This Week: The "National Memory System"

"Quote" of the Week

E. Howard Hunt and the National Memory System

Subverting Democracy, In His Own Words

 

Greetings,

I never tire of reminding people that we can learn a lot from some of the smallest news items, the ones found in the most unlikely of places. This week I discuss the layers of meaning and perspective that was presented in the obituary of a long-time government functionary who passed away a couple of weeks ago. I think you'll be surprised to see what can be learned from this sort of thing. And, when I say "learned," I am not talking about what can be learned about the person who died. I'm talking about what can be learned about the cultural and intellectual systems in the United States, as expressed through our ideological institutions. In this case, the media.

Speaking of the smallest news items, I'm feeling the urge to do "A Stroll Through the News With Nygaard." For those who are new to the Notes, a "Stroll" is where I devote an entire issue of the Notes to a bunch of tiny tidbits of news items, pointing out the lessons and, often, the absurdities that can often be found in the nooks and crannies of the Mainstream Corporate For-Profit Agenda-Setting Bound Media (as I like to call it). These "strolls" are fun, and they also have the salutary effect of allowing me to clear my files of the zillion clippings that seem to accumulate as the weeks go by. I think we're about due...

Strolling on by, I remain yours truly,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Here's the headline from an Associated Press report, published in my local daily newspaper on February 8, 2007:
"Guantanamo Prisoners Weren't Beaten, U.S. Says; An Army Investigation into Guards' Alleged Bragging about Abusing Detainees Found No Evidence it Occurred."

And here is a patched-together "quote" drawn from the first six paragraphs of this story:

"Col. Richard Bassett, the chief [Army] investigator, recommended no disciplinary action against the Navy guards... who had ... described beating detainees as common practice. ... Bassett interviewed no detainees, said Jose Ruiz, a command spokesman. "He talked to all the parties he felt he needed [to talk to]..."

So, which is more amazing: That these people actually say such things to the media? Or that the media refrains from ridiculing them? Hmmm....

E. Howard Hunt and the National Memory System

A man named E. Howard Hunt died on January 23rd. Does the name ring a bell? He is famous (infamous?) for his role in the Watergate burglaries that brought an end to the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974. Note that I say that this is what he is famous for. It is not, however, the most important thing to know about this man. The London Guardian led off their obituary of Hunt with these words: "The infamous part that the espionage agent E Howard Hunt played in the 1972 Watergate burglary—which eventually brought down President Nixon—earned him 33 months in prison. Yet Hunt, who has died aged 88, spent a career in clandestine activities so nefarious that he was lucky not to have spent much longer behind bars."

"Lucky?" I don't think Hunt was "lucky" at all. It's far more serious than that. Let's have a look at how he is remembered in the "National Memory System" and the political/intellectual culture it serves.

National Public Radio ran an obituary for Hunt on the 23rd, and it began with these words:

"E. Howard Hunt, one of the key figures who organized the Watergate break in, has died at the age of 88. He was a long time CIA operative. He helped plan both a coup in Guatemala in 1954 and later the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Howard Hunt served 33 months in prison after he pleaded guilty to conspiracy for his role in the Watergate burglary."

And that's the last we hear from NPR about either Guatemala or Cuba, or any of the rest of Hunt's long career in the CIA. NPR chose instead to devote its entire segment to an interview with reporter Bob Woodward, who "broke the Watergate story in the Washington Post" in 1973, and that's all they talked about: Watergate. So, we see what's important—and not important—to NPR.

The New York Times did a little better in their lengthy obituary the next day. They say of Hunt that "His field was political warfare: dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda." And, although most of their story was also about Watergate, they did devote one full paragraph to Guatemala. Here it is:

"In 1954, Mr. Hunt helped plan the covert operation that overthrew the elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz. ‘'What we wanted to do was to have a terror campaign,' Mr. Hunt said in a CNN documentary on the cold war, ‘to terrify Arbenz particularly, to terrify his troops.' Though the operation succeeded, it ushered in 40 years of military repression in Guatemala."

Two sentences later the Times adds that "Not until 1960 was Mr. Hunt involved in an operation that changed history."

What Lessons Can Be Learned from Such Obituaries?

Remember that this obituary was being written in the winter of 2007, at a time when the United States is officially engaged in a "War Against Terror (a WAT?!)," and is supposedly trying to "spread democracy" around the world. The conventional thinking has it that this is what the U.S., as a Beacon of Democracy, has always done. Yet when a prominent government official dies, the fact that he was engaged in an official U.S. terror campaign for the purpose of overthrowing a democratically-elected government—and one that in fact "succeeded"—merits a single paragraph in the nation's newspaper of record. Indeed, it is implied that such behavior did not even "change history."

The operation that DID "change history," according to the Times, was the secret campaign, ordered by Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, "to alter or abolish the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro in Cuba." The Times tells us that "Mr. Hunt's assignment was to create a provisional Cuban government that would be ready to take power once the CIA's cadre of Cuban shock troops invaded the island." This was the infamous Bay of Pigs operation (Code Name: "Operation Zapata"), which used the same cast of (U.S.) characters as the Guatemala campaign from six years earlier. The Guatemala campaign was codenamed "PB Success," and Zapata was expected to meet with the same "success." It did not, of course, with the result that, as the Times put it, the careers of Hunt and the others "who planned and executed the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961 were damaged or destroyed, as was the CIA's reputation for derring-do."

The Oxford English Dictionary defines "derring-do" as "daring action or feats; heroic courage." Now, if it is true that the CIA's reputation among the general population in 1960 was for "derring-do," rather than for terror and subversion of democracy, that tells us quite a lot about our political and intellectual (and media) culture. Does it not?

It also tells us a lot that E. Howard Hunt was tried and convicted—and spent 33 months in federal prison—for burglary, conspiracy and wiretapping aimed at the Democratic National Committee, yet received no prison time, was never charged, in fact received no negative consequences whatsoever, for his well-documented roles in various campaigns of terror and subversion of democracy. The lesson: Violations against the property of powerful people in the United States have consequences, while much more serious violations against the lives (and governments!) of less-powerful people in other countries do not.

Here's another, related lesson: Terror campaigns that overthrow democracies—and usher in 40 years of unimaginable human suffering—do not "change history." But an operation that does not "succeed" in overthrowing anybody, but that damages the careers of powerful government officials and/or damages the (bizarre and distorted) reputation of the agency that runs the campaigns that overthrow those democracies? Now, THAT changes "history."

Now, here's your Lesson #3: Citizens in the U.S. must not be allowed to know much about covert operations and the casts of characters that carry them out. Why not? Because if we did, we might begin to see patterns in our government's behavior over time, and might begin to understand a little better what is really involved in constructing and maintaining a Global Empire. The targets of these "covert" operations certainly know what is involved. Indeed, the combination of their knowledge of U.S. behavior and the ignorance of it in our own country goes a long way in explaining the bewilderment revealed in the oft-posed question that came to the fore on September 11, 2001: "Why do they hate us?"

Due to its power to reach and inform millions of us every day, the mass media has the effect of functioning as a doctrinal system. That is, a system that creates and/or maintains a certain ideology while delegitimizing others. A tiny part of our doctrinal system is what I call the "National Memory System"—that is, the part of the mass-communication system that functions to tell the general population what is memorable and what is forgettable in our history. The obituaries of E. Howard Hunt and others can be analyzed to see how the system works.

Why do we care how it works? Well, some important questions come to mind: Who are the E. Howard Hunts of today, the men and women who are carrying out the "dirty tricks, sabotage and propaganda" that violate the values of most of the good people in whose name they are supposedly being carried out? Which journalists are following the covert operatives of today? Which news organizations are publishing the details of empire? These journalistic efforts—or the lack of them—will dictate how today's events are remembered—or not—in the obituaries of tomorrow. And, more importantly, they affect our ability to understand what is going on and to hold our leaders accountable for their actions today.

"Late in life," the Times tells us, Mr. Hunt "said he had no regrets, beyond the Bay of Pigs." Which is partly why the London Guardian calls him "lucky." But it's not luck. Our job is to see if we can create a culture where the E. Howard Hunts of the world not only feel regrets for their careers of terror and democracy-destruction, but are brought to justice for them.

Subverting Democracy, In His Own Words

Here are the words of E. Howard Hunt, speaking to the Senate committee investigating the Watergate affair in 1973, when he faced a provisional prison sentence of 35 years:

"I am crushed by the failure of my government to protect me and my family as in the past it has always done for its clandestine agents. I cannot escape feeling that the country I have served for my entire life and which directed me to carry out the Watergate entry is punishing me for doing the very things it trained and directed me to do."

Hmmm... what, exactly, was he "trained and directed" to do? Here are a few quotations from Mr. Hunt himself,

Speaking about "PB Success," the U.S. campaign to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Guatemala, Mr. Hunt told an interviewer from the National Security Archive in 1999, "I was in charge of the political and the psychological warfare aspects [for this operation]." He went on to say,

"... we [the C.I.A] had these black flights coming in to Opa-Locka airport here in Miami, practically around the clock, bringing in people for training. And we had to establish in Honduras a very powerful radio station of our own, a transmitter that would override the beam of the Guatemalan national radio, so that... as in World War II, where we did the Funkspiel so often—this was an idea borrowed from World War II: you just override the other guy's transmitter and feed false information to the public. So that was done."

"Sort of a Prisoner of Ours" Ha Ha

"...the co-operation of the Guatemalan clergy was arranged through Cardinal Spellman in New York, and I had taken upon myself to meet with the Cardinal. I had a letter of introduction from a prominent Washington figure, and I didn't tell him, I asked him what assistance he might be able to be in terms of getting co-operation from the Guatemalan clergy. I knew, of course, that in 1948 or thereabouts, the Catholic Church had been very helpful in arranging a subvention to the Christian Democrats in Italy and turning back the communist electoral threat there. So I wasn't at all bashful about approaching Spel, and he was a rather roly-poly placid individual, but a man of great mentality, and he said in effect, ‘You've told me what the problem is—I'll deal with it.' And that was it. And soon we were writing scripts or leaflets for the Guatemalan clergy, the Catholic clergy, and this information was going out in the pastorals across the country, and in radio broadcasts."

The NSA interviewer asked Hunt, "What part did the American ambassador, Purefoy, play in this business?" To which Hunt replied:

"Well, Purefoy was very, very helpful. He was sort of a prisoner (Laughs) of ours, of CIA and of the Department of State. He owed his ambassadorship to Eisenhower, and he understood that co-operation with us was part of the deal, and so he bent over backward to do everything he could."

How did Hunt get involved in the Bay of Pigs? Here's his version:

"So I was yanked back [from another assignment] and told: ‘What we're doing is reassembling the PB Success team'—that is, the Guatemala operational team—‘to take care of Castro, as we did before. ... My role was very similar to what it had been in the Guatemalan project..."

"President Idigros Fuentes of Guatemala was good enough to give our Cuban exiles two training areas in his country, one in the mountains, and then at (Retardo Lejo) we had an unused airstrip that he gave over to us, which we put into first-class condition for our fighter aircraft and our supply aircraft, and we trained Cuban paratroopers there."

So, just to summarize: In this single interview, Hunt reveals:

* Complicity by the Catholic Church hierarchy in subversion of democracy;

* Involvement of a U.S. ambassador in subversion of democracy, and;

* How a previous subversion (Guatemala) was made use of in an attempt at a later subversion (Cuba).

That last revelation illustrates a sort of "domino theory" that is quite different from the one I was taught in high school. That theory said that if one land in a region came under the influence of Communists, then more would follow in a "domino effect." Nobody told me my own government was expert at the game of (secret) dominoes.