AMERICAN CAPITALISM BEGAN TO FAIL IN ABOUT 1973-----Episode 6

THE ESTABLISHMENT HAD TO CONVINCE THE GOVERNMENT TO GET BACK UP OFF THE MAT AFTER THE DEFEAT IN VIETNAM AND RESUME PLAYING BULLY 

   It was a complex process of consolidation that the system undertook in 1975. It included old-type military actions, like the Mataguez affair, to assert authority in the world and at home. There was also a need to satisfy a disillusioned public that the system was criticizing and correcting itself. The standard way to conduct publicized investigations that found specific culprits but left the system intact. Watergate had made both the FBI and the CIA look bad ---- breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold,cooperating with Nixon in his burglary jobs and illegal wiretapping. In 1975, congressional committees in both the House and Senate began investigations of the FBI and CIA. 

   The CIA inquiry disclosed that the CIA had gone beyond its original mission of gathering intelligence and was conducting secret operation of all kinds. For instance, back in the 1950s, it had administered the drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans to test its effects : one American scientist, given such a dose by a CIA agent, leaped from a New York hotel window to his death. 

   The CIA had also been involved in assassination plots against Castro of Cuba and other heads of state. It had introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and the slaughter to 500, 000 pigs. A CIA operative told a reporter he delivered the virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans. 

   It was also learned from the investigation that the CIA ---with the collusion of a secret Committee of Forty headed by Henry Kissinger ---- had worked to "destabilize" the Chilean government headed by Salvadore Allende, a Marxist who had been elected president in one of the rare free elections in Latin America. ITT, with large interests in Chile, played a part in this operation. When in 1974 the American ambassador to Chile, David Popper, suggested to the Chilean junta [which, with U.S. aid, had overthrown Allende] that they were violating human rights, he was rebuked by Kissinger, who sent word :"Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures." 

   The investigation of the FBI disclosed many years of illegal actions to disrupt and destroy radical groups and left-wing groups of all kinds. The FBI had sent forged letters, engaged in burglaries [it admitted to ninety-two between 1960 and 1966] , opened mail illegally, and, in the case of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, seems to have conspired in murder. 

   Valuable information came out of the investigations, but it was just enough, and in just the right way ---moderate press coverage, little television coverage, thick books of reports with limited readership ---to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself. 

   The investigations themselves revealed the limits of government willingness to probe into such activities. The Church Committee, set up in the Senate, conducted its investigations with the cooperation of the agencies being investigated and, indeed, submitted its findings on the CIA to the CIA to see if there was material that the Agency wanted omitted. Thus, while there was much valuable material in the report, there is no way of knowing how much more there was --- the final report was a compromise between committee diligence and CIA caution. 

   The Pike Committee, set up in the House of Representatives, made no such agreement with the CIA or FBI, and when it issued its final report, the same House that had authorized its investigation voted to keep the report secret. When the report was leaked via a CBS newscaster, Daniel Schorr, to the Village Voice in New York, it was never printed by the important newspapers in the country---the Times , the Washington Post, or others. Schorr was suspended by CBS. It was another instance of cooperation between the mass media and the government in instances of "national security." 

   The Church Committee, in its report of CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, revealed an interesting point of view. The committee seemed to look on the killing of a head of state as an unpardonable violation of some gentlemen's agreement among statesmen, much more deplorable than military interventions that killed ordinary people. The Committee wrote, in the introduction to its assassination report : 

     Once methods of coercion and violence are chosen, the probability of loss of life is always present. There is, however, a significant difference between a cold-blooded, targeted, intentional killing of an individual foreign leader and other forms of intervening in the affairs of foreign nations.