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Rating: 
Summary: US Style Terrorism
Review: Here is truth dripping blood and gore. Given the stakes this is the kind of book we ought to have again and again until it is finally impressed on the American people what its government is doing in its name, while hypocritically proclaiming loudly the virtues of freedom and democracy
The body of the book is formed by six case studies of US perpetration of and complicity in repression and terrorism in El Salvado, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Indonesia. Sadly, this repression almost unexceptionally has come to pass when the poor and repressed majority has organized to redress the privileged economic elite, often under cover of the Cold War against communism; today more commonly under the cloak of the war on terrorism. Gareau also takes brief but sweeping inventories of similar terror in Cambodia, Iraq, Colombia, Nicaragua, the Congo, Iran and elsewhere. Orwell would fully understand a US State Department list of state sponsors of terror conspicuously missing the United States itself.Gareau gives lie to the "romantic notion" that the attacks of September 11 were prompted by a pathogical hatred of the United States and its freedoms. It is more accurate, he says, to see them as a response to widespread and similar activity in which the US has been much more intimately involved. It is critical to understand this history as the first step in contrition and thusly to preventing future repeats. In each of the six case studies, Gareau asks and answers three main questions: did the government being studied commit state terrorism? how much of the terror was perpetrated by the state, and how much by private guerrillas? And, was the country that committed terror upon its own citizens supported by the United States?
Under US diplomatic cover, 95% of the 75,000 killed in El Salvador between 1980 and 1991 were killed by government forces at the same time the US provided El Salvador $6 billion in aid. In the 1950s successive governments in Guatemala instituted the beginnings of successful reform measures aimed at aiding the poor and disenfranchised. Intolerable to US business interests, in response the CIA trained and supplied an invasion force that deposed President Arbenz in 1954 in a watershed in the history of the country which engendered the bloody repression that followed. An estimated 200,000 were killed between 1962 and 1996, about 93% of them by government forces. The United States provided massive aid to Guatemala during this reign of terror. At the direct behest of Nixon and Kissinger in 1973, on September 11 no less, the duly elected and popular Marxist President Salvador Allende of Chile was assassinated. Installed in his stead was General Pinochet who "disappeared" 3-4,000 and ruled with an iron fist of terror for three decades, with wide support from the United States. These are typical of US foreign policy as documented herein, and continue in the Bush adminstration's war on terror which Gareau says is illegal, immoral, overly belligerent and counterproductive.
Gareau's closes the book with suggested remedies that include calling it a defense rather than a war against terrorism; treating terrorism as a criminal rather a military matter and responding to it as such; more active US participation in international agencies such as the International Criminal Court and the International Atomic Energy Commission; quitting US support of terror in all its guises; adopting a negotiable rather than a unilateral posture vis-a-vis terrorism; making US amends as far as possible to victims of terror it has supported in the past; and establishing a truth commission for the United States so its citizens can know what has been done in their names. This is an important book. I can't think of a topic more important especially in this day and age and especially to Americans. That they are largely unaware of this history is inexplicable. Would they want to remedy this character defect, this book would help.
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