EDITORIAL Its time for a good national confession
It is deeply established in Catholic
moral theology that grave sin calls for the sacrament of reconciliation. The
fundamental components are well known: contrition, confession, reparation for
sins. The sin must be named. We must be sorry for the sin. We must make
disclosure of what we have done. Finally, we must redress, to the extent
possible, the wrong we have committed.
The contemporary world has developed a similar technique for
seeking and extending forgiveness, the truth commission. South Africas
Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for instance, offers pardon to those who
confess in full. Truth commissions in El Salvador and Guatemala, likewise, are
helping victims to heal, uncovering evidence to document the awful events of
past decades so that the memory of those years is not lost to new generations.
Truth commissions are at work in Nigeria, Panama, Sierra Leone and East Timor.
Peru and Indonesia will soon follow, and there is pressure for commissions in
Mexico, Bosnia, Serbia, Ghana and Burundi. Canada is concerned about the way it
has treated native peoples and may use a committee to air the subject.
In his column on page 19, Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan, who as a
member of Congress at the time persistently opposed the Vietnam War, writes,
Vietnam can never be forgotten. It will rise up in our souls at
unexpected times and in unpredictable ways.
That warning would stand for other U.S. ventures in other lands.
In many cases where truth commissions have occurred, the missing partner has
been the United States. We have trained soldiers, conspired to overthrow
elected rulers, aided and abetted torture and assassination, have been
complicit in exploitation of indigenous populations. Yet we remain
unaccountable. We get to go home. We get to forget.
But all of these things will indeed rise up, not only in our souls
in unexpected times and ways, but also in the souls of those who have been the
victims of our actions.
It is time we take a lesson from those in the developing world who
have faced incredibly ugly moments of their past as a way to a healthier
future. It is time for a U.S. truth commission, to open the countless
intelligence community and State Department files detailing U.S. activities
during the past half century.
The United States is remarkably adverse to any such suggestions.
While we in this country fully support international tribunals for others, we
have resisted all attempts to be held accountable by any international bodies.
The United States is not the only developed power in need of some serious truth
telling. Europes colonial powers and Japan could benefit from this
remarkable new element of democratic governance.
Some items to consider
The following are some items, hardly an exhaustive list, the
United States might consider:
In Nicaragua in 1979, the CIA moved to save Somozas National
Guard, which had slaughtered some 40,000 Nicaraguans. The United States flew
Somozas troops in planes disguised with Red Cross markings to Honduras
where they were supplied with sophisticated arms and supplies and reconstituted
as a terrorist force under the direction of Argentine neo-Nazis. In subsequent
years there followed the Sandinista revolution, the overthrow of control by the
Somoza family, all resisted by the United States in a variety of ways, and the
U.S. funding of the contra forces aimed at thwarting the revolution. The
International Court of Justice ultimately found the United States guilty of
mining Nicaraguas harbors. In violation of our treaty obligations, we
refused to acknowledge the verdict.
Unfortunately, the events in Nicaragua were not isolated. A 1964
CIA secret report, published by The New York Times in June of last year,
describes the 1953 overthrow in Iran of the democratically elected and
modernizing Premier Mossadeq in an operation planned and executed by the
CIA and the British SIS. The CIAs Kermit Roosevelt went to Iran to
coordinate the army revolt. Mossadeq had done what he was entitled to do under
international law. He nationalized oil.
The overthrow of Mossadeq resulted in popular unrest that led to
the Ayatollah Khomeini dictatorship, which, in November 1979, seized the U.S.
embassy and took 62 Americans hostage. It was a period of massive terrorism. By
Amnesty International count, the Iranian government assassinated 2,946
opponents in the year 1991 alone.
In 1964, it was Brazils turn. We collaborated actively with
the military plotters who overthrew the democratic regime of President
Joào Goulart, because of his commitment to socially progressive reforms.
The result: more than two decades of a military dictatorship that
institutionalized torture, disappeared tens of thousands of
citizens and wiped out institutions that shield the citizen from the state --
labor unions, womens associations, political parties. Its fear of
grassroots organizing led to persecution of Christian base communities. Bishop
Helder Câmara was declared a non-person and denied access to the written
and electronic media.
Chile was the most evolved pluralist democracy in South America in
1969 when it elected Salvador Allende president. Sen. Jesse Helms put in
writing the conclusions of an Oval Office meeting he attended along with
President Nixon, Donald Kendall, president of Pepsi Cola, David Rockefeller of
Chase Manhattan and CIA director Richard Helms. Not concerned risks
involved. No involvement of embassy. $10 million available, more if necessary.
Full-time job-best men we have
Make the economy scream. 48 hours for
plan of action.
A September 1970 cable from CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.,
declassified last year, set out a strategy of destabilization, kidnapping and
assassination designed to provoke a military coup in Chile. It included the
incredible statement: Discredit parliamentary solution. This echoed
a statement of Henry Kissinger, who was masterminding the conspiracy, about the
same time: I see no reason why a country should be allowed to go
communist due to the irresponsibility of its people.
So solid was the Chilean tradition of an apolitical military that
René Schneider, Chilean commander in chief, had to be assassinated as a
first step. Three more years of dirty tricks were needed to engineer a putsch
that produced a 17-year military dictatorship. Pinochets first 19 days
registered 320 summary executions, including poet Victor Jara, and two U.S.
citizens, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman. Under Pinochets misrule some
130,000 Chileans were arrested, and 3,100 were murdered or disappeared.
Pinochet was the dominant figure in Operation Condor, an
international instrument of cross-border assassination, abduction, torture and
intimidation linking the secret police forces of Chile, Paraguay and Argentina.
Condor teams eliminated hundreds of leading opponents of regimes in those
countries, including Orlando Letelier and U.S. citizen Ronni Moffitt in
Washington, Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires and Bernardo Leighton in Italy.
The Truth Commission established under the auspices of the United
Nations in 1993 to determine violations of human rights during El
Salvadors long civil war found: The military were plainly the main
perpetrators of massacres, executions, torture, and kidnappings
premeditated and ideologically inspired decisions to kill.
This is the military to whom the United States had given at least
$6 billion in arms, supplies and training. We ignored Archbishop Oscar
Romeros plea that this aid will surely increase injustice here and
sharpen the repression that has been unleashed against the peoples
organizations fighting to defend their most fundamental human rights. To
our lasting shame, Congress accepted President Reagans paranoid argument:
In El Salvador terrorists with outside support aim at all Central
America, later South America, and, Im sure, eventually North
America.
We knew the facts
We knew the facts at the time. For six successive years in the
1980s the annual human rights report of the Council on Hemispheric Relations
repeated those facts: El Salvador and Guatemala are the only two
governments that abducted, killed and tortured their political opponents on a
systematic and widespread basis. In those years, they killed 150,000 and
created several million refugees. Secret reports now available document that we
knew of these barbarities.
A 1999 United Nations Truth Commission report on Guatemalas
36-year civil war termed the assault against the population, particularly
Mayans, genocide and highlighted the United States support
for a string of brutal dictators, its use of the CIA to aid the Guatemalan
military and its training of Guatemalan army officers in counterinsurgency
tactics as elements contributing to widespread torture and death.
The report pinned more than 90 percent of the atrocities on the
army and its death squads. More than 200,000 people in Guatemala were killed or
disappeared. Another million or more became internal refugees as a result of
the brutality.
U.S. intervention in Vietnam was marked by massive violations of
human rights. The 1968 My Lai massacre is on the judicial record. Charges are
well documented that Richard Nixon in 1968 persuaded the South Vietnam leaders
to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations by assuring them that an incoming
Republican president would give them a better deal that the Democratic
incumbent. Four years later, Nixon ended the war on the same terms. In the
meantime, 60,000 Americans and an unknown number of Vietnamese, Cambodians and
Laotians lost their lives. Agent Orange, the aftereffects of which continue
today in children born without brains or spines, rendered much of the country
infertile, perhaps permanently.
What good does it do to look at the dark side of our national
history, a side that is rarely approached? As citizens, we have become numb to
what is being done in our name. We unquestioningly accept the language of
military solutions and the rationale of national interest. Others, however, see
matters differently. Those who feel the brunt of our policies often wonder how
we can justify such brutal actions with the noble language of our founding
documents. Those who are going through the painful walk through their own
recent history wonder how we can ignore our own role in these sad episodes.
As the awareness of those who have felt the effects of our actions
increases, our own credibility crumbles.
Confession, as they say, is good for the soul, and that goes, as
well, for a nations soul. Were long overdue for a good
confession.
National Catholic Reporter, June 15,
2001
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