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The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda

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Edward Herman, famous for his iconoclastic studies (e.g. Manufacturing Consent)with Noam Chomsky, published this book in 1982, though its themes very much apply today. Herman shows that the U.S. mass media almost always accept the U.S. government version of events without question, especially in foreign affairs and cater to its propaganda needs. Herman explains why it is that fascist military regimes in the third world from Indonesia to Brazil to Guatemala to Uraguay to the Philipines to Chile that have often been installed and given heavy aid by the United States and murdered and tortured hundreds of thousands of people, often in extremely gruesome fashion, and yet very little coverage has been given to their abuses, despite massive evidence presented by church groups and human rights organizations, refugees and many others, in contrast to the massive daily coverage of the injustices suffered by dissidents in the Soviet block, the official enemy of the U.S. government and much of big business. He examines why it is that, to give one of many examples, Brazillian labor leader Luis De Silva can be referred to at one point by a New York Times editorial as "the Lech Walesa of Brazil" and yet that same paper can devote very little coverage to the gross injustices he suffered at the hands of a U.S. client government and yet devoted massive daily coverage to the injustices suffered by Walesa in Communist Poland. He examines why it is that while unions were being eliminated and union leaders and members being executed by the thousands in Colombia, Guatemala, Chile and elsewhere, the United States government and its allies and the U.S. media, can launch into a hocus pocus of holy horror at the far less murderous repression of the Solidarity union in Poland. He examines why it is that the media, when they deign to look at the terror in the U.S. backed client states at all, almost never attribute its source to U.S. training and supply of the military officials who conduct it, instead asserting that the client state government is unfortunately unable to control the death squads or rogue segments of the military, despite massive evidence that these elements are firmly under the control of the client government and being directed by it, or perhaps implying that the U.S. is an innocent bystander looking helplessly over a country that has no history of democracy, is prone to violence, etc; he examines why it is that the media rarely focus on the nature of the massive U.S. training of the Latin American militaries where not much emphasis is placed on military training but much emphasis is placed on ideological training, ingraining the idea in these already reactionary forces that any sort of reform movement, however mild, that seeks to help the oppressed peasantry, establish union rights, and so on, is by definition part of a hellish conspiracy of the Soviet Union and Cuba to overthrow Western Civilization, and so on. They are taught that communism is completely evil and that the United States and those who ally with it are the forces of virtue and civilization and that since the popular movements (unions, peasant self-help organizations,etc.) are by definition, not indiginous movements seeking to fight oppression and misery inflicted by very primitive oligarchies, but agents of world Communism, any means necessary can be used to eliminate them. They also tend to be taught advanced techniques of torture.

He examines why the extensive CIA-backed and protected terror network of the Cuban exile community (e.g. Omega 7, once described by the FBI as the "most dangerous terrorist organization in the U.S. today" yet never prosecuted or investigated; or Orlando Bosch who escaped from prison in Venezuela after blowing up a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976, and committing many other crimes) is never examined by the U.S. media. He examines why it is that South Africa's mass murder in its U.S.-backed illegal occupation of Namibia (such as its massacre of over 600 people at Kassinga in May 1978) and murderous invasion of Angola were rarely condemned by the media, though Cuba's perfectly legal responsive military operations on behalf of the Angolan government, with an extremely reluctant Soviet Union in the background, was violently condemned. He examines why it is that the media never has looked into the famous "Operation Condor" began in the mid-1970's on the initiative of Pinochet's Chile which allowed the various intelligence services of the American backed terror and torture regimes (Brazil, Chile, Uraguay, Argentina, Paraguay, etc.) to operate in each other's countries to search for their own exiled dissidents to kidnap and murder, whose victims seem to run into the hundreds at the very least.

He examines, very extensively, why it is that almost all of the U.S. client regimes have instituted economic policies that have resulted in vast increases in malnutrition, unemployment, child mortality, and so on, and great inceases in poverty, yet these regimes are often refered to in the U.S. media as having produced an "economic miracle." He examines why it was that such bizarre terrorism "experts" were given such grave attention in the U.S. media in the 80's, particularly the late Claire Sterling with her methods of scholarship that would make an intelligent ten year old die laughing and her amusing use of the intelligence services of apartheid South Africa and Pinochet's Chile as "sources." Or General Jan Sejna, who according to Sterling fled Czechoslovakia, as the Soviet army invaded in 1968, but who actually left his country after being implicated in a corruption scandal during Dubcek's brief "Prague Spring" government that the Soviets overthrew , with his wild tales of the Soviets training terrorists in his country for worldwide subversion with methods of scholarship and evidence scarcely more compelling than Sterling's.

There is much else in this book that I didn't mention above, including a couple of pages devoted to Israel and what one of its former prime ministers, Moshe Sharett, referred to as its "scared terrorism." Once or twice, as during his devastating critique of the economic situation in the American client regimes, Herman gets a bit too heavy, but those periods are brief and rare.

I was interested in this book some years back, read parts of it, never finished it. One of those sorts
of books, the kind that would be one of 10 - 20 I would have out at any one time while trying to
discover and better understand the world in which we live. Now it is November 28, 2001 and
America has been victim to one of the largest terrorist attacks in history. I decided to look again into
some of the writings on the war on terrorism which actually began long before 9/11/2001.

The Real Terror network is a chilling book. Ed Herman is an expert on terrorism if ever there was
one. Problem is he is not judgmental in his use of the term, as the media then and today tend to
be, so he is brushed aside from the mainstream (certainly have not seen him interviewed on TV
during our newest crisis!). Early on in the book he describes terrorism as the use of violence to
achieve political goals. With this as his starting point, he goes on to examine various activities of
what he calls retail terrorists (ie. small Soviet sponsored, the PLO, Libya etc) vs wholesale
terrorism (ie state terrorism).

Herman's basic premise is that the terrorism carried out with US support in South Africa, Angola,
Cuba, and by Israel far outweigh that carried out by the folks actually branded as terrorists, the
ones we are in the process of "smoking out" today. He goes on to provide a wealth of examples
of US support for terrorism which is documented in a very scholarly way. There is also a very
effective chapter examining the role of the media in defining who we generally think of as
terrorists, by downplaying or completely ignoring our own actions while repeatedly running
stories on enemy terrorism. Basically he is describing the propaganda model he later flushes out
with co-author Noam Chomsky in "manufacturing Consent"
I would suggest that this book be dusted off and read by anyone who has the stomach. It is not a
pretty picture, or an easy read for that matter. It is not overly long book, and I think that if more
people were exposed to truths like the ones Herman outlines, more people would protest, and
likely the world would be a better, at least safer place.

This is an essential read, but note the date - written in 1982, not 1998 as stated on the Amazon.com website. It provides great insight into US foreign policy, particularly in South America up to 1982. You can almost begin to identify with the 'retail terrorist' but then it's the 'state terrorist' that emerges as the real problem. It also makes you realize the enormous extent to which the 'american people' have been duped by the covert operations of Presidents veiled in Hollywood style PR.

When I see this kind of well researched content in the New York Times or the Economist, I'll believe we are on the right track!

By accident, I read the "Marcos Dynasty" after this. Enough said!

I read this book six years ago, so I write this review based only on distant memories. After sitting in a train station and reading the first sixty pages, my life has never been the same. It is methodical, extremely well-documented, and never sensational. I recommend it as a fundamental building block for anyone looking to develop their understanding of the way the world really works.

Twenty-four years have elapsed since Herman exposed U.S. state terrorism and the CIA moles inside the corporatist media that camouflage it. In 1982, William J. Casey and George Bush were lighting up Central America while Reagan was on the mend after being shot by George Bush's friend's son - John W. Hinckley Jr. At the same time in the Middle East, CIA-installed authoritarian regimes in Iraq and in Iran were pitted against each other and lighting each other up. War seems not only to be the health of the state, but its `raison d'etre'.

Today the Bush Crime Family still remains at the helm of what Daddy Bush called "a new world order" in 1989. Never before has American liberty been so threatened as it is now in 2006 by the Bush-n-Blair Crime Alliance. There are dangerous parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany in the way power and rights are systematically being taken away. The United States is sliding fast down the slippery slope to Nazi Germany. Under Bush-n-Blair's War on Freedom, Congress has acquiescently stood by and allowed the executive branch of the federal government to wield the power to: 1) send the whole nation to war on behalf of British interests without a Congressional declaration of war; 2) arrest any American citizen as a suspected terrorist and have the military incarcerate him or her without charge - denying fundamental rights that go back longer than the Constitution, Bill of Rights, or the Declaration of Independence all the way to Magna Carta (this is what the Jose Padilla case is all about); 3) monitor your telephone conversations, email, and bank records without court-issued warrants - while you may NOT monitor the government's telephone conversations, etc in kind; 4) issue secret summonses under the USA (anti)Patriot Act for people's personal and business records, with harsh punishments for those who exercise their right to freedom of speech and tell about the issuance of said summonses; 5) detain people in jail for indefinite periods as "material witnesses"; 6) ignore habeas corpus for people held at Guantanamo Bay and at CIA secret prisons elsewhere, and 7) bomb, shoot, or otherwise kill foreigners at home in their countries.

Herman's book is a chilling account of how corporatist media camouflages U.S. state terrorism and how Hollywood and other media including professional sports distract the American public through entertainment while the U.S. government goes around the globe killing and terrorizing people in its aim to install puppet regimes in other peoples' countries. He said "In short, we have been living not only in an age of escalating `terrorism' but in age of Orwell, where words are managed and propaganda and scholarship are organized so that terror means the lesser terror - the greater terror is defined out of existence and given little attention" (p13). George Orwell, who wrote a futuristic novel based on his WWII experiences at the BBC about state terrorism and the propaganda that disquises it, titled it `1984' but he was really talking about 1944.

Lies and half-truths - readily believed by a nation of people who have been conditioned to believe what they are told rather than what they see - are employed by the U.S. government and its corporatist media in their bombardment of disinformation and propaganda upon the American people. Truth becomes an ineffective counter to mistruth because most people refuse to believe the truth. Americans are so culturally programmed to believe that the truth is mere lies, that they mentally switch off rather than check it out.

After the preface, which runs 20 pages, are five chapters: Chapter 1 is The Semantics and Role of Terrorism, Chapter 2 is Contemporary Terrorism (1): The Lesser and Mythical Terror Networks, Chapter 3 is Contemporary Terrorism (2): The Real Terror Network, Chapter 4 is Contemporary Terrorism (3): The Role of the Mass Media, and Chapter 5 is Remedies for Terrorism. These are followed by Footnotes and an Index.

In Chapter 1, Herman said that `Security' is a timeless excuse used for rationalizing anything that third world elites want, "serving as a morally pure and highly elastic cover" for their abuses of human rights (p36). He added that "since the military elites that rule them [third world countries] have a weak or non-existent local base, and rely heavily on their external supporter (the U.S.= the Godfather), they must be very cooperative with the Godfather and its multinational progeny. They provide `security' - to Godfather and progeny - but regrettably, `insecurity' to the majority of the population"(p36).

Iraq is a good contemporary example of Herman's timeless axiom - Saddam Hussayn always played to the Godfather in Washington, District of Criminals. He invaded Kuwait after Uncle Sam became angry with Kuwait's re-Islamisation of Bosnia and invited him to do so in retribution for Kuwait's slant drilling of Iraqi oil. Saddam's reward was to have his internal enemies (conscripted into the army) wiped out by Daddy Bush's military. This resulting short-term stability to Saddam's regime came at the cost of tens of thousands of human lives.

Saddam later again cooperated with western officials who claimed they were searching for weapons of mass destruction. They didn't exist. But the inspectors did mark the locations of the weapons that Iraqis did possess - this knowledge helping Bush Junior to invade and occupy Iraq after Saddam began losing his grip there despite 130 months of consecutive British and American (Clinton) bombings of Saddam's internal enemies.

Today Saddam is kept alive and on the sidelines in case his dictatorial rule is needed again by `The Godfather', whereas the resistance leader Zaraqawi was bombed to the Heavens. The U.S.-installed sham democracy in Iraq is still fighting against the Iraqi Sons of Liberty who are resisting the invaders. If the sham democracy fails, Bush will no doubt reinstall Saddam in the name of `security' as his father did with the rulers in Central American countries. Self-determination is not permitted in oil-rich countries.

Herman said "If `terrorism' means `intimidation by violence or the threat of violence,' and if we allow the definition to include violence by states and agents of states, then it is these, not isolated individuals or small groups, that are the most important terrorists in the world"(p201). Our troops have long been state terrorists who invade and kill in the perverse name of `Freedom'. Up is Down and War is Peace in Nazi Amerika.

Can we Americans stop our slide down the slippery slope to a Nazi Amerika? Can we turn away from the corporatist Hitlerite direction our government has taken? Herman warned us that the U.S. "has become the big bull in the china shop, threatening the shop as well as the china"(p213), adding only "if they can get away with it"(p220). Herman and veterans for peace recommend opposing state terrorism.