One Year After Sandy Hook, Shooting is Still a Family Sport

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What was the mother of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooter thinking over a year ago?

Trying to find a way to somehow help her clearly troubled youngest son.

Gun culture is often associated with red states in the South, Midwest and Rocky Mountains. But gun ownership is a time-honored tradition in many blue states, too, like among the bedroom communities within commuting distance of New York City in Southwestern Connecticut.

The late Nancy Lanza in Newtown grew up with firearms and had a pistol permit. She returned to shooting with more intensity, according to one family friend, after her 2009 divorce. She wanted to bond with her youngest son, Adam, especially, who five years before, at 13, had been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, and who, instead of getting better, had been showing signs of social dysfunction and anxiety.

“Shooting was a pastime in which the family engaged,” reads theConnecticut State’s Attorney report of the Sandy Hook massacre released last month. “Both the mother and the shooter took National Rifle Association (NRA) safety courses. The mother thought it was good to learn responsibility for guns. Both would shoot pistols and rifles at a local range and the shooter was described as quiet and polite.”

David B. Lyman is the owner of the Blue Trail Range, “New England’s finest shooting range,” according to the range’s website, “where shooting is a family sport.” Lyman is also an NRA-certified instructor and former national sports shooting champion. He does not seem to have spoken with reporters much since the New York Post last year in the early days after the shooting named the Blue Trail Range as the Lanza family’s preferred gun range.

Did Nancy Lanza go shooting there with one or both of her sons?

“He will not be calling. I can guarantee it,” said a woman about her boss David Lyman after she answered the phone at the Blue Trail Range in Wallingford, about 40 miles from Newtown. An email from bluetrailrange.com later directed queries to Lyman’s lawyer, Craig Fishbein.

“There is nothing that has ever been confirmed,” said Fishbein about whether the Nancy and Adam Lanza went shooting at the Blue Trail Range. “There’s a sign-in process. There’s never been anything showing that.”

David Lyman’s wife, Debbie, runs the “Junior” or child shooting division of the Connecticut State Rifle & Revolver Associationbased in New Haven. One category among Junior competitors is the Smallbore or .22 caliber rifle. One popular rifle among Juniors is the Mark II made by the Massachusetts-based Savage Arms, which describes it as being “light enough to be a child’s first rifle.”

Nancy Lanza owned a Savage Mark II, which was later found near her bed. In the years before she died, she may or may not have encouraged her youngest son, Adam, to use it. All we know now for sure is that he did not partake in shooting competitions. Instead Adam, who was 20 a year ago when he perpetrated the massacre, preferred isolation, computers and video games. One friend told The Wall Street Journal last year that Nancy brought Adam to the range to not only bond with him, but to try and teach him responsibility.

This past spring, as the Sandy Hook heartbreak continued to resonate in Washington and around the nation, the Connecticut State Rifle & Revolver Association held its annual All-State Awards Dinner in Wallingford to honor Junior shooters. Junior Director Debbie Lyman presided over the ceremony, where dozens of boys and girls, some of whom were already bound for college, were honored for having successfully shot in Junior matches.

Did the Sandy Hook shooting ever come up?

“I’m not going to make any comment on the Sandy Hook issue,” Debbie Lyman said this week by telephone from her office at a university-affiliated medical office.

The Guest Speaker for the Junior awards dinner was NRA board member Patricia Clark, who works as a hospital laboratory technician. Earlier this year, I identified her in Mother Jones and The Progressive as the former Chairman of the NRA’s shadowy Nominating Committee, which hand-picks candidates to control elections to the NRA board.

Clark remains an NRA board member and member of the board’s executive committee. She also happens to live little more than a few miles from the site of America’s worst gun tragedy, the now torn-down Sandy Hook Elementary School.

NRA Director Clark declined to return both voice and email requests for comment.

Clark is a nationally recognized Smallbore rifle competitor. Both David and Debbie Lyman are NRA Double Distinguished Expert shooters with the Smallbore rifle, according to an Ohio State website and biography of their son, Remington Lyman. A member of the Ohio State Rifle Team, Remington, who shares the namesake of America’s oldest arms manufacturer, shoots air and Smallbore rifles for the Buckeyes at National Collegiate Athletic Association Rifle competitions.

Surrounded by so many families who have, by any measure, successfully bonded with their children while shooting guns, Nancy Lanza perhaps thought that giving her mentally ill son Adam guns including a Smallbore rifle might somehow help draw him out of his shell. Instead he turned the .22 caliber rifle on her.

“Prior to going to the school, the shooter used a .22 caliber Savage Mark II rifle to shoot and kill his mother in her bed at the home where they lived,” according to the Connecticut State’s Attorney report.

Adam brought two handguns — a Glock 20, a10 mm semi-automatic pistol and a Sig Sauer P226 9 mm semi-automatic pistol — along with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S semi-automatic rifle with him into the Sandy Hook school. He used the Bushmaster to quickly discharge over three hundred rounds, causing the fatal, unspeakable carnage that left 20 first-grade children and six of their teachers dead on the ground.

By then Adam had already left the Savage Mark II behind, back in his mother’s bedroom, after taking the time to use the bolt-action Smallbore rifle to shoot Nancy Lanza four times in the head.

The Connecticut State’s Attorney report concluded that the motive for Adam’s behavior may never be known. But his mother’s actions suggest a different story. No doubt she never should have introduced her youngest son to guns. But her motive for bringing him to a shooting range seems to make more sense once one glimpses the successful families of sports shooters within her community.

One reason gun reform has failed since even the Sandy Hook tragedy may be that advocates have failed to grasp the depth of gun culture in not only red states but also blue ones. Another could be that gun reform advocates have yet to find a way to talk to gun owners without the gun lobby led by the NRA twisting the discussion.
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Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has covered the National Rifle Association for The Village Voice, The Texas Observer, Mother Jones, The Progressive and MSNBC, where, over the past year, he has been a frequent on-air contributor. His clips are posted at www.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank.

Photo: Flickr user Gordon Tarpley, creative commons licensed.

Click here to read the original story in The Progressive: http://progressive.org/one-year-after-sandy-hook-shooting-still-a-family-sport

This Is Why the NRA Endures

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Earlier this year, long before this week’s latest tragic shooting at the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard, one expert after another predicted the gun lobby’s demise. The horrific massacre of mostly first-grade children in Newtown, Connecticut, seemed to have changed the nation’s views of guns. President Obama and Congressional leaders promised action in Washington. Governors in states from New York to Colorado pledged to pass stricter gun laws in their states, too.

For seven long days after Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the gun lobby said not a word. When the National Rifle Association chief executive Wayne LaPierre finally did speak on national television, commentators ridiculed him for sounding so “tone deaf” to the still raw emotions of the nation. His proposed solution of solving gun violence by having more guns rang hollow. The gun lobby looked vulnerable for the first time in decades since it emerged on the national stage during the unsteady, often violent times of the late 1970s.

Gun reform groups stepped up after the Newtown tragedy to do something they had never done before: They tried to match the NRA dollar for dollar in electoral campaigns to help gun reform candidates win. National trends seemed to be on their side. Analysts noted that gun ownership has fallen from half of American households back in the 1970s to a third today, and that politicians have won elections even in conservative states despite having defied the NRA. Soon one New Republic author boldly proclaimed, “This is How the NRA Ends.”

Today, however, the NRA seems strong and at no risk of going away nine months after Newtown’s Sandy Hook school shooting. NRA membership is, by any measure, at a record high. Gun sales across the nation are also breaking records. More importantly, this spring in Washington and this summer in Denver, the NRA has shown it still has the clout to influence major legislation in defiance of what opinion polls post suggest voters want, and to punish individual officials who respond to t voters’ wishes by defying the NRA and its gun rights agenda.

Underestimating the gun lobby has been the gun reform movement’s biggest mistake. Defeating an organization so deeply rooted across so much of American society will require a different approach. The side that wins this debate will be the one that manages to appeal to more gun owners and countless other Americans who share many of the same fears. It will require taking on the gun lobby where it is most vulnerable: its absolutist, if not extremist, ideology that puts forth a false choice between freedom and tyranny. Instead the gun reform movement needs to reframe the debate as a choice between gun violence and gun safety.

Nine months after the Sandy Hook school massacre, millions of Americans are actually living with fewer gun restrictions than before. Six out of the nation’s fifty states have passed stricter gun laws in the wake of the Newtown shooting.

New York, Connecticut, and Maryland have improved background checks before gun purchases, limited military-style, semi-automatic weapons and large capacity magazines, along with requiring safety training and strengthening measures to keep guns away from domestic violence abusers and the mentally ill.

Delaware and Colorado now require background checks on all gun sales. Colorado also limited magazine capacity.

California strengthened laws to confiscate guns from criminals and the mentally ill.

But many other states have moved in the opposite direction.

Arkansas now allows firearms to be carried inside churches and other places of worship.

Wyoming now lets judges decide whether to allow guns to be brought into their courtrooms.

Virginia made the records of concealed carry permit holders private.
This month in Missouri legislators tried to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto of a bill that aspired to make it illegal for state police and other authorities to enforce federal gun laws.

Moreover, in Washington, after their defeat this spring, gun reform groups are not expecting to make any progress until the November 2014 elections. Even then it remains far from certain how many or whether enough gun reform candidates may win.

What accounts for the gun lobby’s uncanny pull across the nation?

Many critics blame the influence of the gun industry. No doubt the gun industry plays a major role. In January I reported first in Mother Jones and later The Progressive how George K. Kollitides II, the CEO of Freedom Group that made the Bushmaster AR-15 semi-automatic rifle used in Newtown, had quietly served on the NRA’s Nominating Committee for its own internal elections. Last year Freedom Group led the gun industry with record sales of $931.9 million. Freedom Group CEO Kollitides is also a Trustee of the NRA Foundation.

Other gun industry executives sit on the NRA’s board. One is Pete Brownell, the third-generation family CEO of Brownells, Inc., America’s largest supplier of firearms parts, tools and accessories, whose father and chairman, Frank R. Brownell III, is President of the NRA Foundation. Another is Ronnie G. Barrett, the CEO of the Tennessee-based Barrett Firearms Manufacturing, which designed the first .50-caliber rifle for civilian use. A third is Stephen D. Hornady, an NRA board director who, like Kollitides, is an NRA Foundation Trustee. Hornady is the second-generation family CEO of the Nebraska-based ammunition-making firm, Hornady Manufacturing.

Other gun industry figures, like Larry and Brenda Potterfield of MidwayUSA, stay out of NRA board politics while still contributing heavily to the gun lobby. A Missouri-based retailer and wholesaler of firearms products, MidwayUSA, has contributed generously to the NRA through programs like “Round-Up,” which allows firearms consumers to round-up their purchase to the next dollar to make a donation in the name of defending the Second Amendment. To date MidwayUSA’s Round-Up program alone has contributed $8.9 million to an NRA endowment.

But gun industry money is only part of the story. Gun ownership may be down across the United States. But gun culture and politics surrounding it still thrive, especially in rural and even many suburban areas in nearly every state.

Moreover, gun rights activists have been organizing voters at the grassroots decades before anyone ever heard of the Tea Party. So-called Second Amendment activists may not have majority appeal, but they seem have to deep support across sizable minority of the population, which translates into a majority in many predominately white and rural voting districts.

Here the recall votes in September of Colorado are instructive. State senators John Morse from Colorado Springs and Angela Giron from Pueblo became the first elected officials ever recalled in the Rocky Mountain state. Colorado voters in their respective districts and across the state, much like voters across the nation, favored recent gun control legislation requiring background checks on gun purchases and limiting ammunition magazines to no more than fifteen rounds. The incumbents were put at a disadvantage in the recall election by a court ruling disallowing mail-in ballots. At the same time, they were helped by funds poured into the state by gun reform groups that in the case seem to surpass even campaign spending by the gun lobby.

The two Colorado state senators, one of whom is a former police chief, lost at the polls due to a truly impressive turnout by voters favoring gun rights.
This is what many commentators and NRA critics missed. The gun lobby may not enjoy majority appeal. But it has a larger army of organized, devoted supporters than any other single-issue lobby in America.

The gun reform lobby includes Mayors against Illegal Guns, funded by billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Americans for Responsible Solutions, organized by former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (who survived a 2011 shooting in her Phoenix, Arizona, district that left six people dead, including a nine-year-old girl). These groups have money, but nowhere near the NRA’s kind of grassroots organization.

This also helps explain the defeat in Congress in April of a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia, and Pat Toomey, a Republican from Pennsylvania. The bill was widely criticized as a weak and ambivalent piece of legislation that divided advocates on both sides of the debate, but it would have required background checks for at least all commercial sales of guns. Its defeat was a symbolic, but still powerful victory for the gun lobby, demonstrating the ongoing national power of the NRA.

What is the lesson of the gun lobby’s success since Newtown?

The NRA does not need majority support across the nation or even individual states. As long as it can effectively divert money and mobilize voters to defeat key candidates who vote for gun reform, it can tip local locations in its favor to protect its gun rights agenda.

Promoting any meaningful gun reform in the United States will require organizing people in their communities in a way that progressives in this nation have long dreamed about but rarely been able to do, or sustain for very long. Ironically, if done properly, the need for an effective gun rights movement could finally bring progressives such a chance.

What is not needed to effectively promote gun reform across the nation is for ultra-liberal cable TV commentators who live in cities on either coast throwing up their hands and asking why anyone would ever even need a gun.

Instead, what is needed to finally promote gun reform may seem counterintuitive to some progressive: to acknowledge and respect gun owners on their own terms.

People keep firearms for many reasons. Millions of Americans hunt prey from waterfowl to deer every year. Many homes across America have shotguns, rifles, and other firearms that have been passed down through generations. For many young boys and increasingly girls, getting their own hunting rifle is a rite of passage.
Many other Americans enjoy target shooting, including in highly organized competitions.

And a lot of people have guns for what they perceive as their need for personal protection. Pointing out, as many liberal critics are prone to do, how one is statistically safer in a home without a gun rather than with one is unlikely to resonate across much of the heartland. Instead effective gun reform advocates need to reaffirm Americans’ right to keep their firearms, while making the discussion one about gun safety.

The gun lobby’s core argument is not about gun safety, though groups like the NRA deserve credit, in fact, for organizing more gun safety classes across the nation than any other groups.) The NRA’s driving principle is that guns in the hands of citizens are the first check and necessary bulwark against the possibility of government oppression. That’s is why the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution, the NRA says.

“Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea,” said NRA CEO LaPierre before a United Nations panel last year in New York.

“History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

This is a bogus, ahistorical argument as I wrote in The Progressive in March in “Gun Control and Genocide.” But it is a view that many self-described Second Amendment absolutists in and out of the NRA share.

Only in recent decades did the NRA first become such anideological organization. In fact, for the first 106 years of its existence, the NRA was a gun club devoted to sports shooting and safety training. But in 1977 the NRA got taken over by Second Amendment absolutists and underwent a metamorphosis into the gun lobby.

The late 1970s was a precarious time, marked by rising inflation, oil prices, and crime rates, along with a widespread lack of faith in government institutions. The popular film genres of the decade involved rogue actors taking matters, if not the law, into their own hands often through the use of righteous violence. Films like Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Serpico, and Death Wish all come to mind, and each in their own way seems to validate many of the basic precepts of today’s gun lobby.

NRA conventions are filled every year with predominately white men who all seem to share a fear of the future. Economic decline, decreasing incomes and rising health care costs, combined with the steady pace of changing demographics toward an increasingly “browner” America, along with what many see as eroding social mores exacerbated by mass media, combine to generate fear. The American lifestyle depicted in Norman Rockwell paintings is long gone.

For many Americans, the guns they keep in their homes make them feel like they still have some power in the face of a world they no longer know nor understand.

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations,” said then-Senator Barack Obama in a famous 2008 electoral campaign gaffe that actually touched on some truths.

Ideological extremism is where the gun lobby and the NRA are most vulnerable. Clinging to guns and bibles as a way of trying to hang on to a fleeting past is not the same as arming oneself to fight a future war against one’s own government. But the latter notion has been the driving ethos behind the gun lobby over the past 26 years, even though, until recently, most NRA leaders tried to keep such views quiet and away from public scrutiny.

Now the NRA’s most frequent keynote speaker is Glenn Beck, the former Fox News commentator and rightwing radio talk show host. Survivalists and conspiracy theorists are only growing in importance at the NRA’s base, and they hold views that often go well beyond those of even conservative libertarians. At the same time, the NRA is fighting to retain its mainstream influence within the conservative wing of the Republican Party.

Fear of a future tyrannical government is the main barrier to passage of effective gun control laws in the United States. In states like New Jersey, for instance, one can have an arsenal of weapons in one’s home to protect oneself, as long as the gun owner himself and each handgun are all individually registered with the state.

Most gun owners would have no problem with that. But the Second Amendment activists who dominate and support the NRA do.

Gun reform advocates need to promote the notion that government efforts to regulate gun ownership, to provide background checks for gun purchases, to prevent guns from being in the hands of domestic abusers and other criminals, to prevent guns from ending up in the hands of mentally ill individuals who have been found to be the shooters in so many recent tragedies, are all achievable, desirable ends.

And the legitimacy of the government’s role in regulating firearms transactions was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, in the same decision, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, that upheld the notion that every American citizen, unless there is specific reason to forfeit it, has a right to keep and bear arms.

In short, the gun lobby can be defeated. But only if gun reformers start seeing most American gun owners on they’re own terms and start organizing voters at the grassroots.

Al Sharpton Targeted by Zombie Gun Product?

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“Poor Al he was a Sharp guy,” begins the description of a gun target firm’s newest “Life-Sized Tactical Mannequin Target.” With a dark skin tone and features that seem to resemble the civil rights figure and MSNBC cable news host Rev. Al Sharpton, the Zombie-looking gun target called “Al Zombie”comes with the disclaimer that “[a]ll Zombies Industries’ products represent fictitious characters and are works of fiction” and “[a]ny resemblance to actual persons (living or dead)” is “entirely coincidental.”

Was “Al Zombie” meant to resemble Rev. Sharpton?

“No,” said Nicholas J. Iannitti, Vice President and Director of Sales for ZMB Industries, LLC, by telephone from the firm’s headquarters in Poway, California. “If you look at our website you can see” our statement that all Zombie target characters are fictitious.

But Zombie Industries, on its Facebook page, attributes what seems like a fictitious quote to a a colleague of Sharp ton’s, who, like him, has criticized Zombie Industries for making a Zombie gun target that seems to resemble President Barack Obama, and that was briefly on display last month at a National Rifle Association convention.

“I don’t know,” said Vice President and Sales Director Nicholas Iannitti, when asked about what seems like a tongue-in-cheek product endorsement attributed to the progressive, nationally syndicated talk radio host Joe Madison on Zombie Industries’ Facebook page. “I wasn’t involved.”

In May Madison was on Sharpton’s MSNBC show PoliticsNation, where they both criticized the presence of “Rocky Zombie,” which they said resembled President Obama, at an NRA convention.

Rev. Sharpton called the target a “stunning, offensive display from the far right,” dubbing it the “Right-Wing Horror Picture Show.” Madison on the same program said, “They are a sorry bunch of people that I can’ t use words for, but I do take offense and I think anyone else, black, white or any other color, would take offense at this.”

Little more than one month later, ZMB Industries decided to apparently make use of the controversy. Now the firm has added what seems to be a mocking quote attributed to Madison on itsFacebook page boasting of another new Zombie mannequin target.

“New Model: Gun Control Lobbyist,” reads the main image on Zombie Industries’ Facebook page. “Lower than a snakes Belly!” reads what seems like a product endorsement on the same page, attributed to “Joe Madison, Radio Host describing Zombie.”

Madison, who now has a program on Sirius XM, could not be reached for comment.

To finish reading the article, please click here.

Gun Control and Genocide

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You may also read the article at The Progressive where it first appeared.

Here’s why the NRA is dead wrong about gun control causing genocide. But at least they agree with human rights groups about the horrors of the military dictatorship in Guatemala.

What does America’s gun lobby have to do with the question of genocide in Guatemala? Plenty, although not for anything they did. But for the particular ideology they bring to this and almost every other case of genocide or similar violence in the twentieth century.

Today, in the United States, the gun lobby and gun manufacturers have a joint interest in both fighting gun control and encouraging Americans to buy more guns.

At the same time, gun manufacturing executives play a greater, hidden role inside the National Rifle Association that NRA leaders like to admit, as I helped established in a piece in January on this website.

The gun lobby also shares ideological ground with a small, but vocal group of gun rights activists who, like most NRA leaders and many gun industry executives, take an absolutist view of the American Second Amendment. Their ideology has two articles of faith, and each one reinforces the other. First, even the slightest form of control is likely, if not certain to result in government seizure of all firearms. And, second, gun control itself invariably leads to government tyranny, if not genocide.

That’s another reason why the gun lobby along with many gun rights activists oppose even modest gun control legislation.

And it’s also why the NRA is vehemently opposed to a U.N. Arms Trade Treaty that human rights groups like Amnesty International strongly support.

Two seemingly unconnected events recently unfolded in March more than 2,500 miles apart. On March 18, Guatemala began an historic trial against a former military dictator on charges of genocide. On March 20, Colorado governor John Hickenlooper signed landmark gun control measures in that state into law.

What does one have to do with the other? For Second Amendment absolutists, gun control and genocide, or at least the specter of government violence, are always tightly intertwined.

“This is how it starts. ==> Landmark gun bills signed in Colorado,”@Bobacheck tweeted in Wisconsin just hours after thy became Colorado law, adding hashtags including, “#NRA #2ndAmendment.”

Colorado’s new gun control laws require background checks on private gun sales, and limit magazines for semi-automatic weapons to a maximum of 15 rounds. (New York recently passed a law limiting magazines for semi-automatic weapons to seven rounds, although it may now modify the law to allow use of industry-standard 10-round magazines as long as they are not loaded with more than seven rounds; the District of Columbia limits magazines to 10 rounds.)

The Colorado legislature passed the law three months after this past December’s Newtown, Connecticut grade school tragedy, and in the wake of two more of America’s worst gun massacres over the past 13 years in the Denver suburbs at Columbine High School in 1999 and in an Aurora movie theater last summer. Many Colorado residents along with most Americans, as recent polls suggest, see such measures like background checks as an important step forward for public safety.

But for the gun lobby along with Second Amendment absolutists, the signing of Colorado’s new gun laws –which came only hours after the state’s Corrections director was shot and killed standing in the front door of his own home—is just the first sinister step toward government repression.

“#COLORADO How are they getting away with this crap? It’s coming to a town near you. We better stand, and fight this people,” tweeted @SanddraggerTees on the West Coast, one of countless gun rights absolutists who also rang the alarm just hours after the legislation became law, using the hashtags #2A for Second Amendment and #NRA.

YOUTUBE and the blogosphere have long been full of material alleging historical connections between gun control and genocide.The videos often use dramatic music, images and language, whilethe website prefer elaborate chart presentations to illustrate correlations and, thereby suggest causations between gun restrictions and genocidal violence.

A small group of legal scholars have also written essays, often for journals at small, accredited law schools, making similar but more substantive arguments. Two such scholars, David Hardy and David Kopel, each testified early this year before the Senate Judiciary Committee, not on genocide, but on guns and gun violence in America; the nationally televised audience watching them was not informed that some of their research has been funded by theNational Rifle Association’s Civil Rights Defense Fund, as Irecently reported on MSNBC.com.

Another pair of scholars, who, back in the 1990s, were among the first to assert a connection between gun control and genocide, began one of their first law review articles on the matter in a defensive tone. The language perhaps indicates how some of their peers view their arguments.

“This essay seeks to reclaim a serious argument from the lunatic fringe,” begin Daniel D. Polsby and Don B. Kates, Jr. in “Of Holocausts and Gun Control” in the Fall 1997 issue of Washington University Law Quarterly published by the law school of the same name in St. Louis. “We argue a connection exists between the restrictiveness of a country’s civilian weapons policy and its liability to commit genocide.”

One of the NRA-funded scholars who recently testified in the Senate, Kopel, teaches Advanced Constitutional Law as an adjunct professor at Denver University law school. Kopel lists a number of specific cases in his review of a book, “Lethal Laws”, by Jay Simkin, Alan M. Rice and Aaron S. Zelman of the small but voluble gun rights organization, Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership.

Cases where gun control led to genocide, according to the group, allegedly include Armenia under Turkish occupation, Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union, the Holocaust led by Nazi Germany, the Cultural Revolution in China, the genocide carried out by the U.S.-backed military in Guatemala, atrocities in Uganda under Idi Amin, and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The same group along with the NRA’s longest-standing African-American board member, Roy Innis, of the Congress for Racial Equality, also put the more recent genocide in Rwanda on the list.

In the case of Guatemala, the authors of Lethal Laws focus mainly on a time several decades before its genocidal acts occurred. Even Kopel takes issue with the authors’ claim whether repealing gun control laws in the early 1950’s might have made a difference, as most Guatemalans, he points out, were too poor to afford firearms anyway. The main thing the Lethal Laws authors seem to say about Guatemala’s genocidal acts in the early 1980s is that human rights advocacy groups like Amnesty International should have advocated for the arming of victimized populations.

Such an argument would of course violate Amnesty International’s mandate. More importantly, anyone who has ever been to, or spent any time even just reading up on Guatemala would know such an argument is patently absurd. It would have only put the nation’s surviving highlands civilians at risk of even more military reprisals.

The bloody history of Guatemala includes grotesque human-rights abuses—in spite of the fact that there were significant numbers of armed rebels. The insurgents had military weapons, but they were still not strong enough as a force to defend civilians including women and children from brigade-level and other large-unit attacks by the Army.

THE TRIAL of the former military dictator, retired General Efraín Ríos Montt, for genocide is underway in Guatemala City. A U.N. Truth Commission previously documented the wholesale annihilation of men, women and children in hundreds of ethnic Mayan villages while he led the country, calling them “acts of genocide.” The abuses were carried out with CIA assistance, as was established in 1995 by journalist and author Tim Weiner in The New York Times.

In late 1990, in The Progressive, I reported how villagers in Santiago de Atitán finally broke through their own fear of military reprisals to place the photos of hundreds of loved ones who had disappeared over the previous decade on the windows and walls of the village’s town hall. It all began with one family’s photo, and soon became a silent, collective act of defiance of military authority.

Another five years passed before Guatemala’s civil war finally ended. By then, Guatemala’s civil war had been bloodier than all the other wars in Central America combined. More than 200,000 Guatemalans were killed or disappeared. Leftist guerrillas committed some abuses, but the U.N. Truth Commission found the Guatemalan military responsible for 93 percent of the nation’s wartime abuses.

Gun control had nothing to do with it. Instead it was the state’s concentration of power by the military as an institutional that facilitated the abuses. Even as the massacres were still being carried out, military authorities began organizing civilians in villages whom they deemed as being less tainted by rebel ideology into military-controlled “strategic hamlets” or population centers. In other villages, where surviving residents were not forcibly relocated, the Army organized the males into the civil defense patrols and armed them with M1 carbine rifles.

Unlike the claims of Second Amendment scholars and activists, the same phenomenon of military power being the primary factor leading to genocide or similar acts is characteristic of state violence committed by other governments in previous eras.

“The history of gun control in Germany from the post-World War I period to the inception of World War II seems to be a history of declining, rather than increasing, gun control,” wrote Bernard E. Harcourt in the Fordham Law Review in 2004. Debunking the arguments made explicitly by NRA activists and Second Amendment scholars point by point, Harcourt concludes their claims “are not about history, nor are they about truth. These are cultural arguments.”

Other scholars looking at the Holocaust and other genocidal acts seem to agree.

“Perhaps the greatest source of power in an oppressive society in times of war is the military establishment that is identified with the authorities in charge,” wrote scholar Vahakn N. Dadrian in “The Comparative Aspects of the Armenian and Jewish Cases of Genocide: A Sociohistorical Perspective,” in the 2008 edited volume, Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide.

Now in Guatemala prosecutors are alleging that General Montt presided over military counterinsurgency efforts that targeted not armed leftist guerrillas trying to overthrow the government, but explicitly unarmed civilians suspected of supporting or even being sympathetic to the rebel cause.

“A woman was found hiding in a ditch and realizing her presence, the point man fired, killing her and two ‘chocolates,’” according to one platoon report from mid-1982 called “Operation Sofia” and obtained by the National Security Archive of George Washington University. The “chocolates” referred to two children she was protecting.

One former Army sergeant operating in the Quiché region, where many abuses were concentrated, told me during the war how his commanders justified such brutality. “The innocent pay for the sins of the guilty,” he explained, saying the innocents referred to unarmed civilians and the guilty referred to the armed guerrillas.

When the military confronted unarmed civilians, there was “a clear indifference to their status as a non-combatant civilian population,”later concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. The level of carnage in Guatemala was extreme even when compared to other bloodied nations in the region like El Salvador.

“In the majority of massacres there is evidence of multiple acts of savagery, which preceded, accompanied or occurred after the deaths of victims,” concluded the U.N. Truth Commission. “Acts such as the killing of defenseless children, often by beating them against walls or throwing them alive into pits where the corpses of adults were later thrown; the amputation of limbs; the impaling of victims; the killing of persons by covering them in petrol and burning them alive; the extraction, in the presence of others, of the viscera of victims who were still alive; the confinement of people who had been mortally tortured, in agony for days; the opening of the wombs of pregnant women, and other similarly atrocious acts.”

BUT WHEN it comes to one thing, Second Amendments scholars are closer to human rights advocates than to many American conservatives about Guatemala. Back in late 1982, President Ronald Reagan, whom many conservative Republicans still revere, met General Montt and afterward told reporters that he thought the Guatemalan dictator was getting “a bum rap” over his alleged human rights abuses.

Today’s gun lobby scholars disagree. They and other gun rights absolutists fault President Reagan for supporting gun control measures including the Brady Bill mandating background checks after his press secretary, Jim Brady, was shot and Reagan was wounded, and for later speaking out against non-sporting, high-powered weapons.

But some of the same leading Second Amendment scholars also reject Reagan’s apologies for Guatemala’s human rights record under General Rios Montt.

“Perhaps the most overlooked genocide of the twentieth century has been the Guatemalan government’s campaign against its Indian population,” wrote Kopel in 1995. One reason “may be that the Guatemalan government has been friendly to the United States.”

He’s right about that.

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist and MSNBC Contributor. He has been covering the gun lobby since the mid-1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post and Mother Jones. He’s been covering Guatemala since the late-1980s, writing for outlets including The Progressive, The Wall Street Journal and The Texas Observer. Smyth is the author of the 1994 Human Rights Watch report released on the eve of genocide, Arming Rwanda, and of the 2010 study, “Painting the Maya Red: Military Doctrine and Speech in Guatemala’s Genocidal Acts”, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His clips are posted atwww.franksmyth.com, and his Twitter handle is @SmythFrank .

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

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http://www.progressive.org/what-judiciary-comm-should-ask-wayne-lapierre

What the Judiciary Committee Should Ask Wayne LaPierre

by Frank Smyth, January 29, 2013, TheProgressive.org

On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on gun violence featuring testimony from the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre, as well as Mark Kelly, the husband of former Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, who was shot in the head while holding a public meeting in her district two years ago.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should take the opportunity to press LaPierre on whether his organization truly represents the views of most American gun owners–and on what, specifically those views are.

While the NRA boasts a 4 million strong membership, it has a secretive and tightly controlled process for choosing its board of directors.

That’s why journalists did not find out that one of the NRA’s most trusted, top officials lives just a few miles from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Patricia A. Clark, a longtime Newtown resident, is chairman of the NRA’s shadowy, but powerful nominating committee.

She is also an instructor in the Eddie Eagle GunSafe program–heralded right after the Newtown tragedy on NBC’s “Meet the Press” by Wayne LaPierre–but she has been on the NRA’s governing board of directors since 1999, entrusted with ensuring that the NRA board’s own ruling clique remains in power.

I have spoken with numerous NRA members who complain about the obscure, Politburo-like governance of the NRA, which keeps ordinary members in the dark about how the organization is run and by whom.

One of the figures whom the NRA board quietly appointed to the 2012 Nominating Committee is George Kollitides II, the chief executive of one of America’s largest consortiums of gun manufacturers. Kollitides last year also became head of the consortium Freedom Group, which includes the company that made the Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle used not just at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut, but also at last year’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, and, a decade before, by the DC sniper in and around Washington.

The NRA’s executive vice president and chief executive officer, Wayne LaPierre, has artfully managed the gun lobby’s message for more than 20 years. His skills include knowing what not to say and when.

A little more than one week after the Newtown shooting on “Meet the Press” with David Gregory, LaPierre made a wholly pragmatic (and not necessarily convincing) argument. When asked whether he would support any gun control measures including restrictions on high-capacity magazines, LaPierre replied, “We don’t think it works, and we’re not going to support it.”

Instead he said the NRA will “support what works,” making the case to put armed guards or police in every school. LaPierre’s TV comments then and in a “no-questions” press conference right after Sandy Hook seemed to resonate, as, for weeks, news outlets explored how and whether armed guards in schools might work.

But the main argument driving the modern NRA is not a pragmatic, but an ideological one.

“American gun owners will never surrender our Second Amendment freedom. Period,” LaPierre said in July, expressing the NRA’s opposition to a proposed U.N. Arms Trade Treaty. “Our Second Amendment is freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea. History proves it. When you ignore the right of good people to own firearms to protect their freedom, you become the enablers of future tyrants whose regimes will destroy millions and millions of defenseless lives.”

That statement suggests the NRA sees the Second Amendment as being more important that all nine other articles of the Bill of Rights, or any other principle or article of government including perhaps the original U.S. Constitution that became law by itself several years before.

LaPierre made no reference to the Second Amendment at all last month in his overly hyped press conference at NRA headquarters one week after the Newtown shooting. On “Meet the Press,” he only referred to it negatively, saying he and the NRA will not back any effort “to destroy” or “lose the Second Amendment.”

But what exactly does than mean after Newtown? NBC’s David Gregory was credited with challenging LaPierre on his vague, unsubstantiated claims that gun control measures won’t work. But he missed an opportunity to probe the longtime NRA chief on whether his interpretation of the Second Amendments means he would never support gun control measures, even if they could be proven to work.

LaPierre, who earned close to $1 million in salary and other compensation from the NRA and related organizations in 2010, has been at the NRA’s helm for the last 22 years.

Few people remember that, before LaPierre, the NRA was not always so extreme. Back in 1968, the NRA’s then-executive vice president, retired general Franklin Orth, supported what still stands as America’s most important gun control law. The Gun Control Act regulated the interstate sale of firearms and effectively rewrote a prior, post-Prohibition-era law banning machine guns or fully automatic weapons. The act passed in 1968 just months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy, and five years after Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy with a single, bolt-action rifle he bought through an ad in the NRA’s American Rifleman magazine.

But a group of hardline gun rights advocates resented what they saw as a sell-out of Americans’ Second Amendment rights. LaPierre began working as a paid lobbyist for the NRA in the late 1970s, just as the hardline advocates were consolidating control of the NRA board. For the next two decades, the NRA’s internal debate boiled down to one question: whether to try and repeal the ban on fully automatic weapons, or let it stand while allowing no other gun control regulations. (A chronology of U.S. laws concerning “Fully-Automatic Firearms” compiled in 1999 and still posted on the website of the NRA’s lobbying wing is sympathetic to a Georgia man who unsuccessfully tried to register a fully-automatic weapon in 1986.)

LaPierre became the NRA’s operations chief in 1991, right before a series of raids by U.S. agencies lead to many violent deaths over illegal guns. In 1992 federal charges related to the sale of two illegal, sawed-off shotguns eventually led to a federal raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho resulting in the wounding of two men including the suspect, Randy Weaver, who was a white supremacist, and the killing of his wife, and their 14-year-old son along with an agent of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms or ATF.

But it was another federal siege, this one over illegal, fully-automatic firearms, less than a year later that became nothing less than a call to arms for gun rights hardliners. In February 1993, federal ATF agents attempted to serve a search warrant to look for the illegal, fully automatic firearms at the compound of a small religious sect known as the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. After a 50-day standoff, ATF agents launched an assault, and the ensuing firefight along with a fire of still unclear origins resulted in the deaths of at least 74 people including 25 children.

LaPierre soon wrote unambiguously in his first book published the following year: “The people have a right to take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.”

The government crossed another line for even more gun rights advocates when Congress passed and President Clinton signed the assault weapons ban, prohibiting a number of high-capacity, semi-automatic weapons. Seven months later, on April 13, 1995, LaPierre signed a fund-raising letter to NRA members: “The semiauto ban gives jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, seize our guns, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us.”

But his timing was unfortunate for his cause. Six days later, on exactly the second anniversary of the Waco siege, Timothy McVeigh, an NRA member, and an accomplice used a fertilizer bomb hidden in a truck to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people including 19 children under the age of six. Not unlike LaPierre in his letter, McVeigh in his terrorism was reminding people of the Waco tragedy, which for them both along with other hardline gun rights advocates still holds significance as a deplorable federal raid over fully automatic guns.

LaPierre was forced to apologize for his “jack-booted thugs” remark, after former President George H.W. Bush, a decades-long member of the NRA, resigned from the organization over his letter. But few NRA members followed suit. Instead the NRA has increased from over three million then to over four million members today.

Extremist groups including white supremacists have long operated in the NRA’s shadow. The National Alliance is a neo-Nazi party whose members have quietly handled out literature to try and attract recruits on the floor of NRA conventions. (I was handed one at the annual NRA convention in Phoenix in 1995 –two months after the Oklahoma City bombing– after I showed a man my New Jersey Firearms Purchaser Identification Card to demonstrate that I was a gun owner.) The late head of the National Alliance also wrote a novel, The Turner Diaries, about a coming race war and insurrection against a Jewish-dominated government; McVeigh used scenes in the novel as an explicit blueprint to make the bomb and choose his target in Oklahoma City.

LaPierre has become expert at handling the press. But there is little question that he holds an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment. “[T]here is no such thing as a free nation where police and military are allowed the force of arms but individual citizens are not,” he wrote in a 2003 book.

WOULD U.S. courts agree? In 2008 the Supreme Court made its first ruling on the Second Amendment in 69 years, affirming the right in the District of Columbia v. Heller of an individual to keep a handgun in his home for self-defense within the district, and then in 2010 affirming the same right throughout the United States.

Yet Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, still allowed for some limits on the right to bear arms including “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Scalia went on to say he could also find “support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Exactly what kinds of weapons might meet that criteria, however, remain unclear. Justice Scalia in an interview in July on Fox News –after the Aurora movie theater shooting– made seemingly more ambivalent comments. Scalia said the Second Amendment only applies to arms that can be borne or carried, but added that whether it would allow for arms like “hand-held rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes” will have be decided in future court decisions.

Could government airplanes be legitimate targets?

Fear and hatred of government agencies, especially the ATF, helps explain why many gun rights advocates were so supportive of House oversight Chairman Darrell Issa’s investigation last year into Operation Fast and Furious, which involved ATF agents planting up to 2,000 guns into the Mexican black market in an effort to trace them to drug cartels.

Besides absolutist ideology, gun manufacturers play an important role in the NRA’s uncompromising stance.

NRA revenues from fundraising –including donations from gun manufacturers—have grown twice as fast as income from members’ dues, according to Forbes. Over 50 firearms-related companies have given the NRA almost $15 million since 2005 –the same year that NRA lobbyists helped get a federal law passed that limits liability claims against gun makers. Two gun-making firms’ chief executive officers, Ronnie Barrett and Pete Brownell, sit on the NRA board.

Yet nearly half of the NRA’s total annual revenues still come from its (rarely-voting) dues-paying members.

Members of the Judiciary Committee should ask LaPierre whether NRA opposition to gun control is rooted in the view that the Second Amendment allows citizens to have the same “force of arms,” to borrow LaPierre’s phrase, as police and military forces.

And they should pin him down on automatic weapons: NRA leaders and other their supporters often try to change the conversation when questions like whether they believe fully automatic weapons should be legal.

Providing unfettered access to enough firepower, as LaPierre’s own writings suggest, to “take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government,” to quote him again, is simply incompatible with any integrated effort to curb today’s gun violence.

For LaPierre and most NRA directors including, apparently, Newtown’s Chairman Clark, the slaying of 27 people including 20 children in Newtown is an acceptable price to pay for upholding what they maintain is “freedom’s most valuable, most cherished, most irreplaceable idea” embodied in the Second Amendment.

Today’s NRA leaders are not just “gun nuts.” They are ideologues wielding extraordinary power, and secrecy is part of their success. After all, who knew their board’s nominating chairwoman lives just a few miles from the now shuttered Sandy Hook school? Or that the executive of the firm that made the gun that killed the kids there had been appointed to the same shadowy committee?

Frank Smyth is a freelance journalist who has been covering the NRA and related groups since the early 1990s, writing for publications including The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Texas Observer and Mother Jones.

Still Seeing Red: The CIA Fosters Death Squads in Colombia

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Back in 1989, the CIA built its first counter-narcotics center in the basement of its Directorate of Operations headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Since then, the newly renamed “crime and narcotics center” has increased four-fold, says CIA spokeswoman Anya Guilsher. She says she cannot comment about any specific counter- drug operations, except to say that the agency is now conducting them worldwide.

The CIA was established in 1947 as a frontline institution against the Soviet Union. Today, nine years after the Berlin Wall fell, the agency is seeking a new purpose to justify its $26.7 billion annual subsidy. Besides the crime and narcotics center, the CIA now runs a counterterrorism center, a center to stymie the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and even an ecology center to monitor global warming and weather patterns, including El Nino.

George J. Tenet, the Clinton Administration’s new Director of Central Intelligence, recently told Congress the United States faces new threats in “this post-Cold War world” that are “uniquely challenging for U.S. interests.”

But the CIA remains a Cold War institution. Many officers, especially within the clandestine operations wing, still see communists behind every door. They maintain warm relationships with rightist military forces worldwide that are engaging in widespread human-rights abuses. These ties conflict with the agency’s purported goal of fighting drugs, since many of the rightist allies are themselves involved in the drug trade.

Take Colombia. In the name of fighting drugs, the CIA financed new military intelligence networks there in 1991. But the new networks did little to stop drug traffickers. Instead, they incorporated illegal paramilitary groups into their ranks and fostered death squads. These death squads killed trade unionists, peasant leaders, human rights, journalists, and other suspected “subversives.” The evidence, including secret Colombian military documents, suggests that the CIA may be more interested in fighting a leftist resistance movement than in combating drugs.

Thousands of people have been killed by the death squads, and the killings go on. In April, one of Colombia’s foremost human-rights lawyers, Eduardo Umana Mendoza, was murdered in his office. Umana’s clients included leaders of Colombia’s state oil workers’ union. Reuters estimated that 10,000 people attended his funeral in Bogota.

Human-rights groups suspect that Umana’s murder may have been carried out by members of the security forces supporting or operating in unison with paramilitary forces. At the funeral, Daniel Garcia Pena, a Colombian government official who was a friend of Umana’s, told journalists that before his death Umana had alerted authorities that state security officials along with security officers from the state oil company were planning to kill him.

The killings are mounting at a terrible pace. In February, a death squad mowed down another leading human-rights activist, Jesus Maria Valle Jaramillo. He had pointed a finger at the military and some politicians for sponsoring death squads.

“There is a clear, coordinated strategy of targeting anyone involved in the defense of human rights,” says Carlos Salinas of Amnesty International. “Every statement of unconditional support by U.S. lawmakers only encourages these kinds of attacks.”

A new debate is taking place today between human-rights groups and the Clinton Administration over U.S. aid to Colombia. The Clinton Administration has escalated military aid to Colombia to a record $136 million annually, making Colombia the leading recipient of U.S. military aid in this hemisphere. Now the administration is considering even more, including helicopter gunships.

Colombia did not figure prominently on the world stage back in late 1990 and early 1991. Germany was in the process of reunification, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had just invaded Kuwait, and El Salvador was negotiating an end to its long civil war. But the Bush Administration was not ignoring Colombia. It was increasing the number of U.S. Army Special Forces (or Green Beret) advisers there. And the CIA was increasing the number of agents in its station in Bogota — which soon became the biggest station in Latin America.

“There was a very big debate going on [over how to allocate] money for counter-narcotics operations in Colombia,” says retired Colonel James S. Roach Jr., the U.S. military attaché and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) country liaison in Bogota in the early 1990s. “The U.S. was looking for a way to try to help. But if you’re not going to be combatants [yourselves], you have to find something to do.”

The United States formed an inter-agency commission to study Colombia’ s military intelligence system. The team included representatives of the U.S. embassy’s Military Advisory Group in Bogota, the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, the DIA, and the CIA, says Roach, who was among the military officers representing the DIA. The commission, according to a 1996 letter from the Defense Department to Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, recommended changes in Colombia’ s military intelligence networks to make them “more efficient and effective.”

In May 1991, Colombia completely reorganized its military intelligence networks “based on the recommendations made by the commission of U.S. military advisers,” according to the secret Colombian reorganization order, which Human Rights Watch made public in 1996. The U.S. commission of advisers backed the reorganization plan ostensibly as part of the drug war. Yet the secret Colombian order itself made no mention anywhere in its sixteen pages or corresponding appendices about gathering intelligence against drug traffickers. Instead, the order instructed the new intelligence networks to focus on leftist guerrillas or “the armed subversion.”

The forty-one new intelligence networks created by the order directed their energies toward unarmed civilians suspected of supporting the guerrillas. One of these intelligence networks, in the oil refinery town of Barrancabermeja in Colombia’s strife-torn Magdalena Valley, assassinated at least fifty-seven civilians in the first two years of operation. Victims included the president, vice president, and treasurer of the local transportation workers union, two leaders of the local oil workers union, one leader of a local peasant workers union, two human-rights monitors, and one journalist.

Colonel Roach says the Defense Department never intended the intelligence networks to foster death squads. But Roach says he can’t speak for the CIA, which was more involved in the intelligence reorganization and even financed the new networks directly.

“The CIA set up the clandestine nets on their own,” says Roach. “They had a lot of money. It was kind of like Santa Claus had arrived.”

The secret Colombian order instructed the military to maintain plausible deniability from the networks and their crimes. Retired military officers and other civilians were to act as clandestine liaisons between the networks and the military commanders. All open communications “must be avoided.” There “must be no written contracts with informants or civilian members of the network; everything must be agreed to orally.” And the entire chain of command “will be covert and compartmentalized, allowing for the necessary flexibility to cover targets of interest.”

Facts about the new intelligence networks became known only after four former agents in Barrancabermeja began testifying in 1993 about the intelligence network there. What compelled them to come forward? Each said the military was actively trying to kill them in order to cover up the network and its crimes. By then the military had “disappeared” four other ex-agents in an attempt to keep the network and its operations secret.

Since the military was already trying to kill them, the agents decided that testifying about the network and its crimes might help keep them alive. Saulo Segura was one ex-agent who took this gamble. But rather than prosecuting his superiors over his and others’ testimony, Colombia’s judicial system charged and imprisoned Segura. In a 1996 interview in La Modelo, Bogota’s maximum-security jail, Segura told me he hadn’t killed anyone and that his job within the network was limited to renting office space and handling money. Segura then glanced about nervously before adding, “I hope they don’t kill me.”

Two months later, on Christmas Eve, Segura was murdered inside his cellblock. His murder remains unsolved; the whereabouts of the other three ex-agents is unknown. No Colombian officers have been prosecuted for ordering the Barrancabermeja crimes.

In 1994, Amnesty International accused the Pentagon of allowing anti-drug aid to be diverted to counterinsurgency operations that lead to human-rights abuses. U.S. officials including General Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton Administration drug czar who was then in charge of the U.S. Southern Command, publicly denied it. But back at the office, McCaffrey ordered an internal audit. It found that thirteen out of fourteen Colombian army units that Amnesty had specifically cited for abuses had previously received either U.S. training or arms. Amnesty made these documents public in 1996 (full disclosure: I provided the internal U.S. documents to Amnesty; Winifred Tate and I provided the secret Colombian order to Human Rights Watch).

Colombian military officers, along with some of their supporters in the United States, say the line between counterinsurgency and counter-drug operations in Colombia is blurry, as Colombia’s leftist guerrillas are more involved today than ever before in drug trafficking.

Indeed, they are. For years, about two-thirds of the forces of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and about half the forces of the National Liberation Army (ELN) have been involved in the drug trade, mainly protecting drug crops, according to both U.S. intelligence and leftist sources.

Colombia’s rightist paramilitary groups, however, are even more involved in the drug trade, and they have been for a decade. Back in 1989, Colombia’s civilian government outlawed all paramilitary organizations after a government investigation had found that the Medellin drug cartel led by the late Pablo Escobar had taken over the largest ones.

At the time, Escobar and his associates were fiercely resisting U.S. pressure on the Colombian government to make them stand trial in the United States on trafficking charges. They took control of Colombia’s strongest paramilitaries and used them to wage a terrorist campaign against the state. These same paramilitaries, based in the Magdalena Valley, were behind a wave of violent crimes, including the 1989 bombing of Avianca flight HK-1803, which killed 111 passengers. Investigators concluded that Israeli, British, and other mercenaries, led by Israeli Reserve Army Lieutenant Colonel Yair Klein, had trained the perpetrators in such techniques. In February, Klein and three other former Israeli reserve officers, along with two Colombians, were indicted in absentia for their alleged involvement in these crimes.

The CIA bears some responsibility for the proliferation of drug trafficking in the Magdalena Valley since it supported rightist counterinsurgency forces who run drugs. But the CIA has also helped combat drug trafficking in Colombia. In other words, different units within the agency have pursued contrary goals.

The CIA’s most notable success in the drug war was the 1995-1996 operations that, with the help of the DEA, apprehended all top seven leaders of Colombia’s Cali drug cartel. One of those apprehended was Henry Loaiza, also known as “The Scorpion,” a top Colombian paramilitary leader. He secretly collaborated with the CIA-backed intelligence networks to carry out assassinations against suspected leftists.

A young, techno-minded CIA team led the Cali bust. Heading up the team was a woman. “I’m just a secretary,” she protested when I called her on the phone at the time.

But despite her denials, she was not unappreciated. On September 19, 1995, a courier delivered a white box to her at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. I happened to be in the lobby at the time. She opened the box to find roses inside. They had been sent by the head of Colombia’s National Police, General Rosso Jose Serrano.

Most other agency counter-drug operations, however, have yielded few breakthroughs.

The net result of CIA involvement in Colombia has not been to slow down the drug trade. Mainly, the agency has fueled a civil war that has taken an appalling toll on civilians.

Colombia is not the only place where these two elements of the CIA nave clashed with each other.

In Peru, the CIA coordinates all of its counter-drug efforts through the office of the powerful Intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos — even though DEA special agents have produced no fewer than forty-nine different intelligence reports about Montesinos and his suspected narcotics smuggling. It is no wonder that agency counter-drug efforts in Peru have failed.

In Guatemala, the agency has played a strong role in both counterinsurgency and counter-drug operations. As in Peru, the agency has worked with Guatemala’s office of military intelligence, even though DEA special agents have formally accused a whopping thirty-one Guatemalan military officers of drug trafficking. Despite the CIA’s efforts, not even one suspected officer has been tried.

The Clinton Administration finally cut off CIA counterinsurgency aid to Guatemala in 1995 after revelations that an agency asset, Guatemalan Army Colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, had been involved in the murder of Michael DeVine, a U.S. innkeeper, as well as in the murder of Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, a leftist guerrilla who was married to the Harvard-educated lawyer, Jennifer Harbury. But the Clinton Administration has allowed the CIA to continue providing counter-drug aid to Guatemala.

Most of the major drug syndicates so far uncovered by the DEA have enjoyed direct links to Guatemalan military officers. One of the largest syndicates, exposed in 1996, “reached many parts of the military,” according to the State Department.

This year, the State Department reports, “Guatemala is the preferred location in Central America for storage and transshipment of South American cocaine destined for the United States via Mexico.”

Mexico is the next stop on the CIA counter-narcotics train. The fact that Mexico’s former top counter-drug officer, General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, was himself recently indicted for drug trafficking, raises the same old question: What is U.S. policy really all about? Before Gutierrez was busted, the DEA thought he was dirty, while U.S. officials, like General McCaffrey, still sporting Cold War lenses, thought he was clean and vouched for him shortly before his indictment.

Some DEA special agents question the CIA’s priorities in counter-drug programs. Human rights groups remain suspicious of the same programs for different reasons.

“There is no magic line dividing counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency operations,” says Salinas of Amnesty International.

“Given the current deterioration of human rights in Mexico,” an expanded role in counter-drug operations by the United States “could lead to a green light for further violations.”

Testifying before Congress in March, the CIA Inspector General Frederick R. Hitz finally addressed allegations that the CIA once backed Cold War allies like the Nicaraguan contras even though they ran drugs. Hitz admitted that, at the very least, there have been “instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations.”

What CIA officials have yet to admit is that the agency is still doing the same thing today.

Death of an Anthropologist

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An unusual cartoon appeared recently in a Guatemalan newspaper. It showed the small figure of Helen Mack swinging a hammer, chipping away at a towering brick wall that symbolized more than thirty-seven years of military impunity.

Helen Mack is leading her family’s investigation of the September 1990 assassination of her sister, Myrna Elizabeth Mack Chang.

An ethnic Chinese Guatemalan, Myrna Mack was one of Latin America’s most eminent anthropologists. Her work earned the support of the Ford Foundation, Georgetown University, and the University of California at Berkeley, among others.

To continue reading the article, please go to a PDF file of the original here.