Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson declared that he would much rather have a free press in this country than a standing army.

We now spend more money on our  "standing army" and weaponry than all the other nations of the world combined! And we have over 700 US "standing army" bases in countries throughout the world!

As for the people's right to know, the US government spent almost $9 billion on keeping information secret last year. We don't know what the CIA and the Intelligence agencies spent because what they spend to keep secrets is classified information!

The government claims that we need to keep things secret from our enemies. But our "enemies" have usually known what was going on when we started wars or secretly overthrew governments. It was the American people who were kept in the dark.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964, which brought us full force into the Vietnam War, turned out never to have happened. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 - and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a "deliberate attack" on a pair of U.S. ships two days later.

The truth was very different.

Rather than being on a routine patrol on August 2nd, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers - in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese Navy and the Laotian Air Force.

"The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place," writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were "part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964."

On the night of Aug. 4th, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf - a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam.

But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to "retaliate" for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened. Cables from the U.S. Task Force Commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to "freak weather effects," "almost total darkness" and an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat."

One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was Squadron Commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," recalled Stockdale a few years ago, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets - there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power."

Secrecy During the War

Seven years later, when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the classified Pentagon Papers, we found out that what we were being told during the Vietnam war was also misinformation. Nixon's response to the leak out was to send "the plumbers" to break into Daniel Ellsburg's psychiatrist's office and try to

get something on Daniel Ellsberg!

We have to ask how well secrecy served democracy in the Vietnam War years, when 50,000 Americans were killed, and millions of Vietnamese lost their lives.

I did not grow up thinking that our government lied to us. But that has changed over the years. In the 1980's a number of Salvadorans arrived in Santa Cruz, and we were part of an effort to help them find housing and other necessities.

All of a sudden, I was exposed to two conflicting stories. On the one hand, I was confronted with people who had witnessed massacres in El Salvador.

 Don Gregorio had had 27 family members killed by the military and death squads. One of the Christian base communities met in his house. The army came and burned the house down with his niece hanging from the rafters inside it. Don Ramon was a Catholic catechist. The Salvadoran military came in and killed all his fellow catechists. He was sleeping up on the mountain, so he escaped the massacre.

It's always about the MONEY!

On the other hand, I had our government's story of what was going on there. According to the US government, El Salvador was a democracy, and the stories of the massacres were not true. The US government was sending one million dollars a day to support the Salvadoran military.

Nicaragua and the Contras

During the 80's I was invited to go to Nicaragua. Again, I did not know what was really happening there. Two events stick in my mind and heart. I was on a cattle-truck bus which was packed with old folks and children, tomatoes and live chickens. The people were very friendly. Some days later, that very same bus was blown up by the Contras, who used a hand-detonated Claymore mine (thus knowing exactly what they were doing). At the funeral a group of Contras attacked the crowd, killing a number of people, including children.

My second experience was a visit to a hospital for children who had had their limbs blown off by mines that were disguised as toys. Again planted by the Contras. These were my first direct experiences of terrorism, and the terrorism was not perpetrated by our enemies.

When I came home, I found that none of this had been reported. US National television instead had run a story about someone throwing a rock through the window of an anti- Sandinista political party office. President Reagan was on TV comparing the Contras to our own Founding Fathers.

John Stockwell, who sat on the National Security Board with Henry Kissinger, estimates that there have been about 3,000 major secret actions since the founding of the CIA, all of which were classified and hidden from the American people.

return to table of contents 

A Small Building known as "The convent."

El Mozote consisted of about twenty houses situated on open ground around a square. Facing onto the square was a church and, behind it, a small building known as "the convent", used by the priest to change into his vestments when he came to the village to celebrate Mass. Near the village was a small schoolhouse.

Upon arrival, the Salvadoran military found not only the residents of the village but also campesinos who had sought refuge from the surrounding area. The soldiers ordered everyone out of their houses and into the square. They made them lie face down, searched them, and questioned them about the guerrillas. They then ordered the villagers to lock themselves in their houses until the next day, warning that anyone coming out would be shot.

Early the next morning, the soldiers reassembled the entire village in the square. They separated the men from the women and children and locked them in separate groups in the church, the convent, and various houses.

During the morning, they proceeded to interrogate, torture, and execute the men in several locations. Around noon, they began taking the women and older girls in groups, separating them from their children and machine-gunning them after raping them. Girls as young as 10 were raped, under the pretext of them being supportive of the guerillas. Finally, they killed the children. A group of children that had been locked in the church and its convent were shot through the windows.

After killing the entire population, the Salvadoran soldiers set fire to the buildings.

Ray Bonner, who actually reported on the massacre for the New York Times, was removed as a journalist in El Salvador. He later wrote a book called Weakness and Deceit.

The Reagan government claimed that the El Mozote massacre was simply guerilla propaganda.