Churchill, Eichmann and Those 9/11 Technocrats
Press Action
Saturday, February 05, 2005
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/nimmo02062005/
By Kurt Nimmo
In an article posted on Counterpunch, I threw a bit of cold water on Ward Churchill’s comparison between corporate and CIA “technocrats” who died in the WTC and Adolph Eichmann, the infamous Nazi bureaucrat.
As it turns out, Churchill was right on.
According to an article published by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, five of “Adolph Eichmann’s Nazi assistants were recruited and employed by the Central Intelligence Agency after World War II, according to recently declassified intelligence documents” obtained by the National Security Archive through an FOIA request. “The newly-revealed documents are based on internal investigations in the CIA’s history department,” explains Yossi Melman of Haaretz. “The agency has steadfastly refused to make the documents public for fear they would cause embarrassment.”
Embarrassment, that’s putting it mildly.
It is nothing less than straight up and down evidence that the CIA is truly depraved and immoral, recruiting the most heinous war criminals, and should be made to answer for its long and villainous history. In fact, the spook agency should be closed down, its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, razed, and salt poured on the ashes.
Of course, none of this matters because, with Bush in office, Rumsfeld running the Pentagon and Porter Goss in charge of the CIA, the agency is now irrelevant. In the future (in fact for the last two years), intelligence operations (i.e., killing people and overthrowing governments) will be conducted from the murky depths of the Pentagon, a fact revealed by ace journalist Seymour Hersh and eventually, after initial denials, admitted by the Pentagon.
It is no secret the CIA recruited General Reinhard Gehlen, the German army’s intelligence chief for the Eastern Front during World War II. “At the end of the war, Gehlen established a close relationship with the U.S. and successfully maintained his intelligence network (it ultimately became the West German BND) even though he employed numerous former Nazis and known war criminals,” writes Tamara Feinstein for the National Security Archive. “For example, current records show that at least five associates of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichmann worked for the CIA, 23 other Nazis were approached by the CIA for recruitment, and at least 100 officers within the Gehlen organization were former SD or Gestapo officers.”
Is it a stretch to conclude, then, that when al-Qaeda (or whatever group) flew those planes into the WTC on September 11, 2001, they were attacking, although not specifically, the legacy of Adolf Eichmann and the Nazi Gestapo, or Geheime Staatspolizei, Hitler’s secret police, responsible for throwing countless numbers of people into concentration camps?
As an aside, it is interesting to note that the Gestapo made use of Schutzhaft, a German word that essentially translates into “protective custody,” in other words the act of locking people up without judicial proceedings, sort of like Bush throwing Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi in military prisons, sans legal representation.
Of course, killing people, regardless of the crimes they willingly or unwilling commit, is wrong. Nobody deserved to die on September 11, 2001, not even Nazi CIA agents, that is if any of them are currently alive and working for the agency, albeit likely in a walker or wheelchair (Doctor Strangelove comes to mind).
However, as Churchill noted in the essay that will likely cost him his job at the University of Colorado, if we are to use the same “rules of engagement” as the United States military, “collateral damage” is an accepted reality of war and, if we are to believe the story pedaled by Bush, Muslims have declared war on the United States. Of course, when the “good” United States kills innocent civilians it is an unfortunate side effect of war, but when “evil” Muslims kill innocents (and technocrats) it is cold-blooded murder.
In fact, as a cursory examination of history reveals, the United States (and Germany, Japan, Britain) went out of their way to kill civilians, as the fire bombing of Tokyo (100,000 people killed on a single night), Dresden (25,000-35,000 killed), Nagasaki (75,000 killed), and Hiroshima (80,000 killed) demonstrate. As Churchill points out in his essay, the United States had no problem killing 500,000 Iraqi children through murderous sanctions after invading the country and destroying its civilian infrastructure (as the research of Thomas J. Nagy discloses, the United States “intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country’s water supply after the Gulf War,” understanding full well “the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway.” See “The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply.")
Of course, this frame of reference was not mentioned by Bill O’Reilly, John Gibson, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, the governor of Colorado, or any of Churchill’s critics who self-righteously climbed up on their corporate news and state government soapboxes and loudly excoriated the professor—and now demand his resignation and public humiliation—for stating the obvious, or what should be the obvious.
Regardless of history—even recent history: the current civilian death toll in Iraq is a staggering 100,000, a fact the corporate media refuses to acknowledge—the fatuous mythology that America is “good,” while our enemies, who often use the same loathsome warfare tactics, are “evil,” has immense staying power, even as it is broken on the rocks of reality by a tsunami of facts and figures. More than anything, it was Ward Churchill’s tone and the style of his prose that so outraged the above mentioned, who are essentially shills and hucksters for a system that deliberately kills 500,000 Iraqi children to make a point about who is boss or recruits Nazis responsible for genocide and the mass murder of millions of innocent people. As Poppy Bush said, after invading Iraq the first time around, “What we say goes.” For disobeying, over 100,000 Iraqis died in the initial assault and 1.5 million died in the decade following the invasion. Bush Senior said mass murder, and so it went.
Meanwhile, crawling up the best seller list is a book by Thomas E Woods ("The Politically Incorrect Guide to the History of America"), a historian and defender of the Confederacy and racism who teaches at a community college in New York. According to Woods, Native Americans were well-treated by Europeans, an assertion that would likely elicit more than a few choice words from Ward Churchill, that is if he wasn’t so busy trying to save his job and fending off death threats. “I think Christopher Columbus was a good person for discovering America and I teach my children that he wanted to become wealthy and spread the Catholic faith to America,” remarked Noreen McCann, quoted in an article on Wood’s book in the Sunday Times.
I guess this clueless woman never heard of the encomienda system (in other words, slavery) imposed on the “New World” by Columbus’ followers, or the chopping off of hands and heads by conquistadors to test the sharpness of their swords, or the trained-to-kill mastiffs and greyhounds unleashed by the conquistadors on hapless natives. Speaking of dogs, as Bartolome de las Casas noted at the time, butcher shops throughout the Caribbean region during the years of conquest sold Indian bodies as dog food. No mention of the fact Columbus sent 300 prisoners to Spain in 1496 to be sold as slaves. Also no mention of the fact that when Columbus arrived it is estimated there were 75 to 145 million inhabitants in North and South America. By 1890, the number in North America had been reduced to 250,000.
And Adolph Eichmann passed out lollipops to Jewish kids.
Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. He is the author of Another Day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America, a collection of essays published by Dandelion Books. Visit his weblog at KurtNimmo.com.