how to survive behind enemy lines, evade the enemy, resist interrogation and torture, and escape from a POW camp. The resistance portion of the training simulates the experience of being held prisoner and interrogated and tortured by enemy forces who do not observe the Geneva conventions. Since SERE interrogation techniques do not follow the Geneva conventions, since they are torture, they are only appropriately applied to SERE training. To do otherwise would be a war crime.

In May 2004 I wrote a blog entry as a response to the Abu Ghraib atrocities. A couple lines from this blog entry were quoted by Stephen Soldz in his important article, "Shrinks and the SERE Technique at Guantanimo,” where he makes it clear what I had suspected back in 2004: that the resistance training I got during SERE could be and has been reverse engineered to teach torture rather than just teaching resistance to torture.

What is crucial about this revised, reverse-engineered SERE is that we have a government-sponsored, tax-payer-supported program that we know teaches US citizens to be torturers, and which has lead to the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and more.

What is NOT new here is that Americans are using and teaching torture. US torture does not start with the Bush administration. What is new with Bush is the openness of his administration’s torture policy, and what Naomi Klein calls the “in-sourcing” of that policy. In-sourcing means US citizens are being taught to be torturers.

In Vietnam the US out-sourced much of the torture of the Phoenix Project, a complex of forty interrogations centers around South Vietnam, built and run by the CIA and the US military, but manned mostly with US-trained south Vietnamese interrogators. This complex of torture centers was responsible for the deaths of at least twenty thousand Vietnamese, and it tortured many thousands more. The training textbook for the Phoenix Project was the CIA’s 1963 training manual, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, which has a whole chapter on “coercive techniques” and was the textbook for Phoenix Project training.

The CIA’s second interrogation manual also has a whole chapter on “coercive techniques”: The 1983 Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual. Both manuals “recommend arresting suspects early in the morning by surprise, blindfolding them, and stripping them naked. Suspects should be held incommunicado and should be deprived of any kind of normal routine in eating and sleeping. Interrogation rooms should be windowless, soundproof, dark and without toilets” (see “US Army and CIA Interrogation Manuals”). The manuals describe coercive techniques to be used "to induce psychological regression in the subject by bringing a superior outside force to bear on his will to resist."

The 1983 manual was the product of the US Army Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program, also called Project X. Both manuals were presented as evidence during the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1988. These hearings were the response to abuses by the CIA-trained death squads in Honduras. These death squads, and many others like them, trained in Panama at the US-run School of the Americas, also know as “the School of the Assassins,” and “the School of Coups.” Since the rise of Castro, the School of the Americas has been an anti-communist counterinsurgency training school taught by CIA and US military, and taught solely in Spanish. The curriculum included torture and other tools of counterinsurgency. In 2000, the School of the Americas was given the new Orwellian name, Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, and moved out of Panama to the US. The name and location has changed, but it is doubtful that the curriculum has.

When it comes to teaching torture, SERE seems to me like elementary school when compared to the graduate programs of the Phoenix Project, the School of the Americas, and the myriad CIA programs throughout the coldwar. The CIA has had torture expertise since its inception during WWII. Again, what is new is that US citizens are being taught to torture rather than out-sourcing to citizens of Latin America or South Vietnam, and that this administration is relatively open about torturing. What is old is that the US continues to produce world-class torturers and to be guilty of world-class war crimes. The CIA and US military learned from the Nazis and Japanese during and after WWII, and then field-tested in Vietnam and Latin America their pseudo-scientific and criminal research of the 1950s done on psychiatric patients and prisoners (See "Prisoner Abuse" below). What is new is that after 9/11 the Bush administration has basically demanded the right to torture openly and so far the American Psychological Association, congress, and much of the country has gone right along with it.

After Abu Ghraib, Bush had to choose a venue to make his ridiculous “We do not torture” speech. He chose Panama City, about an hour from the former home of the School of the Americas. Even if the “we” goes beyond his administration to the US in general, my basic point here is that “we do torture.” US torture doesn’t start with Bush and 9/11. It goes beyond SERE, and beyond Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. WE DO torture - WE DO secret prisons - WE DO rendition - WE DO abolish habeas corpus.

We need to come to terms with who WE are and what WE DO.

Thank you.


See also:

Prisoner Abuse: Patterns from the Past, U.S. National Security Archive, May 12, 2004:

"Throughout the 1950s and early ’60s, the CIA -- the lead agency doing interrogations at Abu Ghraib -- financed and conducted secret research on coercion and human consciousness, McCoy said. 'The scale of that research should not be minimized. By the late ’50s, it reached a billion dollars a year. The agency was providing the majority of the funding for a half-dozen leading psychology departments.'”

The American Psychological Association, Torture, and the Roots of my Anti-Torture Activism

My torture activism started with a conference on torture hosted by the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC).

Stephen Soldz gave a talk called "Aid and Comfort for Torturers" about the American Psychological Association and its reluctance to ban its membership from involvement with torture. The crucial issue here seems to be that the APA does not want to risk its cozy and lucrative relationship with the U.S. government, particularly the military, by banning practices that are gravely immoral and obviously illegal.

The APA has gone to great and underhanded lengths to make sure there is no threat to this relationship, including packing an APA task force with six of nine members directly connected to the interrogations at Gitmo and not telling the other three members of these connections.

See Democracy Now’s 6/1/07 show for a more detailed explanation of the task force, and their show from today with Dr. Maria Arrigo, who outed the APA’s deceptive practices and determined commitment not to upset their relationship with a torture-riddled government.

Soldz’s talk focused on how torture techniques used in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training had been taught to Gitmo interrogators, and how psychologists had been involved in this process.

I was surprised to hear a discussion of training I had been through myself being brought up at a psychoanalytic conference. When question time came, I asked whether the panel thought SERE training should be banned, since the training itself seemed justifiable to me—though certainly not the use of its torture techniques for interrogation, which would be an obvious war crime. I then said I had been through this training, and some jaws dropped.

In his 5/29/07 Counterpunch piece, "Shrinks and the SERE Technique at Guantanamo," Soldz would later quote my May 2004 entry in this blog: my reaction to Abu Ghraib where I recount some of my experiences in SERE. This quote lead Democracy Now to my blog, and then to invite me on a panel for their 6/1/07 show.

I am grateful that this involvement with anti-torture activism has led to my inclusion on the clinical staff of Survivors International, a “non-profit organization dedicated to providing essential psychological and medical services to survivors of torture who have fled from around the world to the San Francisco Bay Area.”

It also led to an invitation from the group Psychologists for an Ethical APA to give a speech at their protest of the APA held during the APA’s annual conference, which was held in San Francisco this year. On 8/19/07, the APA “overwhelmingly rejected an amendment … that would ban psychologists from participating in the development of illegal interrogation techniques used by the U.S. military against prisoner detainees,” as John Han reported in “APA Rejects Human Rights Amendment,” the Fog City Journal. Han’s report gives a very good synopsis of the issues and events.

Investigate Bush's high crimes!

The election is over and the Dems are already making me sick by avoiding the issue of impeachment, or by simply saying it will not be pursued in order to appease their increasingly right-wing constituencies. Pursuing impeachment was the main reason I wanted the Dems to win both houses.

See this article for more on the issue:

Breathing the "I" Word, by Elizabeth Holtzman

See these books for a lot more info on the how and why Bush should be impeached:

The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens, by Elizabeth Holtzman, with Cynthia Cooper.

Articles of Impeachment Against George W. Bush, by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office, by Dave Lindorff and Barbara Olshansky.

Don't let the Dems--now in power, but still bought up by right-wing/conservative interests--undermine the constitution by avoiding their sworn duty to uphold it. There is a VERY good chance Bush is guilty of impeachable crimes. If so, this president, and future presidents, need to be held accountable for "high crimes." Pelosi is making it clear that she won't do her duty, probably because her career is more important to her, and she sees impeachment as potentially damaging to her career. She feels she needs to be careful about these things.

Pelosi: "I said we'd be having hearings on the war, we'd have hearings. But I don't see us going to a place of impeachment," Pelosi said in an interview on NBC's Meet the Press. "Investigation does not equate to impeachment. Investigation is the requirement of Congress. It is about checks and balances." (see article). It seems like a bad idea to have determined where the hearings and investigations will go before you have them. In other words, hold the investigations, and then decide if impeachment is the appropriate course.

Brendan Daly, Pelosi's spokesperson: "impeachment is off the table; she is not interested in pursuing it." Why does she have the power to decide not to investigate what obviously could be impeachable offenses? Her duty is to at least investigate these issues.

The long-term good of the country is better served by the Dems doing their duty and starting impeachment proceedings--or at least not deciding the outcome of investigations and hearings before they start. Watergate hearings didn't happen because of the Dems wanting to do what was right; the people had to push them. Now it is our turn to push. We need to push Pelosi and the rest of the careerists in the so-called Democratic Party. You can be sure that super careerist Senator Clinton won't be much better on this issue than Pelosi. I'll be supporting a Spitzer/Obama ticket in 2008, though Obama seems very much like a careerist too.

Please pass on these links so that the 53% of the Americans who think impeachment should be on the agenda know that it is not only possible, but that it is necessary. As with Nixon, it will be up to the people--ie, us--to push these too-conservative dems to do what is obviously the just thing to do.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins: A Review

Listening to NPR recently, I heard John Perkins interviewed about his best-selling autobiography, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The interview left me intrigued enough to buy the book, but I hesitated to click the "buy" button after I read the negative review by Publisher's Weekly on the book's Amazon.com page:

"[Perkins'] claim to have assisted the House of Saud in strengthening its ties to American power brokers may be timely enough to attract some attention, but the yarn he spins is ultimately unconvincing, except perhaps to conspiracy buffs."

I guess Amazon.com doesn't necessarily want to sell this book. Size has its privileges. I ended up clicking the "buy" button because, as a liberal, I am wary of the usual right wing, knee-jerk claim of "conspiracy theory" for any corruption revealed as involving more than two people--and since I know Amazon.com is not to be trusted due to their right-wing sympathies, and the significant roll they play in what I see as the vast right wing conspiracy we call the media. I need to stop shopping there. I confess.

A quick read of Perkins' Confessions left me with profoundly mixed feelings, and they had nothing to do with whether or not the book is plausible. In fact, with respect to the story Perkins tells about his dealings as an international consultant for Chas T. Main during the 70s and early 80s, it does not seem conspiratorial at all. For this reader, Perkins' book provided what seems to be very plausible but incomplete explanations for how and why "less developed countries," or "LDCs" in the book, become indebted to the DCs that control international banking, and how this indebtedness makes some people very rich: a small group of the LDC elite, the elite of the engineering corporations that get paid on the front end (what Perkins refers to as laundered money), and the elite of the oil companies that get paid on the back end by being able to exploit the resources of the LDC that can't repay the loans.

Besides the superficiality of his explanations of the machinations of these scams, what turned me off the book the most has to do with what the book is—that is, what it is beyond being an expose of how these scams have played a central role creating what we euphemistically call "globalization." The book is an autobiography; more specifically, it is a confessional. Perkins wants to be forgiven in a bad way. I don't just mean his desire to be forgiven is strong, which it is: he wants to be forgiven in a way that I find borderline nauseating.

Perkins crime as an "EHM" or "economic hit man" was to create inflated economic forecasts for LDC leaders who were considering going into debt in order to modernize their country's infrastructure. The EHM's sales pitch was that a modernized infrastructure would allow the country's economy to grow in a way that would not only allow the LDC to pay off the debt, but to also have money left over for a better standard of living. This would lead the LDC out of poverty and allow it to graduate to DC—or so the pitch went. The sinister element of the pitch was the EHM's inflated economic forecast that would convince the head of state that taking on such a large debt was justified by a future of riches. As Perkins tells it, his role as an economic forecaster for an influential consulting firm was central to this world-shaping scam. For this reader who knows little about the history of international finance and the causes of third world debt, this story filled in some important holes in my education on these very important topics. I now feel that the importance of the massive engineering contracts that came out of these and other scams Perkins explains in his narrative, particularly Saudi Arabia, helps me to better explain, for example, why going to war with Iraq would be of so much interest to the current Bush administration—and also why keeping the focus off of Saudi Arabia, the source of so much funding for Jihadist education around the world and the home of fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, would be so important to them too.

Since I cared little about Perkins redemption and quite a bit about the machinations of the scam itself, the book left me wanting a great deal more detail on the particulars of these scams, and how the scams worked and didn't work in various countries. I wanted much more of Perkins' insider knowledge and what I imagine to be whistle-blowing. It is understood that the contractors involved—Halliburton, Brown and Root … The Usual Suspects—were fully paid for their work by the loans, but why would a financial institution be willing to give loans which they knew were not going to be paid off? Was it like the S&L scam? Were these loans somehow insured by the governments involved? If not, wouldn't this scam amount to a very expensive way to achieve the desired indebtedness and servitude? Isn't the IMF and the World Bank—and all the other banks involved—also interested in making money? At least in being solvent?

The roles of commercial banks is left particularly unclear here. Patricia Adams writes in Odious Debts: Loose Lending, Corruption, and the Third World's Environmental Legacy that commercial banks were making a lot of profit from third world loans during the 70s and early 80s, which was when Perkins was involved in the EHM game:

"A Salomon Brothers report showed the thirteen largest U.S. banks had quintupled their earnings from $177 million to $836 million during the first half of the 1970s, with the most spectacular part of the increase coming from the Third World loans. By 1976, Chase Manhattan Bank was earning 78 per cent of its income abroad, Citibank 72 per cent, Bank of America 40 per cent, First Boston 68 per cent, Morgan Guaranty 53 per cent, and Manufacturers Hanover 56 per cent. The Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), one of the world's largest banking houses, was thought to be profiting more from its various affiliates in Africa than from its extensive branch network in France. In absolute terms, Nigeria alone came to account for up to 20 per cent of BNP's after-tax earnings in the late 1970s. A 1982 bank survey reported that international lending had been more profitable than domestic lending for two out of three banks."

Was the World Bank losing money on third world loans while the commercial banks were making money? What about the IMF? How did the banks make money on these types of ventures, if they did? If they didn't, why were these institutions interested in making so much money up front for the Halliburtons of the world, and on the back end for the Exxons? These type of questions of globalization are not asked, or are left unanswered here. With Paul Wolfowitz at its head, it is not hard to imagine that the World Bank is so corrupt that it does not act as a proper financial institution guided by the invisible hand of capitalism but as a money laundering broker for the likes of the Halliburtons and Exxons with the likes of Cheney at its head. Yet this is where Perkins confession fall short. His broad strokes are suggestive, but need some detail to back them up. Like me, most of his readers will not be bankers. If this scam was so common, how has it gone undetected? Has it gone undetected? If it has been detected before and this international banking history beginner is just ignorant, is this book just about Perkins wanting redemption?

Also, he fails when it comes to holding individuals responsible, or, again, he leaves out the details. Why? Perkins barely mentions Bush Jr. He only mentions the obvious about Cheney. My guess is he could do a lot more here if he wanted to. Why doesn't he want to? Perkins mentions Bush Sr. and makes a convincing if only suggestive case that this part-owner of The United Fruit Company and former head of the CIA would be a mover and shaker within the corporatacracy's scam involving the likes of "banana republics," but why only suggestive? Perkins has the expertise and the experience to do a much more in-depth and damning expose of the machinations of international banking and loans to third world countries, and the collusion of corporations and government leaders. If his role was so central to the crimes of the corporatacracy, wouldn't redemption require more with respect to exposing the details of the scam, and at least some of the more significant players?

Indeed, it seems to this reader that Perkins is less interested in exposing the crimes and criminals of globalization than he is in redemption—and, to be blunt, in achieving some fame while receiving redemption (or fame as some form of redemption). Not surprisingly for such a confession, the character of the author is central. In this case, too much so. Perkins desire for some kind of redemption from his reading audience is a major failing of the book, where at times it gets almost unreadably mawkish and—surprisingly for someone who portrays himself as so Bond-like and worldly—naïve. For example, in a November 2004 interview with Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, Perkins said the following:

"And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change."

What "we" could he possibly be talking about? He seems to have been watching too much Oprah. In E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Daniel wonders why his father seems constantly surprised by what they both see as the evil of the United States, and Daniel poignantly asks what it will take for his father to stop being surprised. Does Perkins actually think that his broad-strokes revelation, though probably significant, is such a ground-breaking surprise that it will actually lead to some kind of meaningful reform, or revolution?

Do I sense a bit of messianic narcissism at play here? Does he think that those who--like myself, mostly ignorant about the history of international finance--will read the book, learn something about the criminal machinations of globalization, and then will be spurred into action by their surprise and disgust? Unlike Daniels father, I'm not surprised. I've read Chomsky and Zinn. I subscribe to FAIR. Moreover, most American readers will either not care, reject what he has to say as a conspiracy theory, or, sad to say, believe in the rightness of the manifest destiny he decries and see this scam as a clever means of achieving it—even rationalizing that these LDCs at least got some infrastructure and a hard lessen in capitalism out of the deal. The "we" he refers to mostly will either not be surprised or will not care that the CIA killed Omar Torrijos. Invading Panama didn't seem to surprise the "we" too much, and that was rather blatant.

The scam of the book itself is that Perkins sells his belief in the inherent goodness of his reader as a way of seducing the reader into paying him back with some redemption. He wants the reader to see him as good, and in return he at times patronizingly treats the reader like a member of one of his tours down the Amazon: "like me, you want to be good too … let me show you how." When Goodman asks why he didn't write the book sooner, and what was the nature of the bribe he took not to write it, Perkins responds:

"I think I, you know, I’m a good person overall, and I think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of sex, money and power can seduce people, because I certainly was seduced."

He eventually answers the question with more confessions about taking pay as a consultant, and then not having to do any work. Being worldly, he understands this as a bribe to keep quiet.

Perkins repeatedly uses the seduction of the "sex, power, and money" this "system" could offer him as an excuse for his part in the crimes. Though the sex is left a bit vague, the power and money seem clear enough. He only briefly alludes to the sex since, as he makes clear (as if he were running for office), he's become a family man since he left the ranks of EHMs. He even attributes the ultimate completion of his transformation from hit man to liberal righteousness to his desire to want a better world for his daughter. You see: this is ultimately a family values confessional.

One thing a messianic narcissist can't attain while in the ranks of the covert EHMs is fame. So it seems Perkins has traded in the EHM's international sex for the international fame a best-selling author will enjoy. He'll still make money, and even enjoy the power the NYT's best seller list affords. He'll give lectures, and tours of the Amazon. But his messianic narcissism doesn't stop there: a visit to any of Perkins' web sites shows how he has moved from EHM to some bathetic mixture of new-age guru and modern-day Rousseau, confessing his corruption while spouting platitudes about the noble savage—as if the reader needs some reformed corporatacracy criminal to tell her or him how to be a good liberal:

"'The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle' can be taken at many levels—the standard interpretation is that it foretells the sharing of indigenous knowledge with the technologies of science, the balancing of yin and yang, and the bridging of northern and southern cultures. However, most powerful is the message it offers about consciousness; it says that we have entered a time when we can benefit from the many diverse ways of seeing ourselves and the world, and that we can use these as a springboard to higher levels of awareness. As human beings, we can truly wake up and evolve into a more conscious species."

Perkins is a would-be prophet of the Good News to follow the corrupt capitalism he describes, a reader of the signs of the ages. I hope my awakening comes with a good dose of fame, sex, money, and power. Perhaps I can get a good start by joining one of the study groups in my neighborhood this would-be-Guru hopes to set up for discussions of his Confessions via his web site www.dreamchange.org. A grassroots movement that, unlike the rhizomatic roots of grass, very much has a center, a leader, the hero who has come back from the darkside to tell the rest of the rebel hoard how to be enlightened. Ugh. Patriotism is not this scoundrel's refuge. Like so many boomers before him, he has found his Oprah redemption in front of a fawning audience, albeit a redemption that seems shaky enough to lead to compulsive-sounding assurances that he is, "you know … a good person." Goodman's show is open to reformed right-wingers lamenting the error of their ways and the evils of capitalism, in a way giving them some kind of redemption if it leads to more ammunition against the vast right wing conspiracy—a small price to pay, it would seem, though it is hard to imagine needing more ammunition with Bush Jr. as president. This book might be better relocated out of the politics section and into the New-Age or self-help sections, or some combination of the two so popular among boomers recovering from some form of disenchantment.

Bush Broke the Law

President Bush admitted to personally authorizing thousands of illegal wiretaps, and he doesn't plan to stop. Circumventing the Constitution is serious business. Impeachable business even.

This is a big moment. People from across the political spectrum are standing together to protect the rule of law and the principles that are core to our identity as Americans.

Please sign this MoveOn.org petition to show Congress that Americans want a thorough investigation of the president's secret wiretapping program?

Consider it a vote against an imperial presidency, which was the idea behind my 2004 EP cover above. The problem was clear then; now it is blatant. Don't let this "man for no season" get away with it. See my Wednesday, Septermber 1, 2004, blog to see where this phrase comes from, or visit the "music" page on my web site to hear the song.