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Documents shed new light on US
support for 1964 Brazilian coup
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Mar. 31 (IPS)— A newly declassified audiotape
and documents released Mar. 31, 40 years after the 1964 coup that installed
military rule in Brazil, show that then-US President Lyndon Johnson
was directly involved in the decision to back the coup forces, if necessary.
In a six-minute tape of Johnson being briefed by phone at his Texas
ranch, the president is heard giving a top aide, Undersecretary of State
George Ball, the authority to actively support the coup if US backing
is needed.
“I think we ought to take every step that we can, be prepared to
do everything that we need to do,” he told Ball on Mar. 31, 1964,
the day before Brazilian President Joao Goulart fled the country.
“We just can’t take this one,” he said, apparently referring
to Goulart, whose populist rhetoric and alleged association with leaders
of the Brazilian Communist Party had fostered fears that South America’s
largest country could turn into a giant Cuba.
“I’d get right on top of it and stick my neck out a little,”
added Johnson, who one year later would send thousands of Marines to
intervene in civil unrest in the Dominican Republic.
He then called for “everybody that had any imagination or ingenuity
... [Central Intelligence Agency Director John] McCone ... [Secretary
of Defense Robert] McNamara,” to ensure that the coup that was
already in play in Brazil was successfully concluded.
Goulart, a member of the Brazilian Workers’ Party who was elected
vice president under Janio Qadros, took power in 1961 after Qadros resigned.
Despite Goulart’s democratic antecedents and his repeated efforts
to reassure Washington that he was not setting Brazil on a radical path
and had no intention of aligning the country with Cuba or the Soviet
Union, US officials, still shaken by the Cuban Missile Crisis of October,
1962 — which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to
the brink of nuclear war — adopted an increasingly hostile position.
Washington was represented in Brasilia by Ambassador Lincoln Gordon
whose chief military attaché, Gen. Vernon Walters, was a particularly
close friend of Brazilian Gen. Castello Branco, who would be declared
president after Goulart’s ouster. Walters later became deputy director
of the CIA and eventually US ambassador to the United Nations under
Ronald Reagan.
In addition, the CIA had a heavy presence in Brazil at the time, and
was implementing a number of covert operations designed to bolster the
opposition to Goulart.
As with the case of the US ambassador in Chile during the early 1970s
when the CIA was actively trying to destabilize the government of President
Salvador Allende, Gordon, who is now 92 years old, was reportedly kept
in the dark about the agency’s specific operations.
Much has already been revealed about US support for a military coup.
In 1976, for example, secret documents uncovered by a graduate student
at the University of Texas and later published in the Brazilian press
offered some details about CIA operations and also confirmed that Washington
had deployed an aircraft carrier task force that included destroyers
and oil tankers off the Brazilian coast at the time of the coup, presumably
to intervene either covertly or overtly on behalf of the coup forces,
if Gordon deemed it necessary.
At that time, Gordon, who could not be reached for comment for this
article, admitted the deployment had taken place but insisted that it
was “a contingency never put into effect. We feared the possibility
of a civil war ... and one side might need some outside help.”
The new documents and audiotape, which were officially declassified
last month when they were obtained by the independent National Security
Archive (NSA), include at least two of the documents — including
a lengthy cable from Gordon on the political situation as of Mar. 27,
1964 — that were disclosed in 1976.
But, in addition to the audiotape, four of the documents, including
two CIA memoranda and two State Department exchanges, have apparently
not been revealed previously.
“These documents reflect the degree to which the Johnson administration,
starting with the president himself, was willing to intervene to ensure
the success of this coup,” said Peter Kornbluh, the chief Latin
American researcher at the NSA.
“They shed new details about sending arms and ammunition via submarine
and appropriating an Esso tanker to support rebels forces, if needed.
“They make it more clear than ever before that the US was prepared
to do a great deal — overtly if necessary — if the coup did
not quickly succeed, to ensure that Goulart was indeed overthrown,”
he added.
The first cable, which is perhaps the best known, was sent Mar. 27 by
Gordon to top foreign-policy cabinet officials and provides a lengthy
assessment of Goulart’s alleged intention to “seize dictatorial
power” with the Communist Party. It also recommends “a clandestine
delivery of arms” for Branco’s supporters, as well as a shipment
of gas and oil to help them succeed.
The ambassador also urges the administration to “prepare without
delay against the contingency of needed overt intervention at a second
stage.”
A follow-up cable sent by Gordon the following day reiterates the request
for a secret shipment of weapons to be “pre-positioned prior any
(sic) outbreak of violence” and to be “used by paramilitary
units working with Democratic Military groups.”
A third document from the CIA, dated Mar. 30, is a field report from
intelligence sources in Belo Horizonte that asserted “a revolution
by anti-Goulart forces will definitely get under way (sic) this week,
probably in the next few days,” and would take the form of a march
by military forces toward Rio.
According to the source cited in the cable, the “revolution ...
will not be resolved quickly and will be bloody.” In particular,
the source anticipates fighting with other army units in Sao Paolo and
a protracted military struggle in the north.
The navy was seen as likely to favor Goulart, while “the air force
is so divided that it will not be a problem in the early stages [and]
eventually it should come to the aid of anti-Goulart forces.”
A secret cable dated Mar. 31 to Gordon from then-Secretary of State
Dean Rusk provides a list of White House decisions “taken in order
[to] be in a position to render assistance at appropriate time to anti-Goulart
forces if it is decided this should be done.”
The decisions include sending US naval tankers from Aruba to Santos,
assembling 110 tons of ammunition and other equipment for the anti-Goulart
forces, and dispatching the naval task force to be positioned off the
coast.
The final document, dated Apr. 2, 1964, is from the CIA confirming Goulart’s
departure into exile in Uruguay on the same day and the success of the
coup.
While the new releases contribute more to what is known about the coup
and the US role in it, the record remains far from complete, according
to Kornbluh, who said the CIA has failed to disclose documents relating
to its operations in Brazil, in contrast to those concerning its actions
with respect to the military regimes in Chile and Argentina.
“Declassification of the historical record on the 1964 coup and
the military regimes that followed would advance US interests in strengthening
the cause of democracy and human rights in Brazil, and in the rest of
Latin America,” he said.
DOJ investigates CMS health
care at Missouri prison
By Michael Rigby
Mar. 1-- Allegations of improper medical treatment, lack of
medical treatment, and several suspicious deaths at the Women’s
Eastern Reception, Diagnostic and Correctional Center, a state women’s
prison in Vandalia, Missouri, has prompted an investigation by the Civil
Rights Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ). Health care services
are provided by Correctional Medical Services (CMS).
Death is no stranger at the Vandalia prison. On Mar. 23, 2003, Crystal
Smith was found unresponsive in her cell. She was later pronounced dead.
Her sister, Angela Smith Hynes, voiced concerns that Smith may have
been denied needed medications.
On July 2, 2003, Vandalia prisoner Al’Deana Simmons, 33, was pronounced
dead after she was discovered unconscious. Prison officials told her
mother, Virginia Terry, that she choked on her breakfast; however, the
death certificate listed the cause of death as a ruptured aneurysm.
Terry said that her daughter had been complaining about poor health
care at the prison in her letters and phone calls home. Simmons called
home the day before she died. “She said her head was sizzling and
that she was going blind,” said Terry. “The prison doctor
saw her for 10 minutes and said that nothing was wrong.”
In September 1999, Stephanie Rane Summers, 48, died from untreated hepatitis
C at a Columbia, Missouri hospital after being transferred there from
the Vandalia prison. The state had granted Summers a medical parole
just 13 hours before her death, said Summers’ sister, Sara Gilpin.
According to Gilpin, for two-and-a-half years prison doctors refused
to test her sister for hepatitis C or evaluate her for placement on
a liver transplant list, even though it was recommended by outside doctors
who examined Summers. “All my sister was ever given was vitamin
K shots to help [blood] clotting and water pills to remove the fluid,”
said Gilpin, who has filed a federal lawsuit over her sister’s
death.
Life threatening problems are endemic at the Vandalia prison. On July
4, 2003, 13 women were taken to the hospital because a CMS nurse gave
them the wrong medication. One woman was rushed to the hospital by ambulance
and placed in intensive care. Several other women were admitted, and
four were kept for observation. The women, all of whom were supposed
to receive Prozac, were possibly given Sinequan instead, said CMS spokesperson
Ken Fields. Like Prozac, Sinequan is an antidepressant but with sedative-like
effects.
The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division is now investigating complaints
about the quality of medical care CMS is providing at the prison. Under
the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, the US Attorney General
may investigate institutions such as nursing homes and prisons and initiate
civil actions to remedy a “pattern or practice” of unlawful
conditions. Ironically, CMS was awarded its first Missouri contract
under former governor John Ashcroft in 1992. As US Attorney General,
Ashcroft now heads the DOJ.
The Missouri Department of Corrections has attempted to stymie the investigation
by refusing investigators access to the prison infirmary or staff, and
requiring that prisoners be interviewed only in the visitation area
during normal visiting hours. Nonetheless, investigators made three
trips to the prison and interviewed 127 prisoners. Terry and Gilpin
also met with investigators, providing them with medical records and
other evidence.
At the DOJ’s request, the American Civil Liberties Union interviewed
several women at the prison and has launched its own investigation into
51 complaints about health care in Missouri prisons.
Source: Prison Legal News
FBI worker saw papers proving US
foreknowledge of 9-11
By Andrew Buncombe
Washington, DC, Apr. 2 — A former translator for the
FBI with top-secret security clearance said she has provided information
to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks which proves senior
officials knew of al-Qaida’s plans to attack the US with aircraft
months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice,
that there was no such information was “an outrageous lie.”
Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session
with the commission’s investigators providing information that
was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting
that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists
were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence
her and has obtained a gag order from a court by citing the rarely
used “state secrets privilege.”
She told The Independent: “I gave [the commission] details of
specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target
information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave
them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is
not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can
be established very easily.”
She added: “There was general information about the time-frame,
about methods to be used - but not specifically about how they
would be used - and about people being in place and who was ordering
these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned.
Major cities - with skyscrapers.”
The accusations from Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani,
Farsi, Turkish, and English, will reignite the controversy over whether
the administration ignored warnings about al-Qaida. That controversy
was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism
official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings.
The issue - what the administration knew and when - is central
to the investigation by the Sept. 11 Commission, which has been hearing
testimony in public and private from government officials, intelligence
officials, and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House
made a U-turn when it said that Rice would appear in public before
the commission to answer questions. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney,
will also be questioned in a closed-door session.
Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially
constructed “secure” room at its offices in Washington on
Feb. 11. She was hired as a translator for the FBI’s Washington
field office on Sept. 13, 2001, just two days after the al-Qaida attacks.
Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.
She said it was clear there was sufficient information during the
spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an
attack. “Most of what I told the commission - 90 percent
of it - related to the investigations that I was involved in
or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side
by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well.”
“President Bush said they had no specific information about Sept.
11 and that is accurate but only because he said Sept. 11,” she
said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes
and that an attack was just months away.
To try to refute Clarke’s accusations, Rice said the administration
did take steps to counter al-Qaida. But in an opinion piece in The
Washington Post on Mar. 22, Rice wrote: “Despite what some have
suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing
to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts
speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held
terrorists.”
Edmonds said that by using the word “we,” Rice told an “outrageous
lie.” She said: “Rice says ‘we’, not ‘I.’
That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defense
Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible.”
It is impossible at this stage to verify Edmonds’ claim. However,
some senior US senators testified to her credibility in 2002 when
she went public with separate allegations relating to alleged incompetence
and corruption within the FBI’s translation department.
Source: Independent (UK)
Prison labor’s race to the global
bottom
By Zack Roth
Mar. 1-- In the early 1990’s David Horwitz owned Kwalu,
a Capetown, South Africa-based company which manufactured generic
tables and chairs for fast food chains, hotels, and hospitals. Furniture
construction is a labor-intensive business, and though Kwalu’s
labor costs in Capetown were low, Horwitz thought he could make them
lower still. So in 1992 he relocated the entire operation to the town
of Ridgeland, South Carolina, to take advantage of one of the cheapest
labor sources imaginable: the prisoners of Ridgeland Correctional
Institution. Kwalu now lists its address as a post office box in Ridgeland.
It has become clear that there are companies who find it more efficient
to employ American prisoners that workers from traditional reservoirs
of cheap Third World labor. Depending on who you’re talking to,
this is either a win-win for all concerned, or clear evidence that
capitalism’s relentless “race to the bottom” doesn’t
end with cold sweatshops in Malaysia. The idea of using prison labor
as an alternative to sending manufacturing jobs overseas has gained
ground in recent years, and is prominent among arguments made by supporters
of the prison labor system.
Ken Mellem is one of these supporters. In 1996, Mellem, then CEO of
Geonex, a mapping services company based in St. Petersburg, FL which
had previously contracted with the Pentagon, won a contract with the
English communications giant British Telecom, converting paper maps
onto computer databases. Mellem considered having the work done at
company facilities in India and Indonesia, but eventually he found
that the prisoners of Liberty Correctional in Tallahassee came just
as cheap.
Since the North American Free Trade Agreement went into effect in
1994, the US has lost three million jobs, according to estimates by
Public Citizen, an advocacy group. Using a domestic source of labor
clearly made Mellem feel good about himself. “There are so many
jobs going off-shore that we could bring back,” he says.
But there were also more pragmatic advantages to using Liberty Correctional.
Labor costs for the prisoners -- who were supervised and paid by PRIDE,
Florida’s state-run “prison-labor contracting” firm
-- were comparable to those for the Asian workers. “We paid a
rate that was competitive overseas,” Mellem says, meaning about
90 cents to $1.00 per hour. But what really swung it for him were
the benefits of an English-speaking work force, and the convenience
of having the work done at an accessible location in the same time
zone as company headquarters.
According to Mellem, things worked out well, and not just for Geonex.
“These people had never worked as a team before,” he says.
“They got training; they learned to follow directions.”
Mellem believes that getting prisoners to work productively while
on the inside helps prepare them for life after their release: “We
hired three inmates out of Liberty once they finished. They were excellent
employees, dedicated, with work skills. One of them said to me, ‘I
can make more money doing this than I can stealing.’ ”
Mellem was so pleased with his experience that he testified before
Congress the following year about the benefits for the private sector
of Florida’s state-run prison labor industry, and about the system’s
rehabilitative effects. He’s since been appointed by Governor
Jeb Bush to PRIDE’s board, where he’s working to expand
the prison labor system.
Mellem speaks with conviction about the benefits for prisoners of
using prison labor to replicate conditions on the outside, the better
to prepare prisoners for their release. But critics of the system,
like human rights activist Paul Wright, have trouble believing that,
for the private sector, easing transition into the outside world is
really the priority. “If they want to emulate conditions on the
outside, can prisoners unionize to collectively bargain for their
wages and work conditions?” Wright asks. “If not, then how
voluntary is it?”
Wright also points out that the jobs prisoners get training for no
longer exist “on the outside” in this country. Unicor, the
agency that supervises federal prison labor, can only legally contract
with companies who would otherwise have sent the jobs overseas.
The rule is to ensure that jobs are not outsourced from non-prisoner
domestic labor, but its very existence undermines the argument that
job skills being taught will be valuable upon release -- unless those
prisoners were planning to move to China.
For Unicor, as for Ken Mellem, bringing jobs home from developing
countries is part of the point. Unicor , also known as Federal Prison
Industries, uses federal prisoners to provide “services”
for corporations. It’s forbidden from manufacturing products
for the private sector, but prisoners do non-manufacturing jobs like
data-entry, magazine stuffing, and manning call centers on behalf
of private companies. As of September 2002, Unicor had industrial
operations at 111 factories, located at 71 facilities within the federal
prison system. These factories employ over 21,000 prisoners, or over
18 percent of the federal prisoner population, and pay anywhere from
23 cents to $1.15 per hour.
Worldwide Automotive, which rebuilds starters and generators for cars,
used to operate plants in China, Malaysia, and Mexico. Now, through
Unicor, it employs 120 prisoners at a Petersburg, VA correctional
facility. The Worldwide Automotive contract is a poster child for
the “job repatriation” idea that Unicor director Steve Shwalb
has been seeking to promote over the last few years. Schwalb announced
in 1998 that Unicor’s work for the private sector would focus
on winning back jobs that had gone overseas. And he told the Wall
Street Journal the following year that he sees Unicor expanding into
making toys and sneakers, almost all of which are made abroad
But what’s striking about the “job repatriation” plan
is how unsuccessful it’s been. Though some free market ideologues
point to prison labor as a means of circumventing inefficiencies like
the minimum wage, the fact is that without significant government
support, Unicor has been unable even to meet its cost.
Schwalb’s lack of success in using Unicor to return jobs to the
US comes as no surprise to Christian Parenti. In “Lockdown American,”
his 1999 study of the nations prison system, Parenti showed why prisoners
will never provide the consistent, productive source of low-cost domestic
labor that is the holy grail of the private sector. One major problem
is the intensely authoritarian nature of prison life, in which almost
every aspect of a prisoner’s daily routine is closely monitored
by guards. Prison staff have no reason to care about the quality of
the work produced, and often look suspiciously at anything that could
upset their system of rigid control. Parenti cites the example of
guards who forbade prisoners to stuff Victoria’s Secret ads into
magazines, claiming material was pornographic.
Aside from the guards, the prisoners themselves are mostly just clocking
hours, and rarely have much incentive to keep quality standards or
efficiency up. According to Parenti, 42 percent of Unicor’s orders
are delivered late, compared to an industry wide average of 6 percent.
The military found that wire manufactured by Unicor failed at nearly
twice the rate of the military’s next worst suppliers. And Navy
officials who bought Unicor products, according to Parenti, complained
that, “the product is inferior, costs more, and takes longer
to procure.”
Once security costs are factored in, as well as lost productivity
due to lockdowns, escapes, and other unavoidable disruptions of prisoner
life, prison labor doesn’t look like such a bargain.
Maybe businesses are also wary of giving prisoners access to sensitive
personal information, like credit card and social security numbers.
Before Ken Mellem of Geonex could land the British Telecom contract,
he first had to convince nervous BT executives that there was no risk
in giving prisoners maps of the English phone system. Unicor never
allows prisoners access to credit card numbers, which limits the type
of “services” it can provide for businesses, and the range
of potential clients it can win.
There’s also a more general public relations problem. Private
firms can’t be entirely sure that their use of prison labor won’t
leak out, and companies don’t want their products associated
in the public mind with convicted felons.
Ultimately, says Parenti, prison labor just doesn’t make economic
sense. “The world is so full of impoverished desperate people
willing to work for next-to-nothing that capitalists will always have
other options.” Schwalb of Unicor now seems reluctantly to agree.
“In the global economy,” he says, “we’re never
going to be more than a rounding error.”
Source : Prison Legal News
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