Ken eyed a few small cookies and picked them up. He considered them for a moment, appeared to think better of it and returned the cookies to their original resting place.

As he did this, he said: "Since approximately 1952, when the Psychological Warfare Center was inaugurated at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, a program came into being that, eventually, would evolve into a so-called anti-terrorist program. This whole process was set in motion when, within a month or so after the Center opened, the Special Forces branch of the United States Army was established and became attached to the Center in order to help give active expression to the principles and perspective which were the original motivating force behind the founding of the Psychological Warfare Center.

"More specifically, among other things, this Center had been designed to promote the use of unconventional warfare to secure various objectives in foreign territory. This kind of warfare encompasses a wide spectrum of possible strategies and operations that either fall at, or beyond, the borderline of what is allowable under existing international law concerning the rules of warfare.

"Initially, the Special Forces Mobile Training Teams, the so-called 'A team', which usually consisted of up to ten enlisted men and several officers, would be sent into designated areas in order to teach indigenous guerrillas, how to conduct successful operations of unconventional warfare. Naturally, these guerrillas were fighting for goals that were compatible with US objectives.

"Gradually, the focus of the Center changed, and, as a result, so did some of the activities of the Special Forces. One major transformation concerned the switch from showing guerrillas how to carry out unconventional warfare, to showing oppressive, corrupt, exploitive and undemocratic governments how to defeat the guerrillas who were seeking to generate an insurgency against such governments.

"In other words, the primary purpose of the Center was no longer to help people to learn how to fight wars of national liberation through unconventional warfare. The purpose of the Center had become, for the most part, one of helping various authoritarian governments to learn how to use unconventional methods to suppress wars of national liberation.

"Every struggle for national liberation involving a people oppressed by a client of the United States required a response of US-supported programs of counterinsurgency against these cadres of the alleged, world-wide communist conspiracy. When the threat of communism began to crumble, along with the Berlin Wall and the former Soviet Union, then the policy of counterinsurgency was transformed into a policy of counter-terrorism in order to contain the world-wide conspiracy of terrorists and their sponsoring states.

"Counterinsurgency became counter-terrorism in order to take advantage of changing circumstances in the world. Because of events during the last eight or nine years, the 'label' communism no longer evokes the same kind of blind fear it once did during the era of the Red scare, so a new term had to be employed that would re-ignite the same sort of blind fear which could be used to manipulate the American public.

"Thus, the issue of terrorism was seized on. Where, once, the United States used policies of counterinsurgency to defend the free world against the hordes of communists, now, the United States, through policies of counter-terrorism, could defend the free world against the hordes of pathological malcontents known as terrorists.

"Consequently, anyone who objected to the exploitive, oppressive, and undemocratic policies of either the United States or its client states, now were more likely to be labeled as terrorists rather than communists, although, on occasion, the insurgents might be called both. In either case, in order to maintain the status quo of American influence and control, such rebels had to be controlled or eliminated through the use of unconventional measures of warfare.

"Sometimes, Special Forces Mobile Training Teams would be sent into the field to serve as advisors to, as well as instructors for, the military and police forces of foreign governments who were serving American interests. Sometimes, members of the military and police from these countries would be sent to the Psychological Warfare Center, or to the Pentagon's School of the Americas in Panama, or to Fort Benning's program on counter-terrorism, for training.

"In any event, one of the central precepts taught by many of these instructors of counter-terrorism and counterinsurgency was the importance of creating local paramilitary groups. These groups would serve as a counter-organization to local guerrillas.

"Furthermore, considerable stress was laid on recruiting certain kinds of people to these paramilitary organizations. More specifically, the recruits should be those individuals who, for 'reasons' of class, religion, ethnicity, tribe or race, harbored considerable hatred for the people who would become their targets.

"The slaughter, by Christian Phalange, of two to three thousand Palestinian refugees in the Sabra-Shatila camps, including many women and children, is a thoroughly repulsive example of this policy in action. Most regrettably, this same policy has been implemented in many other parts of the world by the US and its client states.

"The focus of this policy was always to be 'soft' targets of opportunity. In other words, instead of going head to head with armed guerrilla groups, these paramilitary counter-terrorist organizations were taught to attack defenseless civilians, especially those who were struggling to implement programs of social justice and human rights that would benefit the poor people of a given region.

"Such attacks were not just because there were civilians who were working toward goals considered to be antithetical to various American interests. The brutalization of these civilians would become the object lesson in terror for the edification of other civilians.

"In other words, to defeat an enemy, one doesn't have to engage in direct, high-intensity, high-risk conflict with the military forces of that enemy, whether these forces be in the form of guerrilla groups or a standing national army. All one has to do is to attack the civilians of a region through low-intensity, low-risk terrorist operations.

"When, as a result of their fear of such terrorist operations, civilians become submissive and pliant, imposing one's will on the region becomes much, much easier. Without the support and assistance of many aspects of the civilian population, guerrilla organizations have considerable difficulty in maintaining themselves and conducting viable campaigns of insurgency against the existing government.

"This approach has been employed by the U. S. and its client states with great success, at least for the short run, in many parts of the world, including Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Far East. In fact, this terrorist model of foreign policy is really nothing more than an updated, technologically refined, exported version of a domestic product that had been developed in America during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries with respect to the Native peoples of North America."

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