[News] Torture and terror record of the world's policeman

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Not a truly radical analysis, but valuable in understanding the role 
of policing rather than the role of the military.

Checkered record of the world's policeman

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/LC18Df03.html
By Jeremy Kuzmarov

"In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. 
The wretched prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, 
the grey cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks 
of the men who had been flogged with bamboos."
- George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays.

"The police interrogation rooms smelled of urine and injustice."
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American.

As the United States expands the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the 
Barack Obama administration has placed a premium on police training 
programs. The stated aim is to provide security to the population so 
as to enable local forces to gradually take over from the military in 
completing the pacification process.

A similar strategy has been pursued in Iraq. American-backed forces 
have been implicated in sectarian violence, death squad activity and 
torture. At the same time, the weaponry and equipment that the US 
provided has frequently found its way into the hands of insurgents, 
many of whom have infiltrated the state security apparatus, 
contributing to the long-drawn out nature of both conflicts.

Ignored in mainstream media commentary and "think tank" analyses is 
the fact that the destructive consequences of American strategy in 
the Middle East and Central Asia today are consistent with practices 
honed over more than a century in the poor nations of the periphery.

Police training has been central to American attempts to expand its 
reach from the conquest of the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th 
century through the Cold War-era to today. Presented to the public in 
both the target country and the United States as humanitarian 
initiatives designed to strengthen democratic development and public 
security, these programs achieved neither, but were critical to 
securing the power base of local elites amenable to US economic and 
political interests and contributed to massive human-rights 
violations. They helped to facilitate the rise of powerful 
anti-democratic forces, which operated above the law, contributing to 
endemic violence, state terrorism and corruption.

Quite consistently across time and space, American policy-makers have 
supported police suppression of radical and nationalist movements as 
a cost-effective and covert means precluding costly military 
intervention which was more likely to arouse public opposition.

During the mid 1960s, the Director of United States Agency of 
International Development (USAID) David Bell commented in 
congressional testimony that "the police are a most sensitive point 
of contact between the government and people, close to the focal 
points of unrest, and more acceptable than the army as keepers of 
order over long periods of time. The police are frequently better 
trained and equipped than the military to deal with minor forms of 
violence, conspiracy and subversion."

Robert W Komer who served as a National Security Council advisor to 
President John F Kennedy further stressed that the police were "more 
valuable than Special Forces in our global counter-insurgency 
efforts" and particularly useful in fighting urban insurrections.

"We get more from the police in terms of preventative medicine than 
from any single US program," he said. "They are cost effective, while 
not going for fancy military hardware. They provide the first line of 
defense against demonstrations, riots and local insurrections. Only 
when the situation gets out of hand (as in South Vietnam) does the 
military have to be called in."

These remarks illuminate the underlying geo-strategic imperatives 
shaping the growth of the programs and the mobilization of police for 
political and military ends, which accounted for widespread human 
rights abuses.

This article, drawing on declassified US government archives, 
examines some of the landmark instances in the historical development 
of American police training programs to highlight the origins of 
current policies in the killing fields of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Over the years, as US imperial attention has shifted from one region 
to another, police training and financing has remained an unobserved 
constant, evolving with new strategies and weapons innovations but 
always retaining the same strategic goals and tactical elements. 
Staffed by military and police officers who valued order and 
discipline over the protection of civil liberties, the programs were 
designed to empower pro-US regimes committed to free-market 
capitalist development and helped to create elaborate intelligence 
networks, which facilitated the suppression of dissident groups in a 
more surgical way.

The US in effect helped to modernize intelligence gathering and 
political policing operations in its far-flung empire, thus 
magnifying their impact. These further helped to militarize the 
police and fostered, through rigorous ideological conditioning, the 
dehumanization of political adversaries. The result was a reign of 
torture and terror as part of police practice in countries subject to 
US influence, the devolution of police forces into brutal oppressors 
of the indigenous population, and the growth of corruption levels 
pushing regimes towards kleptocracy.

In his trilogy on the American empire, Chalmers Johnson demonstrates 
how the US has historically projected its global power through a 
variety of means, including economic blackmail and the manipulation 
of financial institutions, covert operations, arms sales, and most 
importantly, through the development of a global network of military 
bases whose scale dwarfs all previous empires, including Rome. This 
article seeks to add another important structural dimension of US 
power, namely the training of police and paramilitary units under the 
guise of humanitarian assistance, which preceded and continued 
through the era of global military bases.

Colonial policing and state terror in the Philippines
In 1898, seeking access to the vast "China market" and building the 
foundation of its seizure of Hawaii, the US entered the great 
"imperial game" through its colonization of the Philippines. From 
1899-1902, the military waged a relentless campaign to suppress the 
nationalist movement for independence, resulting in the death of 
perhaps two million Filipinos and the destruction of the societal fabric.

As the fighting waned, the Philippines Commission under future 
president William H. Taft focused on building an indigenous police 
force, officered by Americans, which was capable of finishing off the 
insurgents and establishing order. The constabulary engaged in 
patrols for over a decade to suppress nationalist and messianic 
peasant revolts in the countryside. It frequently employed scorched 
earth tactics and presided over numerous massacres, including killing 
hundreds of civilians at Bud Dajo in the Moro province of Mindanao, 
where Muslims refused to acquiesce to American power and rule.

As Alfred W McCoy documents in his outstanding new book, Policing 
America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of 
the Surveillance State, the constabulary's success in serving US 
imperial interests owed largely to the role of military intelligence 
officers in imparting pioneering methods of data management and 
covert techniques of surveillance, which were appropriated by 
domestic policing agencies, including the Federal Bureau of 
Investigations (FBI), during the 1st Red Scare.

Under the command of Harry H Bandholtz, the constabulary's secret 
service became especially effective in adopting psychological warfare 
techniques, such as the wearing of disguises, fabricating 
disinformation and recruiting paid informants and saboteurs in their 
efforts to "break up bands of political plotters". They monitored the 
press, carried out periodic assassinations and compiled dossiers on 
thousands of individuals as well as information on the corruption of 
America's Filipino proxies as means to keep them tied to the occupation.

One of the major technical achievements was an alarm system, which 
ended dependence on the public telephone. American advisors further 
imparted new administrative and fingerprinting techniques, which 
allowed for an expansion of the police's social control capabilities. 
The declaration of martial law ensured minimal governmental oversight 
and facilitated surveillance and arrests without due process. 
Torture, including the notorious water cure, was widely employed.

After the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Cavite and 
Batangas due to heavy guerrilla activity, William Cameron Forbes, a 
grandson of philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson who served as 
commissioner of commerce and police from 1904 to 1908 and governor 
general from 1909-1913, noted in his journal that "the constabulary 
was now free to run in the suspects. A lot of innocent people will be 
put in jail for a while, but it will also mean that some guilty ones 
will be caught and the cancer will be cut". These comments exemplify 
the ends justifies the means philosophy underpinning the abuse of 
human rights, which was characteristic of later interventions as well.

Racism was another prominent factor. Henry T Allen, the first chief 
of the constabulary, characteristically referred to Filipinos 
resisting the US as suffering from "intense ignorance" and the 
"fanatical" characteristics of "semi-savagery". He added, in a letter 
to Taft, that "education and roads will effect what is desired, but 
while awaiting these, drastic measures are obligatory ... The only 
remedy is killing and for the same reason that a rabid dog must be 
disposed of."

In his memoir, Bullets and Bolos, constabulary officer John R White, 
who went on to serve with the US military in World War I, recounts 
how his men razed houses, "plundered all that they could carry away" 
and destroyed sugar and other foodstuffs in the attempt to isolate 
and starve the Moro enemy in Mindanao. In the end, they left the 
pretty plateau a "burned and scarred sore". This was hard, he wrote, 
"but necessary for we did not want the job of taking Mindanao again". 
The tactics pioneered in the Philippines paved the way for later 
American action under the Strategic Hamlet program in South Vietnam.

The constabulary ultimately succeeded in infiltrating and sowing 
dissension within radical organizations, including an incipient labor 
movement, contributing to their implosion. It even played a role in 
apostolic succession by undermining the influence of Bishop Gregorio 
Aglipay through the spread of disinformation. Aglipay was a 
nationalist with socialist sympathies whose services were attended by 
thousands of the urban poor.

The legacy of political repression and corruption survived long after 
the Philippines was granted independence in the mid 1930s. The 
constabulary and police have maintained their notoriety for 
brutality, right up to the present, as new waves of repression and 
violence are being launched under the guise of the "war on terror."

'Popping off Cacos': The US Gendarmerie and racial slaughter in Haiti
American policies in the Philippines were replicated in the Caribbean 
during the colonial occupations of the 1910s and 1920s, where they 
contributed to the spread of considerable violence and repression. In 
Haiti, the US Gendarmerie was the brainchild of Franklin D Roosevelt, 
who, influenced by his cousin, Teddy, viewed the creation of a local 
police force as a cost-effective means of advancing US reach. The 
gendarmerie was mobilized primarily to fight against nationalist 
rebels, known as the Cacos, and to oversee brutal forced labor 
regiments imposed by the United States.

As in the Philippines, the United States provided modern police 
technologies, including communications equipment and fingerprinting 
techniques, and worked to improve administration and records 
collection to aid in the monitoring of dissident activity. In a 
prelude to the Cold War, riot control training was also provided to 
facilitate the crack down on urban demonstrations and strikes. 
American officers taunted people using racial epithets and did not 
usually object when rioters were badly beaten and clubbed, sometimes to death.

Journalist Samuel G Inman observed that the gendarmerie enjoyed 
practically "unlimited power" in the districts where they served, 
creating opportunities for extortion and kickbacks. "He is the judge 
of practically all civil and criminal cases, the paymaster for all 
funds from the central government and ex-officio director of the 
schools inasmuch as he pays the teachers. He controls the mayor and 
city council since they cannot spend funds without his OK. As 
collector of taxes, he exercises a strong influence on all 
individuals in the community." These comments exemplify the 
consequences of US policy in giving too much power to police units, 
resulting in systematic abuse.

The gendarmerie was especially valued for obtaining intelligence and 
adopted, as a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 
psychological warfare (psy-war) tactics, including the spread of 
disinformation, the playing on native superstitions, and use of 
disguises to induce defections and infiltrate enemy camps.

One of the gendarmerie's chief psy-war experts, Captain Herman H 
Hanneken blackened his skin, disguised himself as a Caco and bribed a 
bodyguard to gain access to the camp of leader Charlemagne Peralte, 
who became known as the "black Christ" after images of his 
decapitated body strung up on a cross were disseminated for 
intimidation purposes. Political terrorism would remain a feature of 
American counter-insurgency strategy through the Vietnam War-era and 
continuing today in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The violence that was endemic to the American occupation of Haiti was 
in large part racial. On search and destroy missions, "popping off" 
Cacos was likened to a sport, much like with the "pulajanes," 
"ladrones" and "gu-gus" in the Philippines, and later the "gooks" in Vietnam.

Colonel Robert Denig noted in his diary that "life to Haitians is 
cheap, murder is nothing". Lieutenant Faustin Wirkus added that 
killing Haitian rebels was like playing "hit the nigger and get a 
cigar games" at amusement parks back home. After the Caco movement 
was destroyed and the Marines were withdrawn, the US continued to arm 
and train the gendarmerie which it recognized as a pivotal instrument 
of power.

Following a period of military rule in the 1940s, Francois "Papa Doc" 
Duvalier used the police to suppress political dissent, orchestrating 
what internal reports referred to as "an active campaign of 
harassment and terrorism all over the country". This fits in with a 
broader regional pattern, as the US-created National Guard evolved 
into the political instrument of dictators Anastasio Somoza in 
Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, both having 
emerged from police ranks.

The police programs thus contributed not only to the spread of 
political violence in suppressing anti-occupational resistance, but 
also paved the way for an era of strong-armed rule and state 
terrorism after American colonial occupations formally ended.

Police training and political terror in South Vietnam
Building off the techniques pioneered in previous interventions, 
police training programs were an integral part of American 
counter-insurgency strategy in Vietnam, where they aided in the 
creation of an Orwellian-style police state and helped to stoke civil 
conflict.

Training began in 1955 as a centerpiece of America's 
"nation-building" campaign on behalf of president Ngo Dinh Diem, who 
replaced French puppet emperor Bao Dai following the temporary 
division of the country under the 1954 Geneva Accords. Valued by the 
US for his anti-communism, Diem had little interest in developing a 
Western-style democracy and wanted to establish his own political 
dynasty. The principal US motive was to contain the spread of the 
Chinese revolutionary movement, which threatened the Open Door 
policy. The Dwight D Eisenhower administration refused to allow 
mandated elections to unify the country, which it knew would be won 
by the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, whom the State Department 
referred to as the "ablest" and "most charismatic leader" in the country.

The police operation was run by Michigan State University (MSU) 
faculty under contract with the State Department. Much like in the 
Philippines and Haiti decades earlier, the United States stressed 
mass surveillance capable of monitoring subversion and dismantling 
the political opposition to Diem.

New technologies hastened the scale of violence associated with these 
efforts, though proved limited in engendering a favorable outcome for 
the United States. American advisors urged police to develop a more 
efficient record gathering system and modeled the Surete (civil 
police force) after the American FBI, arming it with 12-gauge 
shotguns, sedans, ammunition, and riot-control equipment to counter 
subversion. There were few pretenses from the beginning that the 
police were anything but a political instrument, with many top 
officials, including Surete Director Nguyen Ngoc Le, having been 
previously trained by France.

The MSU team developed an identity card system to monitor political 
activity as part of Diem's anti-communist denunciation campaign. 
Those found with links to the Vietminh, who had led the liberation 
struggle against France, were arrested and faced torture at an 
assortment of prison camps, or were "disappeared," as internal 
reports noted. Even Diem's own chief of staff, Tran Van Don, derided 
the use of "Gestapo-like police raids and torture" against "those who 
simply opposed the government".

US support was crucial in shaping South Vietnam's evolution into what 
Foreign Affairs described as a "quasi-police state marred by 
arbitrary arrests, censorship of the press and the absence of 
political opposition". The passage of law 10/59 allowing for the 
execution of regime opponents resulted in the declaration of armed 
resistance by the National Liberation Front (NLF), whose leader, 
Nguyen Huu Tho was rescued from house arrest through infiltration of 
Diem's police by revolutionary supporters.

Starting in 1961, after taking over from Michigan State, the United 
States Agency for International Development's Office of Public Safety 
(OPS) sent advisers to Malaya for counter-guerrilla training. Over 
the next fourteen years, working with the Public Safety Division of 
the US Operations Mission to Vietnam (USOM), the OPS provided more 
than 300 advisers and $300 million towards this goal, bolstering the 
number of police from 16,000 to 122,000.

They funded eight specialized training schools and built over 500 
rural police stations and high-tech urban headquarters equipped with 
firearm ranges, computer systems and padded interrogation rooms. The 
OPS also helped to create a telecommunications network linking police 
headquarters in rural villages to major cities such as Saigon.

As in the Philippines and Haiti, emphasis was placed on building a 
corps of informants and developing a climate of fear to intimidate 
those who might challenge the government. To this latter end, 
psychological warfare teams painted a ghostly eye on the doors of 
houses suspected of harboring "Vietcong" agents. Penetration by the 
NLF, however, and a lack of conviction on the part of American 
trained forces helped to stymie these efforts, to the frustration of 
many American advisors who could not get around the strength of 
Vietnamese nationalism and political dynamic underlying the civil 
war. Language and cultural barriers and an underlying paternalism 
further strained social relations and made communications difficult, 
limiting effectiveness.

In May 1963, as opposition to Diem's rule intensified, police killed 
nine monks, as well as three women and two children at a rally 
against religious persecution and government violence. In July, 
according to OPS adviser Ray Lundgren, in spite of the "amazing 
results" yielded by riot control courses, police again displayed 
"unnecessary brutality" in suppressing a peaceful Buddhist rally 
against repeated injustices, beating monks and other civilians.

In November, Diem was overthrown in a coup d'etat and replaced by a 
revolving door of generals, including ultimately Nguyen Cao Ky and 
Nguyen Van Thieu, who had served under the French and were implicated 
in the narcotics trade. The US in turn invaded and launched massive 
bombing campaigns which decimated the South Vietnamese countryside.

In an attempt to maximize social control in the face of mounting 
popular resistance, the OPS expanded the surveillance program first 
initiated by Michigan State, issuing identity cards to everyone over 
15 and compiling dossiers on the political beliefs of nearly 12 
million people. Once dissidents were identified, the police undertook 
night sweeps in their villages and "arrested anyone under the 
remotest suspicion of being left-wing", as one witness put it. "The 
government has a blacklist of suspects, but I understand that wives, 
mothers and fathers - anyone with the slimmest association with those 
on it are being caught in the net."

Many of those taken in were peace activists, students, members of 
oppositional groups like the Hoa-Hao and Cao Dai sects, and 
politicians who were seen as threats to the reigning junta. Echoing 
his predecessors in previous interventions, CIA Station Chief Douglas 
Blaufarb rationalized the repression on the grounds that "it was 
futile to have expected in the circumstances a punctilious regard in 
all cases for the niceties of civil rights". Racism and the perceived 
inferiority of the Vietnamese "gooks" lay behind wide-scale 
human-rights violations.

Some of the worst abuses took place within the prison system overseen 
by the OPS. Conditions were described as "nightmarish", "appalling" 
and equivalent to "hell on earth", stemming largely from the rampant 
overcrowding caused by the influx of political prisoners.

Inmates were packed into tiny cells, where they had to sleep standing 
up or in shifts, and deprived of proper food, bathing facilities and 
medical attention. At Kien Tung Provincial Prison, just 10 kilometers 
from the seat of government, William C Benson of the OPS reported 
that the cells were "extremely dirty and the stench so nauseating" 
that it made him sick.

In An Xuyen, OPS advisor Donald Bordenkircher, who three decades 
later was appointed to head the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, 
wrote to his superiors that inmates had to sleep next to their own 
urine and feces and that the kitchen doubled as a trash dump and was 
inhabited by giant rats which were "as large as cats".

Known as a stern disciplinarian, Bordenkircher embodies the 
continuity in American policies from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan 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 
<http://www.japanfocus.org/-Jeremy-Kuzmarov/3319>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 
<http://www.japanfocus.org/>Japan Focus. Republished with permission 
from Japan Focus.)

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