June 10, 2000 International Tribunal for U.S./NATO War Crimes in Yugoslavia
Stan Goff is a retired U.S. Army officer whose experience in Africa and Latin America in "Special Operations" exposed him to many of the Pentagon’s crimes. He sent these remarks for inclusion in the evidence presented to the tribunal.
I want to thank Sara Flounders and the International Action Center for asking me to testify before this body. I apologize for being unable to actually be at the tribunal.
My name is Stan Goff. In February of 1996, at the terminus of an indescribable role conflict, I retired from the United States Army, where I had worked since January 1970. I spent the majority of my military service in a field euphemistically called Special Operations; which included Paratroop, Ranger, Special Forces, and so-called Counter-Terrorist assignments. Beginning in Vietnam, I was sent to eight countries that were actively designated as "conflict areas." Those included Grenada, Somalia, El Salvador, Colombia, Guatemala, Peru, and Haiti. I also trained troops in Panama, Venezuela, Honduras, and Korea. I taught Military Science at the US Military Academy at West Point and tactics at the Army's Jungle School in Panama. I worked in some cases directly under the supervision of the US Embassy.
So I come to you as a former instrument of a system I had no name for, but which I now know is imperialism. I come to you from the belly of the beast.
I did not work in the Balkans, and when the United States government was turning its guns on the people of Iraq, I was busy teaching the same unit of Peruvian Special Forces that held a kangaroo court for activist Lori Berenson how to conduct more effective counter-guerilla operations. But these are all threads in the same cloth.
What I want people to understand here is something about the internal process of the fanged end of this system. The entire system is predicated on omissions, deceptions, and lies, and each one of these that we effectively confront chips away at the wall of impunity. So I want to talk about "human rights," because this is the banner under which imperialism now advances. And all this talk of human rights is shot through with omissions, deceptions, and lies.
Before every mission, Special Operations units are given something called an intelligence summary. This is a very comprehensive and a very straightforward document that is without exception classified SECRET or higher. If I disclose the details of those documents, I can be prosecuted. So in order to retain my freedom of movement and association, I will generalize about them.
In an unspecified number of those countries, we received information in the intelligence summaries about a significant number of the host nation officers with which we were about to work, pertaining to the human rights records of those officers. The intelligence summaries described specific instances of severe human right violations committed by those officers, and in some cases we were told that those activities were probably on-going. Let me restate that in different words, in case my diction confused anyone. Our government sanctioned our direct cooperation with and assistance to known human rights violators on numerous occasions. Our government did this with the full understanding that the insights and skills we were imparting to both troops and leaders would enhance these forces' capability to violate the rights of their own citizens.
Since it was not part of an intelligence summary, I can tell this body that security agents, soldiers, and officers in Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, and Colombia personally boasted to me about having killed civilians, whom they characterized as guerrilla sympathizers and communists, and in Peru I had a Peruvian officer tell me that the only friendly Indian is a dead Indian. This should speak not only to the pervasiveness of our genuine lack of official concern about human rights, but we should note that I was approached freely with these anecdotes. There was a pre-existing level of comfort with American advisors that seemed to give them tacit permission to commit these acts and even relate them openly.
I won't even go into detail about Haiti, where we were ordered to protect the right-wing death squads known as FRAPH from retribution, and we were further ordered to tell the Haitian people that the FRAPH was now the legitimate political opposition.
So when the United States suddenly became preoccupied with Yugoslavia, particularly the human rights of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, I was sufficiently inoculated against military duplicity and corporate press boostering to say to people—who were alarmingly taken in by Wag-the-Dog propaganda—
"This is not what it seems. This is an orgy of omissions, deceptions, and lies."
This body will do a more than adequate job of recounting the specific omissions, the specific deceptions, and the continuing river of lies... the erasure of Serbian history, the demonization of anyone who becomes our official enemy, the long line of fascists and heroin traffickers with which our government has made alliances, and even the apparent miraculous resurrection from the dead of hundreds of thousands of alleged genocide victims.
My contribution is this. I can unequivocally, categorically tell this body that our foreign policy and military establishment has a consistent record—distinct from its pronouncements—of actively supporting regimes who unabashedly violate the most essential human rights of their own people. More importantly, I testify here before you that this support is given with full knowledge of those human rights violations, and that there is an active effort to conceal both the violations and our direct complicity.
My one and only editorial comment is that the posture of our foreign policy and military establishment is not a consequence of some moral failure. I think it is absolutely essential to say that. If we assess this a moral failure, then we are trapped into confronting it with a counter-morality. Smedley Butler, the great Marine Corps dissident, said the flag follows the dollar, and the troops follow the flag. The crimes we are reviewing here should be accounted for, but more importantly we need to identify the economic and political system from which those crimes inevitably grow. That system is U.S. imperialism.
I am proud to be associated with a body that takes up the task of solidarity with and defense of the targets of these continuing imperialist attacks.
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