By Peter Bright | Ars Technica
The New York Times is reporting that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has recently been at a secret meeting with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen to discuss topics including the two companies' mutual competitor, Apple.
The Times says that the companies were investigating ways to partner in order to do battle with Apple. One option was for Microsoft to acquire Adobe, a claim that has seen Adobe's stock price surge by more than 10 percent.
Microsoft is thought to have investigated buying Adobe some years ago, but abandoned the idea with the expectation of running into new antitrust problems. With Apple and Google now such strong competitors, such a purchase may now be a viable option. Regardless of the legal difficulties, a partnership—and, indeed, a Microsoft purchase—makes sense.
The common enemy
Apple's increasing importance in the mobile space with its trio of iOS devices: the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, is a growing threat to both companies. Adobe and Apple butt heads in a number of markets. The two companies have competing software (Adobe's Lightroom and Premiere go up against Apple's Aperture and Final Cut Studio, for example), and more significantly, Apple is attacking a key Adobe product: Flash.
iOS devices have no Flash support in their browsers, so can't run Flash ads or any other Flash content on webpages. Apple has been advocating the use of HTML5, with its video and interactivity capabilities, as an alternative. Given the dominance of Flash in advertising, this is a big blow to Adobe. Apple then stepped up the pressure on Adobe with the launch earlier this year of iAds—rich, Flash-like ads built using HTML5.
Microsoft's difficulties in the mobile space—both phones and tablets—are well-known. The tablet problem is probably more serious; though Microsoft would like to have a piece of the smartphone market, it is tablets that threaten PC sales, and hence Windows. There is already some suggestion that iPad sales are denting netbook sales, and this is a trend that Microsoft could be badly hurt by. At the very least, it would substantially diminish home PC sales; ultimately, it could threaten corporate computer purchases too.
Apple's anti-Flash stance also indirectly threatens Microsoft. Redmond's relationship with HTML5 is a difficult one. On the one hand, the Internet Explorer team is making a considerable effort to make Internet Explorer 9 a modern browser with good support for new Web technology. That team, at least, is serious about HTML5.
On the other hand, Microsoft is also investing in its own Flash competitor, Silverlight, which it introduced in 2007 with great fanfare. Like Flash, Silverlight is a browser plugin that allows the creation of rich, interactive Web applications, and like Flash, it includes a range of media features not available to HTML5, such as DRM-protection of video streams. HTML5 threatens Silverlight in much the same way as it threatens Flash.
HTML5 also raises Microsoft's long-standing fear about the Web: that it would become a platform in its own right and displace the Windows PC. It is this fear that led to the development of Internet Explorer and the first browser war; Microsoft doesn't want the Web to be a platform, but if it must be one, it should be a Microsoft-powered Web accessed through a Microsoft browser on a Microsoft operating system.
Microsoft and Adobe do compete on a number of fronts. Silverlight and Flash, and ASP.NET and ColdFusion, are the two main areas of opposition. However, in practice, even in these competitive areas, the companies' respective products have carved out their own niches, and neither is threatening to completely demolish the other. Apple's stance towards Flash—get rid of it, use HTML5—is far more dangerous to Flash, and far more vigorously pursued, than Microsoft's stance—use this other browser plugin instead.
Collaboration and cooperation
Having a common enemy isn't enough to justify working together, of course. There needs to be some practical benefit to cooperation: something that strengthens both Microsoft and Adobe against the Apple threat.
The most obvious, immediate thing that the two companies can do is to get Flash ported to Windows Phone 7. Early signs are that Windows Phone 7's Web browser is surprisingly fast and capable, but one thing it isn't is HTML5-aware. If the phone operating system is successful, there will be a substantial growth in smartphones that are, at least for the time being, not HTML5-capable.
Such phones are crying out for Flash compatibility. There are certainly hurdles to achieving this—not least of which is the current requirement that all Windows Phone 7 software be written using .NET code—but they are by no means insurmountable. For example, Microsoft could simply bundle Flash with the phone operating system, and in so doing obviate the need for Flash to be written in C#.
The two companies could even go for something more exotic: make it possible to create Windows Phone 7 programs directly in Flash. The latest Flash version, CS 5, has the ability to produce iPhone applications. Apple originally planned to ban such applications, but has since relented. A similar capability could be readily built to produce Windows Phone 7 software.
Microsoft is already doing its best to court developers to attract them to its phone platform, with high-quality development tools that leverage the .NET technology that's already familiar to many. Flash development would similarly open the platform up to a large number of developers, letting them use technology they're already familiar and comfortable with.
There are technical things that the companies can work on, too, to improve the use of plugins in the desktop browsers. Google and Adobe are already cooperating to produce a better plugin interface to enable greater performance and stability for Flash in Chrome, and Chrome now bundles Flash. Taking a similar tack with Internet Explorer would further strengthen Flash's position on the desktop, again countering the forces of HTML5.
Or an outright purchase
Microsoft could afford Adobe, no doubt about that. Hell, Microsoft could afford to buy Adobe with petty cash; we're only talking $15 billion here. The relative size of the two companies means that the offer doesn't even have to appeal to Adobe, particularly: Microsoft can buy the company whether it likes it or not; as such, the question is not what Microsoft has to offer Adobe, only what Adobe has to offer Microsoft. Such a purchase would significantly strengthen Microsoft's software line-up. Redmond has virtually no creative/artistic software; though the company has dabbled in this area in the past, its only real creative software is the Expression Design vector graphics package.
The corporate cultures of the two companies are likely to be radically different, a product of their vastly different target audiences. As such, it's hard to see Adobe being anything other than a wholly-owned subsidiary, at least initially. Attempting to integrate it into the broader Microsoft organization would likely be no more successful than Microsoft's Danger purchase.
Software...
Apple has had a lot of success with its creative software, both at the high end (Final Cut Studio, Aperture, Logic Studio) and the low end (iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand). An Adobe purchase would let Microsoft tackle these markets in the same way; Adobe's technology would provide a substantial upgrade to programs like Windows Live Photo Gallery and Windows Live Movie Maker, as well as opening up the possibility of upsells to the full products like Lightroom and Premiere. A hypothetical "Windows Live Photoshop Elements" would be a great addition to the line-up, too.
Bolstering the Windows Live line-up makes Windows a much nicer platform. The iLife suite is a tough act to follow, and though Windows Live Essentials is trying to compete in this area, the iLife applications are quite a bit more polished. Buying Adobe would let Microsoft simultaneously broaden the appeal of the Essentials with new programs, and raise the quality bar.
Software with more of an overlap with existing products may be a little more difficult to deal with. Adobe's Dreamweaver Web authoring software is on balance better than Expression Web, so it would seem natural to replace the latter with the former. ColdFusion would be tricky, and it's hard to see how it would survive such an acquisition; though it has its fans, and offers features that ASP.NET does not, it's probably too similar to justify continuing to develop and support both products; one can imagine it would be cut loose in such a purchase.
Though the same would in some senses be true of Flash (and related technologies, Flex and AIR)—it has massive overlap with Silverlight—it's too important to be let go in this way. Instead, consolidation—allowing the Flash software to produce applications that will run on Silverlight or Windows Phone 7—would be the way to go.
It would also be good to see Microsoft's secure coding practices applied to Adobe's software. If nothing else, the teams developing Reader and Flash need a bit of help.
... and Style
Beyond the software, Adobe would bring a very different kind of customer to Microsoft. Adobe has strong links with the creative and design communities, communities that have, frankly, reviled Microsoft for decades. I would argue that the current generation of Adobe software shows a stronger sense of aesthetics than is generally true of Microsoft's output, and that's in no small part down to the community that Adobe serves—giving designers a suite of ugly, clunky software is not a winning move. It would be nice for this sense of aesthetics to permeate Microsoft.
Microsoft traditionally has been very good at producing software for developers, but its efforts to appeal to designers have been less effective. It has started making moves in the right direction with Expression Blend, but it's still in many ways a developer-oriented company. The Expression range of software does have some interoperability with Adobe software (Expression Blend can open Adobe Photoshop mockups, for example), as an acknowledgement of the importance of Adobe's software in the design world.
By bringing this design-oriented, creative software in-house, Redmond would be able to offer an end-to-end solution for designing great-looking applications, from Illustrator and Photoshop mock-ups, to Expression Blend or Expression Web/Dreamweaver designs, to Visual Studio application development. If the company could make this kind of workflow work better—without alienating designers—it could prove to be extremely attractive to both Web and phone developers.
Microsoft hasn't cared too much about design in the past, but that's no longer the case with Windows Phone 7. Strong design is key to the new platform; it ties it together to make it feel like a coherent whole, in a way that simply doesn't happen on desktop Windows. Appealing to designers hasn't mattered in the past. These days, it does.
Stumbling blocks
An Adobe purchase does pose quite a few issues. Antitrust is the obvious biggest problem. Regulators might not like to give Microsoft control over Flash, and would be certainly be concerned about what such a takeover would mean for Adobe's Apple software. Microsoft does develop Office for Mac, but this is a bastard product that's not actually a version of Office for Mac OS X, but rather a completely separate set of software that happens to share the same file formats as the Windows software. It looks different, it works differently, it does different things, it is written by different people, and it is released on a different schedule.
This allows Microsoft to continue to "support" Apple's platform, while still keeping it at a disadvantage relative to Windows. The company gets the best of both worlds; Office for Mac is believed to be profitable in its own right, Microsoft gets to say to regulators "See? We do care about other platforms!" and yet, simultaneously, Microsoft manages to keep Mac OS X inferior to Windows in a manner that's important to corporations. It has Office, but it's not the real Office—so companies are going to stick with Windows.
This is not the case with Adobe's software; Photoshop for Mac OS X is a first-class citizen, on an equal footing with the Windows version. Any work done to improve Photoshop strengthens Microsoft's rival just as much as it does Windows. As such, killing the Mac OS X versions would plainly hold some appeal to Redmond. If Photoshop and related products were not so dominant on Mac OS X then it might not matter, but the fact is that it would kneecap Macs. Those creative sales are still important to Apple, and their loss would be quite a blow to the Mac platform, if not Apple as a whole. Until Apple comes out with its own Photoshop competitor, this is a situation unlikely to change.
The close work between Adobe and Google over Flash likely wouldn't withstand such a purchase, either. Adobe and Google don't compete, making it easy for the two to cooperate, but Google and Microsoft are not so friendly with one another.
Adobe's other major technology, PDF, would be another sticky issue. Microsoft has devised its own PDF alternative, XPS, and though this has not set the world on fire, it's sufficiently integrated into Windows now that the company is stuck with it. PDF, obviously, is enormously entrenched. There would be a concern that Microsoft might favor XPS over PDF, to the detriment of everyone not using XPS (which is to say, everyone). Countering that is the fact that various versions of PDF are ISO standards anyway; Adobe has ceded absolute control over the specification, so there may not be too much that Microsoft could do to hurt it.
Partnership, yes. Purchase, doubtful
Microsoft partnering with Adobe is something of a no-brainer. In spite of the differences between the two companies, working together, especially on Windows Phone 7, will be valuable to both. Bringing Flash to Windows Phone 7, both in the browser and as an application development tool, would be win-win, and I would be surprised if this did not happen eventually.
As for buying Adobe? I think a good case can be made. It rounds out Microsoft's software offerings, giving the company access to a market that it currently virtually ignores, and though it wouldn't happen overnight, gradual integration of the two companies' product lines would enhance Windows and Windows Phone in many ways. Microsoft is not the dominant monopoly it once was, but regulators might well be reluctant to let the company buy the dominant producer of painting, drawing, and desktop publishing software, especially when so many of its customers don't use Windows.
And it's these monopoly concerns that I think will be enough to prevent the companies from even trying to engineer a takeover. The purchase would make sense for Microsoft, but the chances of it ever being approved are slim to none.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The ties that bind at the Federal Reserve
NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - To the outside world, the Federal Reserve is an impenetrable fortress. But former employees and big investors are privy to some of its secrets -- and that access can be lucrative.
On August 19, just nine days after the U.S. central bank surprised financial markets by deciding to buy more bonds to support a flagging economy, former Fed governor Larry Meyer sent a note to clients of his consulting firm with a breakdown of the policy-setting meeting.
The minutes from that same gathering of the powerful Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC, are made available to the public -- but only after a three-week lag. So Meyer's clients were provided with a glimpse into what the Fed was thinking well ahead of other investors.
His note cited the views of "most members" and "many members" as he detailed increasingly sharp divisions among the officials who determine the nation's monetary policy.
The inside scoop, which explained how rising mortgage prepayments had prompted renewed central bank action, was simply too detailed to have come from anywhere but the Fed.
A respected economist, Meyer charges clients around $75,000 for his product, which includes a popular forecasting service. He frequently shares his research with reporters, though he kept this note out of the public eye. Reuters obtained a copy from a market source. Meyer declined to comment for this story, as did the Federal Reserve.
By necessity, the Fed spends a considerable amount of time talking to investment managers, bank economists and market strategists. Doing so helps it gather intelligence about the market and the economy that is invaluable in informing the bank's decisions on borrowing costs and lending programs.
But a Reuters investigation has found that the information flow sometimes goes both ways as Fed officials let their guard down with former colleagues and other close private sector contacts.
This selective dissemination of information gives big investors a competitive edge in the market. In the past, Fed officials themselves have privately expressed discomfort about the cozy ties between the central bank and consultants to big investors, though their concerns have largely fallen on deaf ears.
No one is accusing Meyer and his firm, Macroeconomic Advisers -- or any other purveyors of Fed insights for that matter -- of wrongdoing. They are not prohibited from sharing such information with their hedge fund and money manager clients.
But critics question whether it is proper for Fed officials to parcel out details that have the potential to move markets around the world, especially with the government's involvement in the economy being so pronounced.
"It's certainly not what Fed officials should be doing," said Alice Rivlin, a former Fed governor and now a fellow at the Brookings Institute think tank. "The rules when I was there were you don't talk to anybody about anything that could be used for commercial purposes."
In an effort to counter concerns about close ties between business and government, U.S. President Barack Obama issued an "ethics pledge" that forbids appointees of his administration from contacting the agencies they worked under for at least two years after leaving.
But such measures are tough to enforce. And in the case of the Fed's Washington-based board, governors are allowed to transition directly into a banking sector job immediately after they leave the central bank, though they must first serve out a rather lengthy 14-year term, which many do not.
"COLOR" IN GRAY AREA
Against the backdrop of today's shaky recovery and the Fed's efforts to provide ongoing support to growth, information about what central bank officials agree or disagree on can be even more valuable than usual.
Haag Sherman, chief investment officer of Salient Partners, a Houston-based money management firm that oversees around $8 billion in assets, says even the slightest hint of the possible direction of policy can give investors a huge leg up.
"The fact is that government today is driving the markets more than any time in recent history and having insight into near-term and long-term plans provides a money manager with a significant competitive advantage," Sherman said.
Markets have been particularly sensitive to Fed policy in recent months as renewed weakness in the economy sparked widespread speculation that the central bank would try to ease borrowing conditions further, probably by ramping up its purchases of U.S. government bonds.
By adding to the over $1.7 trillion in such purchases undertaken in response to the financial crisis so far, the Federal Reserve would be providing further incentives for banks to lend and consumers to borrow -- despite the fact that official interest rates are already effectively at zero.
In his note, Meyer said many Fed officials hadn't found out about the pace of mortgage prepayments -- which meant the central bank's support for the economy was ebbing -- until just before the August 10 meeting.
"For a few members, it was too late to affect their decisions; for others it was a very important factor, even the most influential factor," wrote Meyer. "Shouldn't the FOMC at least have a neutral balance sheet policy given the weaker outlook? This was obvious to the doves, persuasive to the center, but not the hawks."
Fed-watching, of course, has long been a cottage industry, albeit a fairly wealthy one. Investors are constantly looking for clues about what officials may or may not be thinking, parsing their language much like Kremlinologists of yore. And markets can jump at the first whiff of a change in tone.
For example, five days after Meyer's note, the Wall Street Journal published a more detailed account of the divisions on the Fed's policy-setting committee. The newspaper report was credited with moving bond yields 0.20 percentage point, a relatively steep decrease.
Small wonder that large funds are willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars a year to receive "color" -- as investors refer to the useful tidbits that plugged-in consultants supply.
The precise number of former Federal Reserve employees tapping their network of old colleagues can't be determined, but by most accounts they are a sizable group.
"The revolving door between the Fed and the private financial sector is quite significant," said Timothy Canova, professor of international economic law at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, California.
There is no required registration process for economic and monetary policy consultants, former Fed lawyers say.
Some especially high-profile former Fed officials now have their own shops, too: Former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's Greenspan Associates offers policy consulting to Pimco, the world's biggest bond fund.
"THREE BIG FEDDIES"
Though rarer, access is sometimes also bestowed upon outsiders. Paul Markowski, a China expert who counts hedge funds and foreign central banks among his consulting clients, has never worked at the Fed but says his relationships with officials there date back to the 1960s. For him, he says, it's a question of knowing the individuals on the committee well enough to understand their sometimes cryptic signals.
"You have to establish a relationship over time. If you go and see someone once or twice you are not going to be able to read what they are saying to you properly," he said. "They look at me, for one, as someone who has deep relations with the financial markets. It's a two-way street."
On the same day as the Fed's eventful August meeting, Markowski wrote to his clients:
"While I thought they could hold off doing what they did, a senior Fed official told me that after measuring the risk of doing nothing they had little to lose and more to gain."
On Friday, September 24, three days after the September 21 meeting, he described a string of conversations with "three big Feddies."
Earlier in the year, just a day after the April 27-28 gathering, Markowski offered clients the type of material that, if true, went beyond anything even the minutes from the meeting would offer three weeks later:
"I had two interesting phone conversations with senior Fed officials -- one last night and another this morning. What I heard was that going into the meeting the staff were split 50:50 as to the recommendation on rates; there were 6 members who favored some change in the asset sales issue and 3-4 who favored changing (the Fed's commitment to keep rates low for an extended period), with another 1-3 suggesting putting the change off to the next meeting."
QUID PRO QUO
Of course, speaking to one or two officials at the central bank does not necessarily provide the full story, especially at a time when policymakers diverge on key issues such as the outlook for the economy and appropriate policy actions.
Niche analysts may also have a vested interest in exaggerating the extent of their access -- it makes their offering all the more enticing.
Some investors point out that markets are inherently volatile, and inklings into the broad contours of policy do not necessarily translate into an obvious short-term trading strategy.
"Having this information from the Fed would be beneficial only if you understood what the effects of what the Fed is doing might be," said Joseph Calhoun, strategist at Alhambra Investments in Miami.
Even those who seem to be in the know are not always right: both Meyer and Markowski called the August 10 meeting wrong, thinking the Fed would hold pat when it in fact chose to provide additional stimulus.
But Canova, the Chapman law professor, says the immediate investment value of the information is not the main issue. For him, the backroom exchanges are part of a bigger problem of financial industry influence over economic decision-making.
"This is one of many quid pro quos in a system of opaque subsidies," Canova said. "It seems to me naive to think private investors would routinely share proprietary information without any legal obligation or subpoena unless they were getting some tangible benefits in return."
A DIFFERENT COMMUNICATIONS CHALLENGE
Over the past two decades, the Fed has become much more transparent than it once was. In the 1990s, it began releasing the results of its interest rate decisions and minutes of its policy meetings, as well as transcripts of those gatherings with a five-year lag.
Yet as institutions go, the Fed is hardly a paragon of openness. Chairman Ben Bernanke seldom speaks to the press on the record. When he does, it is often during well-orchestrated, pre-vetted events. During the financial crisis, Fed lending to troubled financial institutions, including the infamous rescues of AIG and Bear Stearns, was done hurriedly and behind closed doors, fostering public suspicion and political ire.
The Fed's opaque communications structure makes it easy for markets to misinterpret the rather terse policy statements released after each meeting, adding to the demand for kernels of wisdom about their decisions.
The pitfalls of the Fed's communication strategy were highlighted by the August 10 meeting. Just a few weeks earlier, Bernanke had spent the bulk of his testimony to Congress discussing the central bank's eventual exit from its ultra-accomodative policies. And the Fed had done little to explain to markets the link between the economic outlook and the size of its balance sheet.
For many investors, therefore, the policy pivot on August 10 -- the decision to buy more bonds -- came out of the blue. Markets broadly took the Fed's move as a significant shift toward more support for the economy. Some market participants also interpreted it as a sign the Fed was more worried about the economy than it was letting on.
When its policymakers are on the same page, the Fed often has no trouble making its position known following its FOMC meetings. But when policymakers disagree, as has been the case recently, the cacophony of voices can merely confuse markets.
That may be one reason Fed officials feel the need to help investors better understand the public statements they make.
Other central banks around the world try to avoid such risks by taking a different approach. Some strip away some of the mystery around policy by stipulating a specific inflation target. The European Central Bank holds a press conference after its key meetings that gives its president, Jean-Claude Trichet, a chance to explain the reasoning behind its actions in a public forum.
"If Bernanke can't stop the leaks he ought to have a full press conference after the meeting. It's inappropriate for certain people to gain an advantage on information from the Fed," said Ernest Patrikis, a former No. 2 official at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and now a partner at law firm White & Case.
CLUB FED
For the U.S. Federal Reserve, the willingness to share market-sensitive information may reflect the institution's history and culture. Critics have long argued that the central bank has been too close to the financial industry.
The Fed was established in 1913, in part as a response to the panic of 1907, by bankers who wanted a lender of last resort to help prevent frequent runs on the nation's financial institutions.
Bankers still serve on boards of directors of regional Fed banks and former Fed staffers are hotly sought after on Wall Street and in the investment community.
Meyer founded his consulting firm, then called Laurence H. Meyer and Associates Ltd, before joining the Fed in 1996. When he left the Fed in 2002, he returned to his firm, now called Macroeconomic Advisers.
Another example is Susan Bies, who retired from the Fed's board in 2007, and took a job on the board of Bank of America in 2009. A number of chief economists at top U.S. banks at some point have also held staff positions at the Fed.
Going the other way, William Dudley, head of the powerful New York Federal Reserve Bank, was the chief economist at Goldman Sachs and a partner at the firm.
Critics say this revolving door structure makes it difficult for Fed staffers to be disciplined in not inadvertently revealing too much in conversations with old colleagues and friends.
Fed board staffers who retire even get to keep their pass for the central bank's building, which boasts fitness facilities, a barber and a dining room.
Though their identification badges designate their "retired" status, they are not restricted to where they can go once inside the building -- even if they now work in the private sector.
Nowhere is the sense of cliquish old-world camaraderie more evident than at the Fed's annual gathering for world central bankers in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Receiving an invitation to the exclusive event is no small feat, and economists take pains to get themselves on the short list. Being there means face time with Fed officials in an informal setting -- and more importantly, a stamp of legitimacy that is difficult to put a price tag on.
This year's conference, held in late August, featured not only panels on monetary policy and a string of speeches from leading central bankers and academics, but also an unusual evening excursion to watch a horse-whisperer tame a wild stallion.
"Too often, the Federal Reserve believes that rules do not apply to them," said Sherman at Salient Partners. "If we allow some to have access, then how are we different than those that follow 'crony capitalism' in the Third World?"
The Very Dark Side of U.S. History
Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and "liberty" around the world. When the United States inflicts unnecessary death and destruction, it's viewed as a mistake or an aberration.
By Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on October 9, 2010
In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an "aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side."
There is a dark -- seldom acknowledged -- thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.
This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.
The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.
Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.
But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."
Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of "total war" -- which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.
In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terror tactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspecting Indians at a peaceful encampment:
Yet, in the 1860s, many whites in Colorado saw the slaughter as the only realistic way to bring peace, just as Sherman viewed his "march to the sea" as necessary to force the South's surrender.
The brutal tactics in the West also helped clear the way for the transcontinental railroad, built fortunes for favored businessmen and consolidated Republican political power for more than six decades, until the Great Depression of the 1930s. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Indian Genocide and Republican Power."]
Four years after the Civil War, Sherman became commanding general of the Army and incorporated the Indian pacification strategies -- as well as his own tactics -- into U.S. military doctrine. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had led Indian wars in the Missouri territory, succeeded Sherman in 1883 and further entrenched those strategies as policy. [See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide.]
By the end of the 19th Century, the Native American warriors had been vanquished, but the Army's winning strategies lived on.
Imperial America
When the United States claimed the Philippines as a prize in the Spanish-American War, Filipino insurgents resisted. In 1900, the U.S. commander, Gen. J. Franklin Bell, consciously modeled his brutal counterinsurgency campaign after the Indian wars and Sherman's "march to the sea."
Bell believed that by punishing the wealthier Filipinos through destruction of their homes -- much as Sherman had done in the South -- they would be coerced into helping convince their countrymen to submit.
Learning from the Indian wars, he also isolated the guerrillas by forcing Filipinos into tightly controlled zones where schools were built and other social amenities were provided.
"The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps," wrote historian Stuart Creighton Miller. "Bell's main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes. … Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes." [See Miller's "Benevolent Assimilation."]
For those outside the protected areas, there was terror. A supportive news correspondent described one scene in which American soldiers killed "men, women, children … from lads of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog:
In 1901, anti-imperialists in Congress exposed and denounced Bell's brutal tactics. Nevertheless, Bell's strategies won military acclaim as a refined method of pacification.
In a 1973 book, one pro-Bell military historian, John Morgan Gates, termed reports of U.S. atrocities "exaggerated" and hailed Bell's "excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification."
Gates recalled that Bell's campaign in Batanga was regarded by military strategists as "pacification in its most perfected form." [See Gates's Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902.]
Spreading the Word
At the turn of the century, the methodology of pacification was a hot topic among the European colonial powers, too. From Namibia to Indochina, Europeans struggled to subdue local populations.
Often outright slaughter proved effective, as the Germans demonstrated with massacres of the Herrero tribe in Namibia from 1904-1907. But military strategists often compared notes about more subtle techniques of targeted terror mixed with demonstrations of benevolence.
Counterinsurgency strategies were back in vogue after World War II as many subjugated people demanded independence from colonial rule and Washington worried about the expansion of communism. In the 1950s, the Huk rebellion against U.S. dominance made the Philippines again the laboratory, with Bell's earlier lessons clearly remembered.
"The campaign against the Huk movement in the Philippines … greatly resembled the American campaign of almost 50 years earlier," historian Gates observed. "The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one."
But the war against the Huks had some new wrinkles, particularly the modern concept of psychological warfare or psy-war.
Under the pioneering strategies of the CIA's Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, psy-war was a new spin to the old game of breaking the will of a target population. The idea was to analyze the psychological weaknesses of a people and develop "themes" that could induce actions favorable to those carrying out the operation.
While psy-war included propaganda and disinformation, it also relied on terror tactics of a demonstrative nature. An Army psy-war pamphlet, drawing on Lansdale's experience in the Philippines, advocated "exemplary criminal violence -- the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies," according to Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.
In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war trick used against the Huks who were considered superstitious and fearful of a vampire-like creature called an asuang.
"The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks," Lansdale wrote. "When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man on the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.
"The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy," explained one pro-U.S. Filipino colonel. "Almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano's Nenita Unit. [See Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines.]
On to Vietnam
The successful suppression of the Huks led the war's architects to share their lessons elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counterinsurgency and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam with Lansdale.
Following the Philippine model, Vietnamese were crowded into "strategic hamlets"; "free-fire zones" were declared with homes and crops destroyed; and the Phoenix program eliminated thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadre.
The ruthless strategies were absorbed and accepted even by widely respected military figures, such as Gen. Colin Powell who served two tours in Vietnam and endorsed the routine practice of murdering Vietnamese males as a necessary part of the counterinsurgency effort.
"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote in his much-lauded memoir, My American Journey:
Called "a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations," Project X "was first used by the U.S. Intelligence School on Okinawa to train Vietnamese and, presumably, other foreign nationals," the history stated.
Linda Matthews of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Division recalled that in 1967-68, some of the Project X training material was prepared by officers connected to the Phoenix program. "She suggested the possibility that some offending material from the Phoenix program may have found its way into the Project X materials at that time," the Pentagon report said.
In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to U.S. military assistance groups working with "friendly foreign countries." By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world.
In its 1992 review, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents.
But disclosure of the full story was blocked near the end of the first Bush administration when senior Pentagon officials working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Living Dangerously
By the mid-1960s, some of the U.S. counterinsurgency lessons had reached Indonesia, too. The U.S. military training was surreptitious because Washington viewed the country's neutralist leader Sukarno as politically suspect. The training was permitted only to give the United States influence within the Indonesian military which was considered more reliable.
The covert U.S. aid and training was mostly innocuous-sounding "civic action," which is generally thought to mean building roads, staffing health clinics and performing other "hearts-and-minds" activities with civilians. But "civic action" also provided cover in Indonesia, as in the Philippines and Vietnam, for psy-war.
The secret U.S.-Indonesian military connections paid off for Washington when a political crisis erupted, threatening Sukarno's government.
To counter Indonesia's powerful Communist Party, known as the PKI, the army's Red Berets organized the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. So many bodies were dumped into the rivers of East Java that they ran red with blood.
In a classic psy-war tactic, the bloated carcasses also served as a political warning to villages down river.
"To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes," wrote eyewitness Pipit Rochijat. "And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew." [See Rochijat's "Am I PKI or Non-PKI?" Indonesia, Oct. 1985.]
Some historians have attributed the grotesque violence to a crazed army which engaged in "unplanned brutality" or "mass hysteria" leading ultimately to the slaughter of some half million Indonesians, many of Chinese descent.
But the recurring tactic of putting bodies on gruesome display fits as well with the military doctrines of psy-war, a word that one of the leading military killers used in un-translated form in one order demanding elimination of the PKI.
Sarwo Edhie, chief of the political para-commando battalion known as the Red Berets, warned that the communist opposition "should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psy-war." [See The Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression, translated by Robert Cribb in The Indonesian Killings.]
Sarwo Edhie had been identified as a CIA contact when he served at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. [See Pacific, May-June 1968.]
US Media Sympathy
Elite U.S. reaction to the horrific slaughter was muted and has remained ambivalent ever since. The Johnson administration denied any responsibility for the massacres, but New York Times columnist James Reston spoke for many opinion leaders when he approvingly termed the bloody developments in Indonesia "a gleam of light in Asia."
The American denials of involvement held until 1990 when U.S. diplomats admitted to a reporter that they had aided the Indonesian army by supplying lists of suspected communists.
"It really was a big help to the army," embassy officer Robert Martens told Kathy Kadane of States News Service. "I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." Martens had headed the U.S. team that compiled the death lists.
Kadane's story provoked a telling response from Washington Post senior editorial writer Stephen S. Rosenfeld. He accepted the fact that American officials had assisted "this fearsome slaughter," but then justified the killings.
Rosenfeld argued that the massacre "was and still is widely regarded as the grim but earned fate of a conspiratorial revolutionary party that represented the same communist juggernaut that was on the march in Vietnam."
In a column entitled, "Indonesia 1965: The Year of Living Cynically?" Rosenfeld reasoned that "either the army would get the communists or the communists would get the army, it was thought: Indonesia was a domino, and the PKI's demise kept it [Indonesia] standing in the free world:
A Catholic missionary provided an eyewitness account of one search-and-destroy mission in East Timor in 1981:
Classic psy-war and pacification strategies were followed to the hilt in East Timor. The Indonesians put on display corpses and the heads of their victims. Timorese also were herded into government-controlled camps before permanent relocation in "resettlement villages" far from their original homes.
"The problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside," said Msgr. Costa Lopes, apostolic administrator of Dili. "This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food." [See John G. Taylor, Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor.]
Public Revulsion
Through television in the 1960-70s, the Vietnam War finally brought the horrors of counterinsurgency home to millions of Americans. They watched as U.S. troops torched villages and forced distraught old women to leave ancestral homes.
Camera crews caught on film brutal interrogation of Viet Cong suspects, the execution of one young VC officer, and the bombing of children with napalm.
In effect, the Vietnam War was the first time Americans got to witness the pacification strategies that had evolved secretly as national security policy since the 19th Century. As a result, millions of Americans protested the war's conduct and Congress belatedly compelled an end to U.S. participation in 1974.
But the psy-war doctrinal debates were not resolved by the Vietnam War. Counterinsurgency advocates regrouped in the 1980s behind President Ronald Reagan, who mounted a spirited defense of the Vietnamese intervention and reaffirmed U.S. resolve to employ similar tactics against leftist forces especially in Central America. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Guatemala: A Test Tube for Repression."]
Reagan also added an important new component to the mix. Recognizing how graphic images and honest reporting from the war zone had undercut public support for the counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Reagan authorized an aggressive domestic "public diplomacy" operation which practiced what was called "perception management" -- in effect, intimidating journalists to ensure that only sanitized information would reach the American people.
Reporters who disclosed atrocities by U.S.-trained forces, such as the El Mozote massacre by El Salvador's Atlacatl battalion in 1981, came under harsh criticism and saw their careers damaged.
Some Reagan operatives were not shy about their defense of political terror as a necessity of the Cold War. Neil Livingstone, a counter-terrorism consultant to the National Security Council, called death squads "an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combatting terrorism and revolutionary challenges." [See McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.]
When Democrats in Congress objected to excesses of Reagan's interventions in Central America, the administration responded with more public relations and political pressure, questioning the patriotism of the critics. For instance, Reagan's United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick accused anyone who took note of U.S.-backed war crimes of "blaming America first."
Many Democrats in Congress and journalists in the Washington press corps buckled under the attacks, giving the Reagan administration much freer rein to carry out brutal "death squad" strategies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
What is clear from these experiences in Indonesia, Vietnam, Central America and elsewhere is that the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality embraced by counterinsurgency specialists.
Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. But sometimes the two competing visions - of a just America and a ruthless one - clash in the open, as they did in Vietnam.
Or the dark side of U.S. security policy is thrown into the light by unauthorized leaks, such as the photos of abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or by revelations about waterboarding and other torture authorized by George W. Bush's White House as part of the "war on terror."
Only then does the public get a glimpse of the grim reality, the bloody and brutal tactics that have been deemed "necessary" for more than two centuries in the defense of the purported "national interests."
By Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry, Consortium News
Posted on October 9, 2010
In the following article Peter Dale Scott and Robert Parry examine the long history of these acts of brutality, a record that suggests they are neither a "mistake" nor an "aberration" but rather conscious counterinsurgency doctrine on the "dark side."
There is a dark -- seldom acknowledged -- thread that runs through U.S. military doctrine, dating back to the early days of the Republic.
This military tradition has explicitly defended the selective use of terror, whether in suppressing Native American resistance on the frontiers in the 19th Century or in protecting U.S. interests abroad in the 20th Century or fighting the "war on terror" over the last decade.
The American people are largely oblivious to this hidden tradition because most of the literature advocating state-sponsored terror is carefully confined to national security circles and rarely spills out into the public debate, which is instead dominated by feel-good messages about well-intentioned U.S. interventions abroad.
Over the decades, congressional and journalistic investigations have exposed some of these abuses. But when that does happen, the cases are usually deemed anomalies or excesses by out-of-control soldiers.
But the historical record shows that terror tactics have long been a dark side of U.S. military doctrine. The theories survive today in textbooks on counterinsurgency warfare, "low-intensity" conflict and "counter-terrorism."
Some historians trace the formal acceptance of those brutal tenets to the 1860s when the U.S. Army was facing challenge from a rebellious South and resistance from Native Americans in the West. Out of those crises emerged the modern military concept of "total war" -- which considers attacks on civilians and their economic infrastructure an integral part of a victorious strategy.
In 1864, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman cut a swath of destruction through civilian territory in Georgia and the Carolinas. His plan was to destroy the South's will to fight and its ability to sustain a large army in the field. The devastation left plantations in flames and brought widespread Confederate complaints of rape and murder of civilians.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, Col. John M. Chivington and the Third Colorado Cavalry were employing their own terror tactics to pacify Cheyennes. A scout named John Smith later described the attack at Sand Creek, Colorado, on unsuspecting Indians at a peaceful encampment:
"They were scalped; their brains knocked out; the men used their knives, ripped open women, clubbed little children, knocked them in the head with their guns, beat their brains out, mutilated their bodies in every sense of the word." [U.S. Cong., Senate, 39 Cong., 2nd Sess., "The Chivington Massacre," Reports of the Committees.]Though Smith's objectivity was challenged at the time, today even defenders of the Sand Creek raid concede that most women and children there were killed and mutilated. [See Lt. Col. William R. Dunn, I Stand by Sand Creek.]
Yet, in the 1860s, many whites in Colorado saw the slaughter as the only realistic way to bring peace, just as Sherman viewed his "march to the sea" as necessary to force the South's surrender.
The brutal tactics in the West also helped clear the way for the transcontinental railroad, built fortunes for favored businessmen and consolidated Republican political power for more than six decades, until the Great Depression of the 1930s. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Indian Genocide and Republican Power."]
Four years after the Civil War, Sherman became commanding general of the Army and incorporated the Indian pacification strategies -- as well as his own tactics -- into U.S. military doctrine. Gen. Philip H. Sheridan, who had led Indian wars in the Missouri territory, succeeded Sherman in 1883 and further entrenched those strategies as policy. [See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide.]
By the end of the 19th Century, the Native American warriors had been vanquished, but the Army's winning strategies lived on.
Imperial America
When the United States claimed the Philippines as a prize in the Spanish-American War, Filipino insurgents resisted. In 1900, the U.S. commander, Gen. J. Franklin Bell, consciously modeled his brutal counterinsurgency campaign after the Indian wars and Sherman's "march to the sea."
Bell believed that by punishing the wealthier Filipinos through destruction of their homes -- much as Sherman had done in the South -- they would be coerced into helping convince their countrymen to submit.
Learning from the Indian wars, he also isolated the guerrillas by forcing Filipinos into tightly controlled zones where schools were built and other social amenities were provided.
"The entire population outside of the major cities in Batangas was herded into concentration camps," wrote historian Stuart Creighton Miller. "Bell's main target was the wealthier and better-educated classes. … Adding insult to injury, Bell made these people carry the petrol used to burn their own country homes." [See Miller's "Benevolent Assimilation."]
For those outside the protected areas, there was terror. A supportive news correspondent described one scene in which American soldiers killed "men, women, children … from lads of 10 and up, an idea prevailing that the Filipino, as such, was little better than a dog:
"Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to 'make them talk,' have taken prisoner people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down as an example to those who found their bullet-riddled corpses."Defending the tactics, the correspondent noted that "it is not civilized warfare, but we are not dealing with a civilized people. The only thing they know and fear is force, violence, and brutality." [Philadelphia Ledger, Nov. 19, 1900]
In 1901, anti-imperialists in Congress exposed and denounced Bell's brutal tactics. Nevertheless, Bell's strategies won military acclaim as a refined method of pacification.
In a 1973 book, one pro-Bell military historian, John Morgan Gates, termed reports of U.S. atrocities "exaggerated" and hailed Bell's "excellent understanding of the role of benevolence in pacification."
Gates recalled that Bell's campaign in Batanga was regarded by military strategists as "pacification in its most perfected form." [See Gates's Schoolbooks and Krags: The United States Army in the Philippines, 1898-1902.]
Spreading the Word
At the turn of the century, the methodology of pacification was a hot topic among the European colonial powers, too. From Namibia to Indochina, Europeans struggled to subdue local populations.
Often outright slaughter proved effective, as the Germans demonstrated with massacres of the Herrero tribe in Namibia from 1904-1907. But military strategists often compared notes about more subtle techniques of targeted terror mixed with demonstrations of benevolence.
Counterinsurgency strategies were back in vogue after World War II as many subjugated people demanded independence from colonial rule and Washington worried about the expansion of communism. In the 1950s, the Huk rebellion against U.S. dominance made the Philippines again the laboratory, with Bell's earlier lessons clearly remembered.
"The campaign against the Huk movement in the Philippines … greatly resembled the American campaign of almost 50 years earlier," historian Gates observed. "The American approach to the problem of pacification had been a studied one."
But the war against the Huks had some new wrinkles, particularly the modern concept of psychological warfare or psy-war.
Under the pioneering strategies of the CIA's Maj. Gen. Edward G. Lansdale, psy-war was a new spin to the old game of breaking the will of a target population. The idea was to analyze the psychological weaknesses of a people and develop "themes" that could induce actions favorable to those carrying out the operation.
While psy-war included propaganda and disinformation, it also relied on terror tactics of a demonstrative nature. An Army psy-war pamphlet, drawing on Lansdale's experience in the Philippines, advocated "exemplary criminal violence -- the murder and mutilation of captives and the display of their bodies," according to Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.
In his memoirs, Lansdale boasted of one legendary psy-war trick used against the Huks who were considered superstitious and fearful of a vampire-like creature called an asuang.
"The psy-war squad set up an ambush along a trail used by the Huks," Lansdale wrote. "When a Huk patrol came along the trail, the ambushers silently snatched the last man on the patrol, their move unseen in the dark night. They punctured his neck with two holes, vampire-fashion, held the body up by the heels, drained it of blood, and put the corpse back on the trail.
"When the Huks returned to look for the missing man and found their bloodless comrade, every member of the patrol believed the asuang had got him." [See Lansdale's In the Midst of Wars.]The Huk rebellion also saw the refinement of free-fire zones, a technique used effectively by Bell's forces a half-century earlier. In the 1950s, special squadrons were assigned to do the dirty work.
"The special tactic of these squadrons was to cordon off areas; anyone they caught inside the cordon was considered an enemy," explained one pro-U.S. Filipino colonel. "Almost daily you could find bodies floating in the river, many of them victims of [Major Napoleon] Valeriano's Nenita Unit. [See Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines.]
On to Vietnam
The successful suppression of the Huks led the war's architects to share their lessons elsewhere in Asia and beyond. Valeriano went on to co-author an important American textbook on counterinsurgency and to serve as part of the American pacification effort in Vietnam with Lansdale.
Following the Philippine model, Vietnamese were crowded into "strategic hamlets"; "free-fire zones" were declared with homes and crops destroyed; and the Phoenix program eliminated thousands of suspected Viet Cong cadre.
The ruthless strategies were absorbed and accepted even by widely respected military figures, such as Gen. Colin Powell who served two tours in Vietnam and endorsed the routine practice of murdering Vietnamese males as a necessary part of the counterinsurgency effort.
"I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male," Powell wrote in his much-lauded memoir, My American Journey:
"If a helo [a U.S. helicopter] spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him.
"Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served at Gelnhausen [West Germany], Lt. Col. Walter Pritchard, was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."In 1965, the U.S. intelligence community formalized its hard-learned counterinsurgency lessons by commissioning a top-secret program called Project X. Based at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School at Fort Holabird, Maryland, the project drew from field experience and developed teaching plans to "provide intelligence training to friendly foreign countries," according to a Pentagon history prepared in 1991 and released in 1997.
Called "a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations," Project X "was first used by the U.S. Intelligence School on Okinawa to train Vietnamese and, presumably, other foreign nationals," the history stated.
Linda Matthews of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Division recalled that in 1967-68, some of the Project X training material was prepared by officers connected to the Phoenix program. "She suggested the possibility that some offending material from the Phoenix program may have found its way into the Project X materials at that time," the Pentagon report said.
In the 1970s, the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School moved to Fort Huachuca in Arizona and began exporting Project X material to U.S. military assistance groups working with "friendly foreign countries." By the mid-1970s, the Project X material was going to armies all over the world.
In its 1992 review, the Pentagon acknowledged that Project X was the source for some of the "objectionable" lessons at the School of the Americas where Latin American officers were trained in blackmail, kidnapping, murder and spying on non-violent political opponents.
But disclosure of the full story was blocked near the end of the first Bush administration when senior Pentagon officials working for then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered the destruction of most Project X records. [See Robert Parry's Lost History.]
Living Dangerously
By the mid-1960s, some of the U.S. counterinsurgency lessons had reached Indonesia, too. The U.S. military training was surreptitious because Washington viewed the country's neutralist leader Sukarno as politically suspect. The training was permitted only to give the United States influence within the Indonesian military which was considered more reliable.
The covert U.S. aid and training was mostly innocuous-sounding "civic action," which is generally thought to mean building roads, staffing health clinics and performing other "hearts-and-minds" activities with civilians. But "civic action" also provided cover in Indonesia, as in the Philippines and Vietnam, for psy-war.
The secret U.S.-Indonesian military connections paid off for Washington when a political crisis erupted, threatening Sukarno's government.
To counter Indonesia's powerful Communist Party, known as the PKI, the army's Red Berets organized the slaughter of tens of thousands of men, women and children. So many bodies were dumped into the rivers of East Java that they ran red with blood.
In a classic psy-war tactic, the bloated carcasses also served as a political warning to villages down river.
"To make sure they didn't sink, the carcasses were deliberately tied to, or impaled on, bamboo stakes," wrote eyewitness Pipit Rochijat. "And the departure of corpses from the Kediri region down the Brantas achieved its golden age when bodies were stacked on rafts over which the PKI banner proudly flew." [See Rochijat's "Am I PKI or Non-PKI?" Indonesia, Oct. 1985.]
Some historians have attributed the grotesque violence to a crazed army which engaged in "unplanned brutality" or "mass hysteria" leading ultimately to the slaughter of some half million Indonesians, many of Chinese descent.
But the recurring tactic of putting bodies on gruesome display fits as well with the military doctrines of psy-war, a word that one of the leading military killers used in un-translated form in one order demanding elimination of the PKI.
Sarwo Edhie, chief of the political para-commando battalion known as the Red Berets, warned that the communist opposition "should be given no opportunity to concentrate/consolidate. It should be pushed back systematically by all means, including psy-war." [See The Revolt of the G30S/PKI and Its Suppression, translated by Robert Cribb in The Indonesian Killings.]
Sarwo Edhie had been identified as a CIA contact when he served at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. [See Pacific, May-June 1968.]
US Media Sympathy
Elite U.S. reaction to the horrific slaughter was muted and has remained ambivalent ever since. The Johnson administration denied any responsibility for the massacres, but New York Times columnist James Reston spoke for many opinion leaders when he approvingly termed the bloody developments in Indonesia "a gleam of light in Asia."
The American denials of involvement held until 1990 when U.S. diplomats admitted to a reporter that they had aided the Indonesian army by supplying lists of suspected communists.
"It really was a big help to the army," embassy officer Robert Martens told Kathy Kadane of States News Service. "I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment." Martens had headed the U.S. team that compiled the death lists.
Kadane's story provoked a telling response from Washington Post senior editorial writer Stephen S. Rosenfeld. He accepted the fact that American officials had assisted "this fearsome slaughter," but then justified the killings.
Rosenfeld argued that the massacre "was and still is widely regarded as the grim but earned fate of a conspiratorial revolutionary party that represented the same communist juggernaut that was on the march in Vietnam."
In a column entitled, "Indonesia 1965: The Year of Living Cynically?" Rosenfeld reasoned that "either the army would get the communists or the communists would get the army, it was thought: Indonesia was a domino, and the PKI's demise kept it [Indonesia] standing in the free world:
"Though the means were grievously tainted, we -- the fastidious among us as well as the hard-headed and cynical -- can be said to have enjoyed the fruits in the geopolitical stability of that important part of Asia, in the revolution that never happened." [Washington Post, July 13, 1990]The fruit tasted far more bitter to the peoples of the Indonesian archipelago, however. In 1975, the army of Indonesia's new dictator, Gen. Suharto, invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor. When the East Timorese resisted, the Indonesian army returned to its gruesome bag of tricks, engaging in virtual genocide against the population.
A Catholic missionary provided an eyewitness account of one search-and-destroy mission in East Timor in 1981:
"We saw with our own eyes the massacre of the people who were surrendering: all dead, even women and children, even the littlest ones. … Not even pregnant women were spared: they were cut open. …. They did what they had done to small children the previous year, grabbing them by the legs and smashing their heads against rocks. …
"The comments of Indonesian officers reveal the moral character of this army: 'We did the same thing [in 1965] in Java, in Borneo, in the Celebes, in Irian Jaya, and it worked." [See A. Barbedo de Magalhaes, East Timor: Land of Hope.]The references to the success of the 1965 slaughter were not unusual. In Timor: A People Betrayed, author James Dunn noted that "on the Indonesian side, there have been many reports that many soldiers viewed their operation as a further phase in the ongoing campaign to suppress communism that had followed the events of September 1965."
Classic psy-war and pacification strategies were followed to the hilt in East Timor. The Indonesians put on display corpses and the heads of their victims. Timorese also were herded into government-controlled camps before permanent relocation in "resettlement villages" far from their original homes.
"The problem is that people are forced to live in the settlements and are not allowed to travel outside," said Msgr. Costa Lopes, apostolic administrator of Dili. "This is the main reason why people cannot grow enough food." [See John G. Taylor, Indonesia's Forgotten War: The Hidden History of East Timor.]
Public Revulsion
Through television in the 1960-70s, the Vietnam War finally brought the horrors of counterinsurgency home to millions of Americans. They watched as U.S. troops torched villages and forced distraught old women to leave ancestral homes.
Camera crews caught on film brutal interrogation of Viet Cong suspects, the execution of one young VC officer, and the bombing of children with napalm.
In effect, the Vietnam War was the first time Americans got to witness the pacification strategies that had evolved secretly as national security policy since the 19th Century. As a result, millions of Americans protested the war's conduct and Congress belatedly compelled an end to U.S. participation in 1974.
But the psy-war doctrinal debates were not resolved by the Vietnam War. Counterinsurgency advocates regrouped in the 1980s behind President Ronald Reagan, who mounted a spirited defense of the Vietnamese intervention and reaffirmed U.S. resolve to employ similar tactics against leftist forces especially in Central America. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Guatemala: A Test Tube for Repression."]
Reagan also added an important new component to the mix. Recognizing how graphic images and honest reporting from the war zone had undercut public support for the counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Reagan authorized an aggressive domestic "public diplomacy" operation which practiced what was called "perception management" -- in effect, intimidating journalists to ensure that only sanitized information would reach the American people.
Reporters who disclosed atrocities by U.S.-trained forces, such as the El Mozote massacre by El Salvador's Atlacatl battalion in 1981, came under harsh criticism and saw their careers damaged.
Some Reagan operatives were not shy about their defense of political terror as a necessity of the Cold War. Neil Livingstone, a counter-terrorism consultant to the National Security Council, called death squads "an extremely effective tool, however odious, in combatting terrorism and revolutionary challenges." [See McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft.]
When Democrats in Congress objected to excesses of Reagan's interventions in Central America, the administration responded with more public relations and political pressure, questioning the patriotism of the critics. For instance, Reagan's United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick accused anyone who took note of U.S.-backed war crimes of "blaming America first."
Many Democrats in Congress and journalists in the Washington press corps buckled under the attacks, giving the Reagan administration much freer rein to carry out brutal "death squad" strategies in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
What is clear from these experiences in Indonesia, Vietnam, Central America and elsewhere is that the United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality embraced by counterinsurgency specialists.
Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. But sometimes the two competing visions - of a just America and a ruthless one - clash in the open, as they did in Vietnam.
Or the dark side of U.S. security policy is thrown into the light by unauthorized leaks, such as the photos of abused detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or by revelations about waterboarding and other torture authorized by George W. Bush's White House as part of the "war on terror."
Only then does the public get a glimpse of the grim reality, the bloody and brutal tactics that have been deemed "necessary" for more than two centuries in the defense of the purported "national interests."
Industry Front Group Gets Taxpayer Money to Convince You to Eat Pesticide-Laden Food
Thanks to the USDA, your hard-earned money has been given to a special interest group representing giant agribusiness and its pesticide company cohorts.
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2010
Would you pay for a campaign to assure consumers that pesticide residues in their fruits and vegetables pose no harm to their health? Because, whether you want to or not, you just have. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently awarded $180,000 in federal grant funding to an organization called the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled "Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues." The money came from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grant program, a grant program intended to "enhance the competitiveness" of so-called specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops.
The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF) is a front group representing California's large produce growers and marketers and suppliers who sell them pesticides and fertilizer. Some of the member organizations include the California Strawberry Commission, Western Growers, the California Table Grape Commission, Sunkist Growers, the Produce Marketing Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation, and the California Association of Pest Control Advisers. A look on the pesticides section of AFF's Web site shows headlines such as "US Farmers are Environmentalists Too" and "Everything Doesn't Cause Cancer," as well as produce industry documents refuting a recent study that linked pesticides to ADHD.
According to CDFA's press release, AFF will use its new taxpayer-funded grant, to "generate more balanced media reporting and change public perception about the safety of produce when it comes to pesticide residues," by "utilizing sound science backed by a team of nutrition and toxicological experts." The press release also charges that "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides have been widely reported in the media for many years" and "continued media coverage of this misleading information is damaging to producers of California specialty crops and may also have a negative impact on public health."
As a part of its campaign, AFF commissioned a report by four toxicologists and a nutritionist that critiques the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) "Dirty Dozen" list of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Of the experts who wrote the report, two have links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a food industry lobby group, including one who served as the executive director of ILSI's Risk Science Institute, and two who serve in university positions endowed by major corporations (Mars, Inc. and Dow Chemical). The report nitpicks EWG's methodology because the dirty dozen list measures which fruits and vegetables typically contain the most pesticide residues but does not assess which pesticides, and thus, which foods, actually carry the most risk of harm to one's health.
The AFF report also takes issue with the assertion that dietary exposure to pesticides can harm one's health. It points out that environmental and occupational exposures to pesticides are often much higher than dietary exposures (i.e. a farmworker who works among fields where pesticides were sprayed is exposed to more pesticides than the average person who eats fruits and vegetables that were grown using pesticides) and that there are relatively few studies in existence that focus specifically on dietary exposure to pesticides.
The AFF report also defends the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of pesticides and the ability of those regulations to keep Americans safe, points out the importance of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet, and refutes the notion that organic produce is more nutritious than produce grown with pesticides.
Will Allen, author of The War on Bugs, refutes the idea that dietary exposure to pesticides is inconsequential, pointing to a study of school children ages three to 11 who ate diets of conventional food. Their urine and saliva were tested over the course of a year, including during two five-day periods when they switched to diets of organic food. The study found that the levels of organophosphate pesticides chlorpyrifos and malathion corresponded to changes in fresh produce consumption throughout the year. Furthermore, when the children switched to organic food, the levels of organophosphates in their urine and saliva quickly dropped to undetectable or nearly undetectable levels. The study concluded that "dietary intake of OP pesticides represents the major source of exposure in young children."
A look at the CDC's 2009 Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals shows that Americans carry a "body burden" of a number of different pesticides. The study examined the blood and urine of Americans in three different periods (1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004) and reported on the pesticide and pesticide metabolites found. Some of the pesticides found in our bodies were clearly due to past use of the chemicals. For example, DDT and its more persistent breakdown product DDE were still found as of 2003-2004 even though DDT was banned in 1972. However, many of the pesticides detected, such as organophosphates and carbamates, both nerve poisons, are still used today.
The Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen list, under attack by AFF, begins with peaches as the most contaminated fruit, followed by apples, nectarines and strawberries. In his book, Allen breaks down the pesticides used on two of these four fruits. In 2004, California peach growers used 124 separate pesticides on their orchards. Nearly three-quarters of the 468,804 pounds of pesticides used on California peaches that year were accounted for by 12 pesticides: organophosphates phosmet, diazinon, and chlorpyrifos; carbaryl (a carbamate insecticide); herbicides glyphosate, oxyfluorfen, oryzalin, simazine, and the highly toxic paraquat dichloride; fungicides copper oxide and iprodione, and the soil fumigant methyl bromide (a chemical being phased out worldwide).
For strawberries, Allen estimates that an average 335.4 pounds of pesticides were used per acre of strawberries grown in California in 2004. That year, California strawberry growers used 184 different pesticides, but only six accounted for over 80 percent of all pesticides use: soil fumigants chloropicrin, methyl bromide, 1,3-dichloropropene, and metam sodium, and fungicides sulfur and captan. Allen points out that all four fumigants (which he says are "among the most toxic chemicals on earth") are restricted-use pesticides, meaning that they may only be applied by trained and certified applicators due to their toxicity. All four chemicals cause acute toxicity and they are listed as Bad Actor Chemicals by Pesticide Action Network. 1,3-dichloropropene and metam sodium are carcinogens and both methyl bromide and metam sodium are developmental toxins.
Additionally, three of the four fumigants (all except 1,3-dichloropropene) are restricted in California, requiring farmers to obtain special permits from the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) in order to use them. Allen says farmers applied for these permits because of "farm practices of growing carrots and strawberries and potatoes in the same place year after year after year after year, never rotating their crops to break the pest cycle for that crop." He says farmers should listen to the wisdom of generations of farmers before them instead of taking advice from "chemical merchants" so they can retain "the art of rotation and soil nutrient balance, which enables farmers to naturally control pests and disease." Despite their toxicity and restricted status, methyl bromide, metam sodium and chloropicrin account for over 60 percent of all pesticides use on carrots.
But, even if many pesticides are used on fruits and vegetables and the main route of exposure to organophosphates (and perhaps other classes of pesticides) is dietary, do the residues of pesticides in fruits and vegetables actually harm our health? For one thing, there have been recent findings about the link between organophosphates and ADHD. One study published this past May found that each 10-fold increase in urinary concentration of organophosphates was associated with a 55 to 72 percent increase in likelihood that a child ages eight to 15 would have ADHD. Of the 1,139 children in the study, 93.8 percent tested positive for detectable levels of one or more metabolites of common organophosphates. A second study, published in August, linked prenatal exposure to organophosphates to increased levels of ADHD in children once they reached five years old. In this case, each 10-fold increase in a pregnant mother's urinary concentration of organophosphates led to a 500-percent increase that her child would be diagnosed with ADHD at age five.
Pesticide Action Network criticizes the EPA's regulation of pesticides, saying they do not account for additive and synergistic effects. "Since the Environmental Protection Agency regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address -- and so they usually don't," says a statement on its Web site. The organization cites human health impacts linked to pesticide exposure including birth defects, cancers, Parkinson's Disease, and a host of developmental and neurological disorders and reproductive and hormonal system disruptions. "Given the complexities of chemical causality and disease-formulation," they ask, why take the chance of consuming even residual levels of pesticides in our food at all?
The President's Cancer Panel report, released this past May, concurs, saying that "approximately 40 chemicals classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as known, probable, or possible human carcinogens, are used in EPA-registered pesticides now on the market." Noting that the levels of pesticides allowed in food by the EPA have been criticized as inadequate and influenced by industry, the report unequivocally cautions Americans that "exposure to pesticides can be decreased by choosing, to the extent possible, food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers... Similarly, exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones, and toxic run-off from livestock feed lots can be minimized by eating free-range meat raised without these medications."
Kari Hamerschlag, a senior food and agriculture analyst for Environmental Working Group, criticized AFF's notion that publicizing which fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated with pesticides is dangerous because it decreases fruit and vegetable consumption, citing USDA data showing that consumption of many foods listed in the Dirty Dozen have actually increased in recent years. The Environmental Working Group has not advocated avoiding conventionally grown fruits and vegetables if one cannot find or afford organic. Furthermore, she says, "if AFF's goal is increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, why don't they address the root causes why people do not eat more produce?"
Environmental Working Group, Californians for Pesticide Reform, and 50 other organizations signed a letter calling out CDFA for its misuse in taxpayer dollars in awarding this grant to AFF. The letter reads, in part, "We object to the department's decision to fund an industry communications initiative against legitimate public interest concerns related to pesticide residues on food. The award of this grant strikes a blow to California's expanding organic produce industry and places the department in opposition to the public's interest in reducing pesticide exposure. This action also represents a fundamental failure to implement a fair and balanced grant selection process."
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2010
Would you pay for a campaign to assure consumers that pesticide residues in their fruits and vegetables pose no harm to their health? Because, whether you want to or not, you just have. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently awarded $180,000 in federal grant funding to an organization called the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled "Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues." The money came from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grant program, a grant program intended to "enhance the competitiveness" of so-called specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops.
The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF) is a front group representing California's large produce growers and marketers and suppliers who sell them pesticides and fertilizer. Some of the member organizations include the California Strawberry Commission, Western Growers, the California Table Grape Commission, Sunkist Growers, the Produce Marketing Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation, and the California Association of Pest Control Advisers. A look on the pesticides section of AFF's Web site shows headlines such as "US Farmers are Environmentalists Too" and "Everything Doesn't Cause Cancer," as well as produce industry documents refuting a recent study that linked pesticides to ADHD.
According to CDFA's press release, AFF will use its new taxpayer-funded grant, to "generate more balanced media reporting and change public perception about the safety of produce when it comes to pesticide residues," by "utilizing sound science backed by a team of nutrition and toxicological experts." The press release also charges that "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides have been widely reported in the media for many years" and "continued media coverage of this misleading information is damaging to producers of California specialty crops and may also have a negative impact on public health."
As a part of its campaign, AFF commissioned a report by four toxicologists and a nutritionist that critiques the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) "Dirty Dozen" list of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Of the experts who wrote the report, two have links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a food industry lobby group, including one who served as the executive director of ILSI's Risk Science Institute, and two who serve in university positions endowed by major corporations (Mars, Inc. and Dow Chemical). The report nitpicks EWG's methodology because the dirty dozen list measures which fruits and vegetables typically contain the most pesticide residues but does not assess which pesticides, and thus, which foods, actually carry the most risk of harm to one's health.
The AFF report also takes issue with the assertion that dietary exposure to pesticides can harm one's health. It points out that environmental and occupational exposures to pesticides are often much higher than dietary exposures (i.e. a farmworker who works among fields where pesticides were sprayed is exposed to more pesticides than the average person who eats fruits and vegetables that were grown using pesticides) and that there are relatively few studies in existence that focus specifically on dietary exposure to pesticides.
The AFF report also defends the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of pesticides and the ability of those regulations to keep Americans safe, points out the importance of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet, and refutes the notion that organic produce is more nutritious than produce grown with pesticides.
Will Allen, author of The War on Bugs, refutes the idea that dietary exposure to pesticides is inconsequential, pointing to a study of school children ages three to 11 who ate diets of conventional food. Their urine and saliva were tested over the course of a year, including during two five-day periods when they switched to diets of organic food. The study found that the levels of organophosphate pesticides chlorpyrifos and malathion corresponded to changes in fresh produce consumption throughout the year. Furthermore, when the children switched to organic food, the levels of organophosphates in their urine and saliva quickly dropped to undetectable or nearly undetectable levels. The study concluded that "dietary intake of OP pesticides represents the major source of exposure in young children."
A look at the CDC's 2009 Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals shows that Americans carry a "body burden" of a number of different pesticides. The study examined the blood and urine of Americans in three different periods (1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004) and reported on the pesticide and pesticide metabolites found. Some of the pesticides found in our bodies were clearly due to past use of the chemicals. For example, DDT and its more persistent breakdown product DDE were still found as of 2003-2004 even though DDT was banned in 1972. However, many of the pesticides detected, such as organophosphates and carbamates, both nerve poisons, are still used today.
The Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen list, under attack by AFF, begins with peaches as the most contaminated fruit, followed by apples, nectarines and strawberries. In his book, Allen breaks down the pesticides used on two of these four fruits. In 2004, California peach growers used 124 separate pesticides on their orchards. Nearly three-quarters of the 468,804 pounds of pesticides used on California peaches that year were accounted for by 12 pesticides: organophosphates phosmet, diazinon, and chlorpyrifos; carbaryl (a carbamate insecticide); herbicides glyphosate, oxyfluorfen, oryzalin, simazine, and the highly toxic paraquat dichloride; fungicides copper oxide and iprodione, and the soil fumigant methyl bromide (a chemical being phased out worldwide).
For strawberries, Allen estimates that an average 335.4 pounds of pesticides were used per acre of strawberries grown in California in 2004. That year, California strawberry growers used 184 different pesticides, but only six accounted for over 80 percent of all pesticides use: soil fumigants chloropicrin, methyl bromide, 1,3-dichloropropene, and metam sodium, and fungicides sulfur and captan. Allen points out that all four fumigants (which he says are "among the most toxic chemicals on earth") are restricted-use pesticides, meaning that they may only be applied by trained and certified applicators due to their toxicity. All four chemicals cause acute toxicity and they are listed as Bad Actor Chemicals by Pesticide Action Network. 1,3-dichloropropene and metam sodium are carcinogens and both methyl bromide and metam sodium are developmental toxins.
Additionally, three of the four fumigants (all except 1,3-dichloropropene) are restricted in California, requiring farmers to obtain special permits from the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) in order to use them. Allen says farmers applied for these permits because of "farm practices of growing carrots and strawberries and potatoes in the same place year after year after year after year, never rotating their crops to break the pest cycle for that crop." He says farmers should listen to the wisdom of generations of farmers before them instead of taking advice from "chemical merchants" so they can retain "the art of rotation and soil nutrient balance, which enables farmers to naturally control pests and disease." Despite their toxicity and restricted status, methyl bromide, metam sodium and chloropicrin account for over 60 percent of all pesticides use on carrots.
But, even if many pesticides are used on fruits and vegetables and the main route of exposure to organophosphates (and perhaps other classes of pesticides) is dietary, do the residues of pesticides in fruits and vegetables actually harm our health? For one thing, there have been recent findings about the link between organophosphates and ADHD. One study published this past May found that each 10-fold increase in urinary concentration of organophosphates was associated with a 55 to 72 percent increase in likelihood that a child ages eight to 15 would have ADHD. Of the 1,139 children in the study, 93.8 percent tested positive for detectable levels of one or more metabolites of common organophosphates. A second study, published in August, linked prenatal exposure to organophosphates to increased levels of ADHD in children once they reached five years old. In this case, each 10-fold increase in a pregnant mother's urinary concentration of organophosphates led to a 500-percent increase that her child would be diagnosed with ADHD at age five.
Pesticide Action Network criticizes the EPA's regulation of pesticides, saying they do not account for additive and synergistic effects. "Since the Environmental Protection Agency regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address -- and so they usually don't," says a statement on its Web site. The organization cites human health impacts linked to pesticide exposure including birth defects, cancers, Parkinson's Disease, and a host of developmental and neurological disorders and reproductive and hormonal system disruptions. "Given the complexities of chemical causality and disease-formulation," they ask, why take the chance of consuming even residual levels of pesticides in our food at all?
The President's Cancer Panel report, released this past May, concurs, saying that "approximately 40 chemicals classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as known, probable, or possible human carcinogens, are used in EPA-registered pesticides now on the market." Noting that the levels of pesticides allowed in food by the EPA have been criticized as inadequate and influenced by industry, the report unequivocally cautions Americans that "exposure to pesticides can be decreased by choosing, to the extent possible, food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers... Similarly, exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones, and toxic run-off from livestock feed lots can be minimized by eating free-range meat raised without these medications."
Kari Hamerschlag, a senior food and agriculture analyst for Environmental Working Group, criticized AFF's notion that publicizing which fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated with pesticides is dangerous because it decreases fruit and vegetable consumption, citing USDA data showing that consumption of many foods listed in the Dirty Dozen have actually increased in recent years. The Environmental Working Group has not advocated avoiding conventionally grown fruits and vegetables if one cannot find or afford organic. Furthermore, she says, "if AFF's goal is increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, why don't they address the root causes why people do not eat more produce?"
Environmental Working Group, Californians for Pesticide Reform, and 50 other organizations signed a letter calling out CDFA for its misuse in taxpayer dollars in awarding this grant to AFF. The letter reads, in part, "We object to the department's decision to fund an industry communications initiative against legitimate public interest concerns related to pesticide residues on food. The award of this grant strikes a blow to California's expanding organic produce industry and places the department in opposition to the public's interest in reducing pesticide exposure. This action also represents a fundamental failure to implement a fair and balanced grant selection process."
Industry Front Group Gets Taxpayer Money to Convince You to Eat Pesticide-Laden Food
Thanks to the USDA, your hard-earned money has been given to a special interest group representing giant agribusiness and its pesticide company cohorts.
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2010
Would you pay for a campaign to assure consumers that pesticide residues in their fruits and vegetables pose no harm to their health? Because, whether you want to or not, you just have. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently awarded $180,000 in federal grant funding to an organization called the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled "Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues." The money came from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grant program, a grant program intended to "enhance the competitiveness" of so-called specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops.
The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF) is a front group representing California's large produce growers and marketers and suppliers who sell them pesticides and fertilizer. Some of the member organizations include the California Strawberry Commission, Western Growers, the California Table Grape Commission, Sunkist Growers, the Produce Marketing Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation, and the California Association of Pest Control Advisers. A look on the pesticides section of AFF's Web site shows headlines such as "US Farmers are Environmentalists Too" and "Everything Doesn't Cause Cancer," as well as produce industry documents refuting a recent study that linked pesticides to ADHD.
According to CDFA's press release, AFF will use its new taxpayer-funded grant, to "generate more balanced media reporting and change public perception about the safety of produce when it comes to pesticide residues," by "utilizing sound science backed by a team of nutrition and toxicological experts." The press release also charges that "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides have been widely reported in the media for many years" and "continued media coverage of this misleading information is damaging to producers of California specialty crops and may also have a negative impact on public health."
As a part of its campaign, AFF commissioned a report by four toxicologists and a nutritionist that critiques the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) "Dirty Dozen" list of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Of the experts who wrote the report, two have links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a food industry lobby group, including one who served as the executive director of ILSI's Risk Science Institute, and two who serve in university positions endowed by major corporations (Mars, Inc. and Dow Chemical). The report nitpicks EWG's methodology because the dirty dozen list measures which fruits and vegetables typically contain the most pesticide residues but does not assess which pesticides, and thus, which foods, actually carry the most risk of harm to one's health.
The AFF report also takes issue with the assertion that dietary exposure to pesticides can harm one's health. It points out that environmental and occupational exposures to pesticides are often much higher than dietary exposures (i.e. a farmworker who works among fields where pesticides were sprayed is exposed to more pesticides than the average person who eats fruits and vegetables that were grown using pesticides) and that there are relatively few studies in existence that focus specifically on dietary exposure to pesticides.
The AFF report also defends the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of pesticides and the ability of those regulations to keep Americans safe, points out the importance of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet, and refutes the notion that organic produce is more nutritious than produce grown with pesticides.
Will Allen, author of The War on Bugs, refutes the idea that dietary exposure to pesticides is inconsequential, pointing to a study of school children ages three to 11 who ate diets of conventional food. Their urine and saliva were tested over the course of a year, including during two five-day periods when they switched to diets of organic food. The study found that the levels of organophosphate pesticides chlorpyrifos and malathion corresponded to changes in fresh produce consumption throughout the year. Furthermore, when the children switched to organic food, the levels of organophosphates in their urine and saliva quickly dropped to undetectable or nearly undetectable levels. The study concluded that "dietary intake of OP pesticides represents the major source of exposure in young children."
A look at the CDC's 2009 Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals shows that Americans carry a "body burden" of a number of different pesticides. The study examined the blood and urine of Americans in three different periods (1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004) and reported on the pesticide and pesticide metabolites found. Some of the pesticides found in our bodies were clearly due to past use of the chemicals. For example, DDT and its more persistent breakdown product DDE were still found as of 2003-2004 even though DDT was banned in 1972. However, many of the pesticides detected, such as organophosphates and carbamates, both nerve poisons, are still used today.
The Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen list, under attack by AFF, begins with peaches as the most contaminated fruit, followed by apples, nectarines and strawberries. In his book, Allen breaks down the pesticides used on two of these four fruits. In 2004, California peach growers used 124 separate pesticides on their orchards. Nearly three-quarters of the 468,804 pounds of pesticides used on California peaches that year were accounted for by 12 pesticides: organophosphates phosmet, diazinon, and chlorpyrifos; carbaryl (a carbamate insecticide); herbicides glyphosate, oxyfluorfen, oryzalin, simazine, and the highly toxic paraquat dichloride; fungicides copper oxide and iprodione, and the soil fumigant methyl bromide (a chemical being phased out worldwide).
For strawberries, Allen estimates that an average 335.4 pounds of pesticides were used per acre of strawberries grown in California in 2004. That year, California strawberry growers used 184 different pesticides, but only six accounted for over 80 percent of all pesticides use: soil fumigants chloropicrin, methyl bromide, 1,3-dichloropropene, and metam sodium, and fungicides sulfur and captan. Allen points out that all four fumigants (which he says are "among the most toxic chemicals on earth") are restricted-use pesticides, meaning that they may only be applied by trained and certified applicators due to their toxicity. All four chemicals cause acute toxicity and they are listed as Bad Actor Chemicals by Pesticide Action Network. 1,3-dichloropropene and metam sodium are carcinogens and both methyl bromide and metam sodium are developmental toxins.
Additionally, three of the four fumigants (all except 1,3-dichloropropene) are restricted in California, requiring farmers to obtain special permits from the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) in order to use them. Allen says farmers applied for these permits because of "farm practices of growing carrots and strawberries and potatoes in the same place year after year after year after year, never rotating their crops to break the pest cycle for that crop." He says farmers should listen to the wisdom of generations of farmers before them instead of taking advice from "chemical merchants" so they can retain "the art of rotation and soil nutrient balance, which enables farmers to naturally control pests and disease." Despite their toxicity and restricted status, methyl bromide, metam sodium and chloropicrin account for over 60 percent of all pesticides use on carrots.
But, even if many pesticides are used on fruits and vegetables and the main route of exposure to organophosphates (and perhaps other classes of pesticides) is dietary, do the residues of pesticides in fruits and vegetables actually harm our health? For one thing, there have been recent findings about the link between organophosphates and ADHD. One study published this past May found that each 10-fold increase in urinary concentration of organophosphates was associated with a 55 to 72 percent increase in likelihood that a child ages eight to 15 would have ADHD. Of the 1,139 children in the study, 93.8 percent tested positive for detectable levels of one or more metabolites of common organophosphates. A second study, published in August, linked prenatal exposure to organophosphates to increased levels of ADHD in children once they reached five years old. In this case, each 10-fold increase in a pregnant mother's urinary concentration of organophosphates led to a 500-percent increase that her child would be diagnosed with ADHD at age five.
Pesticide Action Network criticizes the EPA's regulation of pesticides, saying they do not account for additive and synergistic effects. "Since the Environmental Protection Agency regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address -- and so they usually don't," says a statement on its Web site. The organization cites human health impacts linked to pesticide exposure including birth defects, cancers, Parkinson's Disease, and a host of developmental and neurological disorders and reproductive and hormonal system disruptions. "Given the complexities of chemical causality and disease-formulation," they ask, why take the chance of consuming even residual levels of pesticides in our food at all?
The President's Cancer Panel report, released this past May, concurs, saying that "approximately 40 chemicals classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as known, probable, or possible human carcinogens, are used in EPA-registered pesticides now on the market." Noting that the levels of pesticides allowed in food by the EPA have been criticized as inadequate and influenced by industry, the report unequivocally cautions Americans that "exposure to pesticides can be decreased by choosing, to the extent possible, food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers... Similarly, exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones, and toxic run-off from livestock feed lots can be minimized by eating free-range meat raised without these medications."
Kari Hamerschlag, a senior food and agriculture analyst for Environmental Working Group, criticized AFF's notion that publicizing which fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated with pesticides is dangerous because it decreases fruit and vegetable consumption, citing USDA data showing that consumption of many foods listed in the Dirty Dozen have actually increased in recent years. The Environmental Working Group has not advocated avoiding conventionally grown fruits and vegetables if one cannot find or afford organic. Furthermore, she says, "if AFF's goal is increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, why don't they address the root causes why people do not eat more produce?"
Environmental Working Group, Californians for Pesticide Reform, and 50 other organizations signed a letter calling out CDFA for its misuse in taxpayer dollars in awarding this grant to AFF. The letter reads, in part, "We object to the department's decision to fund an industry communications initiative against legitimate public interest concerns related to pesticide residues on food. The award of this grant strikes a blow to California's expanding organic produce industry and places the department in opposition to the public's interest in reducing pesticide exposure. This action also represents a fundamental failure to implement a fair and balanced grant selection process."
By Jill Richardson, AlterNet
Posted on October 9, 2010
Would you pay for a campaign to assure consumers that pesticide residues in their fruits and vegetables pose no harm to their health? Because, whether you want to or not, you just have. The California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) recently awarded $180,000 in federal grant funding to an organization called the Alliance for Food and Farming for a project titled "Correcting Misconceptions about Pesticide Residues." The money came from the U.S Department of Agriculture's Specialty Crop Block Grant program, a grant program intended to "enhance the competitiveness" of so-called specialty crops: fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, dried fruits, horticulture, and nursery crops.
The Alliance for Food and Farming (AFF) is a front group representing California's large produce growers and marketers and suppliers who sell them pesticides and fertilizer. Some of the member organizations include the California Strawberry Commission, Western Growers, the California Table Grape Commission, Sunkist Growers, the Produce Marketing Association, the California Farm Bureau Federation, and the California Association of Pest Control Advisers. A look on the pesticides section of AFF's Web site shows headlines such as "US Farmers are Environmentalists Too" and "Everything Doesn't Cause Cancer," as well as produce industry documents refuting a recent study that linked pesticides to ADHD.
According to CDFA's press release, AFF will use its new taxpayer-funded grant, to "generate more balanced media reporting and change public perception about the safety of produce when it comes to pesticide residues," by "utilizing sound science backed by a team of nutrition and toxicological experts." The press release also charges that "claims by activist groups about unsafe levels of pesticides have been widely reported in the media for many years" and "continued media coverage of this misleading information is damaging to producers of California specialty crops and may also have a negative impact on public health."
As a part of its campaign, AFF commissioned a report by four toxicologists and a nutritionist that critiques the Environmental Working Group's (EWG) "Dirty Dozen" list of the most contaminated fruits and vegetables. Of the experts who wrote the report, two have links to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a food industry lobby group, including one who served as the executive director of ILSI's Risk Science Institute, and two who serve in university positions endowed by major corporations (Mars, Inc. and Dow Chemical). The report nitpicks EWG's methodology because the dirty dozen list measures which fruits and vegetables typically contain the most pesticide residues but does not assess which pesticides, and thus, which foods, actually carry the most risk of harm to one's health.
The AFF report also takes issue with the assertion that dietary exposure to pesticides can harm one's health. It points out that environmental and occupational exposures to pesticides are often much higher than dietary exposures (i.e. a farmworker who works among fields where pesticides were sprayed is exposed to more pesticides than the average person who eats fruits and vegetables that were grown using pesticides) and that there are relatively few studies in existence that focus specifically on dietary exposure to pesticides.
The AFF report also defends the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of pesticides and the ability of those regulations to keep Americans safe, points out the importance of fruits and vegetables in a healthy diet, and refutes the notion that organic produce is more nutritious than produce grown with pesticides.
Will Allen, author of The War on Bugs, refutes the idea that dietary exposure to pesticides is inconsequential, pointing to a study of school children ages three to 11 who ate diets of conventional food. Their urine and saliva were tested over the course of a year, including during two five-day periods when they switched to diets of organic food. The study found that the levels of organophosphate pesticides chlorpyrifos and malathion corresponded to changes in fresh produce consumption throughout the year. Furthermore, when the children switched to organic food, the levels of organophosphates in their urine and saliva quickly dropped to undetectable or nearly undetectable levels. The study concluded that "dietary intake of OP pesticides represents the major source of exposure in young children."
A look at the CDC's 2009 Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals shows that Americans carry a "body burden" of a number of different pesticides. The study examined the blood and urine of Americans in three different periods (1999-2000, 2001-2002, and 2003-2004) and reported on the pesticide and pesticide metabolites found. Some of the pesticides found in our bodies were clearly due to past use of the chemicals. For example, DDT and its more persistent breakdown product DDE were still found as of 2003-2004 even though DDT was banned in 1972. However, many of the pesticides detected, such as organophosphates and carbamates, both nerve poisons, are still used today.
The Environmental Working Group's Dirty Dozen list, under attack by AFF, begins with peaches as the most contaminated fruit, followed by apples, nectarines and strawberries. In his book, Allen breaks down the pesticides used on two of these four fruits. In 2004, California peach growers used 124 separate pesticides on their orchards. Nearly three-quarters of the 468,804 pounds of pesticides used on California peaches that year were accounted for by 12 pesticides: organophosphates phosmet, diazinon, and chlorpyrifos; carbaryl (a carbamate insecticide); herbicides glyphosate, oxyfluorfen, oryzalin, simazine, and the highly toxic paraquat dichloride; fungicides copper oxide and iprodione, and the soil fumigant methyl bromide (a chemical being phased out worldwide).
For strawberries, Allen estimates that an average 335.4 pounds of pesticides were used per acre of strawberries grown in California in 2004. That year, California strawberry growers used 184 different pesticides, but only six accounted for over 80 percent of all pesticides use: soil fumigants chloropicrin, methyl bromide, 1,3-dichloropropene, and metam sodium, and fungicides sulfur and captan. Allen points out that all four fumigants (which he says are "among the most toxic chemicals on earth") are restricted-use pesticides, meaning that they may only be applied by trained and certified applicators due to their toxicity. All four chemicals cause acute toxicity and they are listed as Bad Actor Chemicals by Pesticide Action Network. 1,3-dichloropropene and metam sodium are carcinogens and both methyl bromide and metam sodium are developmental toxins.
Additionally, three of the four fumigants (all except 1,3-dichloropropene) are restricted in California, requiring farmers to obtain special permits from the state's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) in order to use them. Allen says farmers applied for these permits because of "farm practices of growing carrots and strawberries and potatoes in the same place year after year after year after year, never rotating their crops to break the pest cycle for that crop." He says farmers should listen to the wisdom of generations of farmers before them instead of taking advice from "chemical merchants" so they can retain "the art of rotation and soil nutrient balance, which enables farmers to naturally control pests and disease." Despite their toxicity and restricted status, methyl bromide, metam sodium and chloropicrin account for over 60 percent of all pesticides use on carrots.
But, even if many pesticides are used on fruits and vegetables and the main route of exposure to organophosphates (and perhaps other classes of pesticides) is dietary, do the residues of pesticides in fruits and vegetables actually harm our health? For one thing, there have been recent findings about the link between organophosphates and ADHD. One study published this past May found that each 10-fold increase in urinary concentration of organophosphates was associated with a 55 to 72 percent increase in likelihood that a child ages eight to 15 would have ADHD. Of the 1,139 children in the study, 93.8 percent tested positive for detectable levels of one or more metabolites of common organophosphates. A second study, published in August, linked prenatal exposure to organophosphates to increased levels of ADHD in children once they reached five years old. In this case, each 10-fold increase in a pregnant mother's urinary concentration of organophosphates led to a 500-percent increase that her child would be diagnosed with ADHD at age five.
Pesticide Action Network criticizes the EPA's regulation of pesticides, saying they do not account for additive and synergistic effects. "Since the Environmental Protection Agency regulates most chemicals on a chemical-by-chemical basis, the combined and cumulative effects of a mixture of pesticides are nearly impossible for them to address -- and so they usually don't," says a statement on its Web site. The organization cites human health impacts linked to pesticide exposure including birth defects, cancers, Parkinson's Disease, and a host of developmental and neurological disorders and reproductive and hormonal system disruptions. "Given the complexities of chemical causality and disease-formulation," they ask, why take the chance of consuming even residual levels of pesticides in our food at all?
The President's Cancer Panel report, released this past May, concurs, saying that "approximately 40 chemicals classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) as known, probable, or possible human carcinogens, are used in EPA-registered pesticides now on the market." Noting that the levels of pesticides allowed in food by the EPA have been criticized as inadequate and influenced by industry, the report unequivocally cautions Americans that "exposure to pesticides can be decreased by choosing, to the extent possible, food grown without pesticides or chemical fertilizers... Similarly, exposure to antibiotics, growth hormones, and toxic run-off from livestock feed lots can be minimized by eating free-range meat raised without these medications."
Kari Hamerschlag, a senior food and agriculture analyst for Environmental Working Group, criticized AFF's notion that publicizing which fruits and vegetables are the most contaminated with pesticides is dangerous because it decreases fruit and vegetable consumption, citing USDA data showing that consumption of many foods listed in the Dirty Dozen have actually increased in recent years. The Environmental Working Group has not advocated avoiding conventionally grown fruits and vegetables if one cannot find or afford organic. Furthermore, she says, "if AFF's goal is increasing fruit and vegetable consumption, why don't they address the root causes why people do not eat more produce?"
Environmental Working Group, Californians for Pesticide Reform, and 50 other organizations signed a letter calling out CDFA for its misuse in taxpayer dollars in awarding this grant to AFF. The letter reads, in part, "We object to the department's decision to fund an industry communications initiative against legitimate public interest concerns related to pesticide residues on food. The award of this grant strikes a blow to California's expanding organic produce industry and places the department in opposition to the public's interest in reducing pesticide exposure. This action also represents a fundamental failure to implement a fair and balanced grant selection process."
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