When Marines go in ...
Truth is the first casualty
By Key
Martin
When 43,000 U.S. troops invaded the Dominican Republic in
1965, four days after a revolution broke out in the streets of
the capital to overturn a military junta and return to the
democratic constitution of the previous government, humorist
Art Buchwald published a Washington Post column about the "last
American" in the Dominican Republic.
You can't leave, the mythical tourist was told by U.S.
authorities in this spoof, because you're the last one. If he
left, the U.S. would no longer have a reason to be there, since
it claimed to be invading to "protect American lives."
It was one of those rare moments when the corporate media
admits that the official explanations for war are packed with
hype and lies.
The cover story was such a bald-faced lie that no one even
remembers it today. The real reason for the U.S. invasion was
to crush the constitutionalist forces. The U.S. government
lived in pathological fear of another Cuba in the
Caribbean.
The next decade was marked by CIA-organized death squads
that fed their disappeared victims to the sharks off the
coast.
That is how wars begin--with a big lie.
Consider Vietnam. In 1954 a Geneva conference divided the
country into two parts, a compromise that gave the liberation
struggle the north and required the French colonial army to
withdraw to the south and leave the country. The French left
behind a puppet government in Saigon. There was also a growing
U.S. military presence.
The U.S. had paid much of the French costs during the
colonial war. After national elections were sabotaged in the
south, a National Liberation Front was formed in 1960 and was
inching closer to victory by 1964.
U.S. policy makers could smell defeat and were desperate to
escalate the war to stave it off. Navy Seal commandos were
training South Vietnamese troops to invade the north and
landings were being conducted.
According to Stanley Karnow in his definitive history of the
Vietnam War that accompanied the PBS series, on March 1, 1964,
former CIA operative William Bundy, the assistant secretary of
defense who later became assistant secretary of state for the
Far East, submitted a plan "to bomb North Vietnamese railways,
roads, industrial complexes and training camps."
The question was, under what authorization? Normally it
would require a declaration of war by Congress. Instead they
went with a proposal by National Security Advisor Walt Rostow
for "a congressional resolution."
"It was unclear how Johnson could persuade Congress to pass
the resolution," wrote Karnow. "But his aides soon began to
draft a document" that would five months later become the Gulf
of Tonkin Resolution "to fulfill nearly all the Pentagon's
dreams."
On Aug. 4, 1964, two destroyers, the Maddox and C. Turner
Joy, moving in rough seas, staged "direct daylight runs to
within eight miles of North Vietnam's coast and four miles of
its islands, as if defying the Communists to `play chicken.'"
The destroyers were "effectively used [as] bait. The bait was
sweetened by covert South Vietnamese commandos . . . just as
the American ships were beginning."
Their problem was that the Vietnamese didn't take the
bait.
But that was a small detail. The U.S. claimed the ships had
been attacked. President Lyndon Johnson rushed to Congress and
obtained the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. "In short, as Johnson
later quipped, the resolution . . . `covered everything.'" The
two sole dissenting voices, Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest
Gruening, "were drowned out by a din of patriotism."
The Navy officer in charge of the two ships, however, wasn't
so sure. "He ordered officers on both ships to quiz the crews
and his skepticism mounted as he listened to the accounts. Not
a single sailor on either vessel had seen or heard Communist
gunfire . . .
The Maddox had not made any `actual visual sightings' of
Communist patrol boats. The radarscope blips apparently showing
the enemy had been due to `freak weather effects.'"
Karnow asserts that "subsequent research by both official
and unofficial investigators has indicated with almost total
certainty that the . . . attack in the Tonkin Gulf never
happened. . . . Even Johnson privately expressed doubts only a
few days after . . . confiding to an aide, `Hell, those dumb
sailors were just shooting at flying fish.' "
How many millions died, were wounded or had their lives
destroyed--Vietnamese and U.S. servicemen--based on this hollow
lie? The U.S. invasion of Vietnam was a show of force that
would enable it to carry out a bloody coup next door in the
world's fourth-largest country, Indonesia, and extend its
economic tentacles throughout the area. The war is remembered
vividly, but few recall the lie that got it started.
Another famous lie was during the Gulf War. In the fall of
1991, two months after Iraqi troops entered Kuwait and the U.S.
began its military buildup, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein met
with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and indicated he
was ready to negotiate. Suddenly the media was awash with tales
of Iraqi soldiers ripping babies from their incubators,
"leaving them on the floor to die," as Clark described the hype
in his book, "The Fire This Time." Bush used the story to push
towards war, repeating it in speeches, claiming 312 babies had
died this way. Even Amnesty International repeated the story as
truth. Any talk of negotiations was effectively sabotaged.
It turned out that the "15-year-old witness" who testified
at a congressional hearing that she was volunteering at the
hospital when the atrocities allegedly occurred was the
daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S., "a fact known
by organizers of the hearing," said Clark. Amnesty
International retracted its report five months later after the
damage had already been done.
In Grenada the U.S. claimed it invaded in 1983 to protect
U.S. citizens at a medical school when in fact there was no
threat to them. The students acknowledged that they were given
guarantees and the necessary facilities to leave if they
wanted. Cuba, which had a workforce there building runways for
a new airport, informed the U.S. government that no foreign
citizens had been disturbed and it offered to cooperate in
solving any difficulty that might arise. As Fidel Castro said
in his speech after the invasion, "if anything endangered them,
it was the war unleashed by the United States."
Now it is in Yugoslavia that the bombs are falling--a new
war, a new set of lies. Consider the "massacre" at Racak last
January. U.S. diplomat William Walker, who headed the Kosovo
Observer Mission, was quick to look at a number of bodies in a
ditch and proclaim that a horrible massacre by the Yugoslav
Army had taken place. This event was the justification for the
current bombings and the mobilization of ground troops.
However, last August 4, Clinton confirmed that NATO had
developed detailed plans for an attack on Yugoslavia, "a
variety of air-power options that could punish or intimidate."
Sound familiar? A plan in place waiting for an incident to
trigger it, just as with Vietnam.
And just who is Walker to proclaim the "massacre" before
autopsies had been done? He was a former assistant to Oliver
North in Central America as the death squads ruled El Salvador
and the CIA started the crack epidemic in the U.S. that
destroyed so many young lives, particularly in the African
American and Latin communities, to fund its covert operations
for the Contras in Nicaragua. At the protests last November 16
at the School of the Americas, the Georgia military training
center at which many of the death-squad organizers were
trained, Walker was charged with being a "silent participant"
in the murder of the six Jesuit priests in 1989. Later he
became the ambassador to El Salvador, and in 1996 he presided
over a ceremony in Washington for 5,000 U.S. veterans of the
war in that country, when the official position of the
government was that there were only 50 "advisors" there. In
short, his job was to start a war, not stop one or tell the
truth.
The corporate media don't bring out this kind of background.
They can tell you how many hits, runs and errors baseball
players make over the course of their entire career, but the
unsavory history of these government operatives is rarely
brought up. Their words are presented as good coin.
The media also does not report the significance of the war
that has been going on for some time involving pro-NATO
commando forces calling themselves the Kosovo Liberation Army
led by Croatian General Agim Ceku (he was responsible for the
largest "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia, the
expulsion of Serbs from the Krajina in 1995) and involving army
officers from Western military forces. Nor do they point out
that in this war there are casualties and, as the European
press has stated, the evidence points toward the bodies at
Racak being the casualties of this war dressed up to look as if
they had been massacred.
They also do not discuss the connection of the formation of
the KLA with the Western intelligence agencies, particularly
the CIA, their generation of funding through drug trafficking,
and their long-standing campaign of terror and assassination in
Kosovo that targets both Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo
considered an obstacle to their plan for war.
These powerful media companies have a problem: their own
links to the military-industrial complex, either through
ownership (NBC and CBS) or their advertising budgets. They
cannot afford to challenge the government hype without
seriously affecting their bottom lines. This was true in
Vietnam and it is true today. They want nothing more
controversial than which laundry detergent to use or which car
to buy. Truth is the first casualty of war.
Whom would you believe? The victims of war or the
spinmasters of the war makers? Cut through the hype and go
immediately to the protest nearest you.
Key Martin is a former activist in the Newspaper Guild
and member of the New York local's Executive Board, and, as the
chairperson of Youth Against War and Fascism, an organizer of
pioneering protests against the Vietnam War.
This article is copyright under a Creative Commons License.
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