Page 1 of 2 Checkered record of the world's policeman
By Jeremy Kuzmarov
"In the police you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched
prisoners huddling in stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey cowed faces of
the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged
with bamboos."
- George Orwell, Shooting An Elephant and Other Essays.
"The police interrogation rooms smelled of urine and injustice."
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American.
As the United States expands the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Barack
Obama administration has placed a premium on police training programs. The
stated aim is to provide
security to the population so as to enable local forces to gradually take over
from the military in completing the pacification process.
A similar strategy has been pursued in Iraq. American-backed forces have been
implicated in sectarian violence, death squad activity and torture. At the same
time, the weaponry and equipment that the US provided has frequently found its
way into the hands of insurgents, many of whom have infiltrated the state
security apparatus, contributing to the long-drawn out nature of both
conflicts.
Ignored in mainstream media commentary and "think tank" analyses is the fact
that the destructive consequences of American strategy in the Middle East and
Central Asia today are consistent with practices honed over more than a century
in the poor nations of the periphery.
Police training has been central to American attempts to expand its reach from
the conquest of the Philippines at the dawn of the 20th century through the
Cold War-era to today. Presented to the public in both the target country and
the United States as humanitarian initiatives designed to strengthen democratic
development and public security, these programs achieved neither, but were
critical to securing the power base of local elites amenable to US economic and
political interests and contributed to massive human-rights violations. They
helped to facilitate the rise of powerful anti-democratic forces, which
operated above the law, contributing to endemic violence, state terrorism and
corruption.
Quite consistently across time and space, American policy-makers have supported
police suppression of radical and nationalist movements as a cost-effective and
covert means precluding costly military intervention which was more likely to
arouse public opposition.
During the mid 1960s, the Director of United States Agency of International
Development (USAID) David Bell commented in congressional testimony that "the
police are a most sensitive point of contact between the government and people,
close to the focal points of unrest, and more acceptable than the army as
keepers of order over long periods of time. The police are frequently better
trained and equipped than the military to deal with minor forms of violence,
conspiracy and subversion."
Robert W Komer who served as a National Security Council advisor to President
John F Kennedy further stressed that the police were "more valuable than
Special Forces in our global counter-insurgency efforts" and particularly
useful in fighting urban insurrections.
"We get more from the police in terms of preventative medicine than from any
single US program," he said. "They are cost effective, while not going for
fancy military hardware. They provide the first line of defense against
demonstrations, riots and local insurrections. Only when the situation gets out
of hand (as in South Vietnam) does the military have to be called in."
These remarks illuminate the underlying geo-strategic imperatives shaping the
growth of the programs and the mobilization of police for political and
military ends, which accounted for widespread human rights abuses.
This article, drawing on declassified US government archives, examines some of
the landmark instances in the historical development of American police
training programs to highlight the origins of current policies in the killing
fields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Over the years, as US imperial attention has shifted from one region to
another, police training and financing has remained an unobserved constant,
evolving with new strategies and weapons innovations but always retaining the
same strategic goals and tactical elements. Staffed by military and police
officers who valued order and discipline over the protection of civil
liberties, the programs were designed to empower pro-US regimes committed to
free-market capitalist development and helped to create elaborate intelligence
networks, which facilitated the suppression of dissident groups in a more
surgical way.
The US in effect helped to modernize intelligence gathering and political
policing operations in its far-flung empire, thus magnifying their impact.
These further helped to militarize the police and fostered, through rigorous
ideological conditioning, the dehumanization of political adversaries. The
result was a reign of torture and terror as part of police practice in
countries subject to US influence, the devolution of police forces into brutal
oppressors of the indigenous population, and the growth of corruption levels
pushing regimes towards kleptocracy.
In his trilogy on the American empire, Chalmers Johnson demonstrates how the US
has historically projected its global power through a variety of means,
including economic blackmail and the manipulation of financial institutions,
covert operations, arms sales, and most importantly, through the development of
a global network of military bases whose scale dwarfs all previous empires,
including Rome. This article seeks to add another important structural
dimension of US power, namely the training of police and paramilitary units
under the guise of humanitarian assistance, which preceded and continued
through the era of global military bases.
Colonial policing and state terror in the Philippines
In 1898, seeking access to the vast "China market" and building the foundation
of its seizure of Hawaii, the US entered the great "imperial game" through its
colonization of the Philippines. From 1899-1902, the military waged a
relentless campaign to suppress the nationalist movement for independence,
resulting in the death of perhaps two million Filipinos and the destruction of
the societal fabric.
As the fighting waned, the Philippines Commission under future president
William H. Taft focused on building an indigenous police force, officered by
Americans, which was capable of finishing off the insurgents and establishing
order. The constabulary engaged in patrols for over a decade to suppress
nationalist and messianic peasant revolts in the countryside. It frequently
employed scorched earth tactics and presided over numerous massacres, including
killing hundreds of civilians at Bud Dajo in the Moro province of Mindanao,
where Muslims refused to acquiesce to American power and rule.
As Alfred W McCoy documents in his outstanding new book, Policing America's
Empire: The United States, the Philippines and the Rise of the Surveillance
State, the constabulary's success in serving US imperial interests owed
largely to the role of military intelligence officers in imparting pioneering
methods of data management and covert techniques of surveillance, which were
appropriated by domestic policing agencies, including the Federal Bureau of
Investigations (FBI), during the 1st Red Scare.
Under the command of Harry H Bandholtz, the constabulary's secret service
became especially effective in adopting psychological warfare techniques, such
as the wearing of disguises, fabricating disinformation and recruiting paid
informants and saboteurs in their efforts to "break up bands of political
plotters". They monitored the press, carried out periodic assassinations and
compiled dossiers on thousands of individuals as well as information on the
corruption of America's Filipino proxies as means to keep them tied to the
occupation.
One of the major technical achievements was an alarm system, which ended
dependence on the public telephone. American advisors further imparted new
administrative and fingerprinting techniques, which allowed for an expansion of
the police's social control capabilities. The declaration of martial law
ensured minimal governmental oversight and facilitated surveillance and arrests
without due process. Torture, including the notorious water cure, was widely
employed.
After the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Cavite and Batangas due to
heavy guerrilla activity, William Cameron Forbes, a grandson of philosopher
Ralph Waldo Emerson who served as commissioner of commerce and police from 1904
to 1908 and governor general from 1909-1913, noted in his journal that "the
constabulary was now free to run in the suspects. A lot of innocent people will
be put in jail for a while, but it will also mean that some guilty ones will be
caught and the cancer will be cut". These comments exemplify the ends justifies
the means philosophy underpinning the abuse of human rights, which was
characteristic of later interventions as well.
Racism was another prominent factor. Henry T Allen, the first chief of the
constabulary, characteristically referred to Filipinos resisting the US as
suffering from "intense ignorance" and the "fanatical" characteristics of
"semi-savagery". He added, in a letter to Taft, that "education and roads will
effect what is desired, but while awaiting these, drastic measures are
obligatory ... The only remedy is killing and for the same reason that a rabid
dog must be disposed of."
In his memoir, Bullets and Bolos, constabulary officer John R White, who
went on to serve with the US military in World War I, recounts how his men
razed houses, "plundered all that they could carry away" and destroyed sugar
and other foodstuffs in the attempt to isolate and starve the Moro enemy in
Mindanao. In the end, they left the pretty plateau a "burned and scarred sore".
This was hard, he wrote, "but necessary for we did not want the job of taking
Mindanao again". The tactics pioneered in the Philippines paved the way for
later American action under the Strategic Hamlet program in South Vietnam.
The constabulary ultimately succeeded in infiltrating and sowing dissension
within radical organizations, including an incipient labor movement,
contributing to their implosion. It even played a role in apostolic succession
by undermining the influence of Bishop Gregorio Aglipay through the spread of
disinformation. Aglipay was a nationalist with socialist sympathies whose
services were attended by thousands of the urban poor.
The legacy of political repression and corruption survived long after the
Philippines was granted independence in the mid 1930s. The constabulary and
police have maintained their notoriety for brutality, right up to the present,
as new waves of repression and violence are being launched under the guise of
the "war on terror."
'Popping off Cacos': The US Gendarmerie and racial slaughter in Haiti
American policies in the Philippines were replicated in the Caribbean during
the colonial occupations of the 1910s and 1920s, where they contributed to the
spread of considerable violence and repression. In Haiti, the US Gendarmerie
was the brainchild of Franklin D Roosevelt, who, influenced by his cousin,
Teddy, viewed the creation of a local police force as a cost-effective means of
advancing US reach. The gendarmerie was mobilized primarily to fight against
nationalist rebels, known as the Cacos, and to oversee brutal forced labor
regiments imposed by the United States.
As in the Philippines, the United States provided modern police technologies,
including communications equipment and fingerprinting techniques, and worked to
improve administration and records collection to aid in the monitoring of
dissident activity. In a prelude to the Cold War, riot control training was
also provided to facilitate the crack down on urban demonstrations and strikes.
American officers taunted people using racial epithets and did not usually
object when rioters were badly beaten and clubbed, sometimes to death.
Journalist Samuel G Inman observed that the gendarmerie enjoyed practically
"unlimited power" in the districts where they served, creating opportunities
for extortion and kickbacks. "He is the judge of practically all civil and
criminal cases, the paymaster for all funds from the central government and
ex-officio director of the schools inasmuch as he pays the teachers. He
controls the mayor and city council since they cannot spend funds without his
OK. As collector of taxes, he exercises a strong influence on all individuals
in the community." These comments exemplify the consequences of US policy in
giving too much power to police units, resulting in systematic abuse.
The gendarmerie was especially valued for obtaining intelligence and adopted,
as a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), psychological warfare
(psy-war) tactics, including the spread of disinformation, the playing on
native superstitions, and use of disguises to induce defections and infiltrate
enemy camps.
One of the gendarmerie's chief psy-war experts, Captain Herman H Hanneken
blackened his skin, disguised himself as a Caco and bribed a bodyguard to gain
access to the camp of leader Charlemagne Peralte, who became known as the
"black Christ" after images of his decapitated body strung up on a cross were
disseminated for intimidation purposes. Political terrorism would remain a
feature of American counter-insurgency strategy through the Vietnam War-era and
continuing today in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The violence that was endemic to the American occupation of Haiti was in large
part racial. On search and destroy missions, "popping off" Cacos was likened to
a sport, much like with the "pulajanes," "ladrones" and "gu-gus" in the
Philippines, and later the "gooks" in Vietnam.
Colonel Robert Denig noted in his diary that "life to Haitians is cheap, murder
is nothing". Lieutenant Faustin Wirkus added that killing Haitian rebels was
like playing "hit the nigger and get a cigar games" at amusement parks back
home. After the Caco movement was destroyed and the Marines were withdrawn, the
US continued to arm and train the gendarmerie which it recognized as a pivotal
instrument of power.
Following a period of military rule in the 1940s, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier
used the police to suppress political dissent, orchestrating what internal
reports referred to as "an active campaign of harassment and terrorism all over
the country". This fits in with a broader regional pattern, as the US-created
National Guard evolved into the political instrument of dictators Anastasio
Somoza in Nicaragua and Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, both having
emerged from police ranks.
The police programs thus contributed not only to the spread of political
violence in suppressing anti-occupational resistance, but also paved the way
for an era of strong-armed rule and state terrorism after American colonial
occupations formally ended.
Police training and political terror in South Vietnam
Building off the techniques pioneered in previous interventions, police
training programs were an integral part of American counter-insurgency strategy
in Vietnam, where they aided in the creation of an Orwellian-style police state
and helped to stoke civil conflict.
Training began in 1955 as a centerpiece of America's "nation-building" campaign
on behalf of president Ngo Dinh Diem, who replaced French puppet emperor Bao
Dai following the temporary division of the country under the 1954 Geneva
Accords. Valued by the US for his anti-communism, Diem had little interest in
developing a Western-style democracy and wanted to establish his own political
dynasty. The principal US motive was to contain the spread of the Chinese
revolutionary movement, which threatened the Open Door policy. The Dwight D
Eisenhower administration refused to allow mandated elections to unify the
country, which it knew would be won by the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh,
whom the State Department referred to as the "ablest" and "most charismatic
leader" in the country.
The police operation was run by Michigan State University (MSU) faculty under
contract with the State Department. Much like in the Philippines and Haiti
decades earlier, the United States stressed mass surveillance capable of
monitoring subversion and dismantling the political opposition to Diem.
New technologies hastened the scale of violence associated with these efforts,
though proved limited in engendering a favorable outcome for the United States.
American advisors urged police to develop a more efficient record gathering
system and modeled the Surete (civil police force) after the American
FBI, arming it with 12-gauge shotguns, sedans, ammunition, and riot-control
equipment to counter subversion. There were few pretenses from the beginning
that the police were anything but a political instrument, with many top
officials, including Surete Director Nguyen Ngoc Le, having been previously
trained by France.
The MSU team developed an identity card system to monitor political activity as
part of Diem's anti-communist denunciation campaign. Those found with links to
the Vietminh, who had led the liberation struggle against France, were arrested
and faced torture at an assortment of prison camps, or were "disappeared," as
internal reports noted. Even Diem's own chief of staff, Tran Van Don, derided
the use of "Gestapo-like police raids and torture" against "those who simply
opposed the government".
US support was crucial in shaping South Vietnam's evolution into what Foreign
Affairs described as a "quasi-police state marred by arbitrary arrests,
censorship of the press and the absence of political opposition". The passage
of law 10/59 allowing for the execution of regime opponents resulted in the
declaration of armed resistance by the National Liberation Front (NLF), whose
leader, Nguyen Huu Tho was rescued from house arrest through infiltration of
Diem's police by revolutionary supporters.
Starting in 1961, after taking over from Michigan State, the United States
Agency for International Development's Office of Public Safety (OPS) sent
advisers to Malaya for counter-guerrilla training. Over the next fourteen
years, working with the Public Safety Division of the US Operations Mission to
Vietnam (USOM), the OPS provided more than 300 advisers and $300 million
towards this goal, bolstering the number of police from 16,000 to 122,000.
They funded eight specialized training schools and built over 500 rural police
stations and high-tech urban headquarters equipped with firearm ranges,
computer systems and padded interrogation rooms. The OPS also helped to create
a telecommunications network linking police headquarters in rural villages to
major cities such as Saigon.
As in the Philippines and Haiti, emphasis was placed on building a corps of
informants and developing a climate of fear to intimidate those who might
challenge the government. To this latter end, psychological warfare teams
painted a ghostly eye on the doors of houses suspected of harboring "Vietcong"
agents. Penetration by the NLF, however, and a lack of conviction on the part
of American trained forces helped to stymie these efforts, to the frustration
of many American advisors who could not get around the strength of Vietnamese
nationalism and political dynamic underlying the civil war. Language and
cultural barriers and an underlying paternalism further strained social
relations and made communications difficult, limiting effectiveness.
In May 1963, as opposition to Diem's rule intensified, police killed nine
monks, as well as three women and two children at a rally against religious
persecution and government violence. In July, according to OPS adviser Ray
Lundgren, in spite of the "amazing results" yielded by riot control courses,
police again displayed "unnecessary brutality" in suppressing a peaceful
Buddhist rally against repeated injustices, beating monks and other civilians.
In November, Diem was overthrown in a coup d'etat and replaced by a revolving
door of generals, including ultimately Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu, who
had served under the French and were implicated in the narcotics trade. The US
in turn invaded and launched massive bombing campaigns which decimated the
South Vietnamese countryside.
In an attempt to maximize social control in the face of mounting popular
resistance, the OPS expanded the surveillance program first initiated by
Michigan State, issuing identity cards to everyone over 15 and compiling
dossiers on the political beliefs of nearly 12 million people. Once dissidents
were identified, the police undertook night sweeps in their villages and
"arrested anyone under the remotest suspicion of being left-wing", as one
witness put it. "The government has a blacklist of suspects, but I understand
that wives, mothers and fathers - anyone with the slimmest association with
those on it are being caught in the net."
Many of those taken in were peace activists, students, members of oppositional
groups like the Hoa-Hao and Cao Dai sects, and politicians who were seen as
threats to the reigning junta. Echoing his predecessors in previous
interventions, CIA Station Chief Douglas Blaufarb rationalized the repression
on the grounds that "it was futile to have expected in the circumstances a
punctilious regard in all cases for the niceties of civil rights". Racism and
the perceived inferiority of the Vietnamese "gooks" lay behind wide-scale
human-rights violations.
Some of the worst abuses took place within the prison system overseen by the
OPS. Conditions were described as "nightmarish", "appalling" and equivalent to
"hell on earth", stemming largely from the rampant overcrowding caused by the
influx of political prisoners.
Inmates were packed into tiny cells, where they had to sleep standing up or in
shifts, and deprived of proper food, bathing facilities and medical attention.
At Kien Tung Provincial Prison, just 10 kilometers from the seat of government,
William C Benson of the OPS reported that the cells were "extremely dirty and
the stench so nauseating" that it made him sick.
In An Xuyen, OPS advisor Donald Bordenkircher, who three decades later was
appointed to head the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, wrote to his
superiors that inmates had to sleep next to their own urine and feces and that
the kitchen doubled as a trash dump and was inhabited by giant rats which were
"as large as cats".
Known as a stern disciplinarian, Bordenkircher embodies the continuity in
American policies from Vietnam to Iraq, Afghanistan
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