Sunday, February 28, 2021

How Poor Black Lives Matter to U.S. Capitalism Today: Reflections on “The New Jim Crow” ~~ Paul Street

 https://www.blackagendareport.com/poor_black_lives_matter_to_capitalism_new_jim_crow

The U.S. mass incarceration regime measures Black lives by the value that can be derived from their imprisonment. “The ‘new Jim Crow’ is about disciplining a deindustrialized Black lumpen proletariat and turning it into a largely inert, deindustrialized profit-source whose 'value added' comes mainly from the mere fact of its captive existence.”


A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will “thingify” them – make them things… Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 1967

This article was previously published in Counterpunch .

Black lower- and working class lives matter to the U.S. state capitalist system as the critical raw material for the vast new social and spiritual Death Row that is the modern U.S. prison-industrial complex.

King Cotton

Black lives have always mattered to white America primarily as a source of economic exploitation. And white American authorities have never been particularly squeamish about killing and maiming Black Americans in defense and advance of that exploitation. Untold millions of Black slaves were tortured and murdered so that Southern tobacco, rice, sugar and cotton planters could extract vast quantities of surplus value from them. As the historian Edward Baptist has recently shown, the violence that was systematically inflicted on Blacks in the forced labor camps of U.S. cotton slavery generated much of the economic surplus that drove the United States’ emergence as a modern capitalist and industrial state before the U.S. Civil War.

After reformist experiments under northern Union Army occupation during the Reconstruction era (1866-1877), Black cotton servitude was resurrected across what became known as the Jim Crow South. The last thing that Black ex-slaves wanted to do after slavery was go back to work under white rule in Southern cotton fields. But, as the historical sociologist Stephen Steinberg noted thirty-four years ago, “Though the Civil War had ended slavery, the underlying economic functions that slavery had served were unchanged, and a surrogate system of compulsory paid labor developed in its place…ex-slaves…were forced to struggle for survival as wage laborers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers in southern agriculture. Once again, blacks paid the price and carried the burden of the nation’s need for cheap and abundant cotton.”

Many thousands of Black Americans died at the hands of white terrorists and authorities, both private and public, to keep Black lives yoked to cotton toiling for a pittance or worse under white owners during the long Jim Crow era.

The Northern Black Proletariat

During and after World War One and through the 1960s, northern industrial firms’ demand for cheap labor (and often enough for strikebreakers) combined with the growing mechanization of Southern cotton farming to push and pull millions of Blacks out of the South to work in giant steel mills, packinghouses, auto-assembly plants and other mass-production facilities in northern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Pittsburgh. By 1970, nearly half of the nation’s Black population resided north of the Mason-Dixon Line. This Great Migration was a step toward freedom for Black Americans who escaped the open racial terror and formal segregation and political disenfranchisement of the former slave states.

Still, Black lives mattered to northern white capitalists and authorities mainly as a source of cheap, super-exploited labor. Blacks were kept at the bottom of the northern industrial proletariat by their branded status as racial inferiors. Black workers were concentrated in northern industry’s dirtiest, hottest, most unpleasant, worst-paid and least secure jobs. (In Chicago’s slaughtering and meatpacking industry – a major destination for southern Black migrants from WWI through the 1940s – Black employees’ time-cards were specially marked to make sure that they were the first fired and last re-hired during and after seasonal layoffs and economic downturns.) The northern Black population was penned up in inferior and overcrowded ghetto neighborhoods. “Northern blacks,” historian Thomas Sugrue notes, “lived as second-class citizens, unencumbered by the most blatant of southern-style Jim Crow laws but still trapped in an economic, political, and legal regime that seldom recognized them as equals. In nearly every arena, blacks and whites lived separate, unequal lives.” This de facto racial separatism and disparity was sustained and enforced by violence. The agents of white northern repression included street gangs, property associations, city police, and, when deemed necessary – as during the race riots of 1919 (Chicago), 1943 (Detroit), and the 1960s (across urban America) – the National Guard and the U.S. military.

Becoming the Raw Material

Today, as across the long neoliberal era that began in the mid-1970s, millions of Black working- and lower- class lives still matter to the U.S. power and profits system primarily as subjects for economic exploitation. The exploitation still relies heavily on violence and repression – violence that all too commonly turns lethal, as with the killings of Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and the hundreds of other Black Americans (usually but not always young and male) who are killed each year by mostly white police officers in the U.S. But there’s a key difference now. Black lives have been largely torn asunder (along, of course, with many white, Latino, and other U.S. lives) from direct engagement in surplus value-generating productive labor.

Already, by the late 1950s, Black northern industrial workers experienced significant jobs losses due to automation and the flight of capital and jobs to whiter and more union-free regions of the country (the great Black-employing Chicago packinghouses Armour’s, Swift’s, and Wilson’s were all closed by the end of that decade, for example). “Deindustrialization” hit the Northern black ghettoes earlier and harder than it hit other predominantly working class neighborhoods and communities across the north and the nation.

Mass Black joblessness in what would become known as “the Rustbelt” was a major factor beneath the remarkable wave of race riots that washed across northern U.S. cities in the “long hot summers” of 1966 and 1967 and (following the murder of Martin Luther King) the spring of 1968. The eviction of Black lives from production only deepened with the finance capital-led dismantlement of American manufacturing and heavy industry that took off and flowered in the 1970s and 1980s, carried yet further through the next decade by the arch-global-corporatist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Concentrated in rotting, deeply immiserated ghettoes as members of a lumpen-proletarianized “underclass,” millions of Black Americans learned that they no longer mattered to white authorities and U.S. capitalism as producers working with industrial or agricultural materials. Their new leading role was now instead to function, themselves, as raw material – as the critical ingredient for the nation’s giant new “criminal [in]justice” system of racially hyper-disparate mass surveillance, mass arrest, mass sentencing, mass incarceration, mass parole, mass probation, and mass felony-marking.

Between the late 1960s and 2000, the number of prisoners in the U.S. rose from roughly 300,000 to more than 2 million with non-violent drug offenders making up most of the enormous new U.S. inmate population. The nation that proclaimed itself the homeland and headquarters of global liberty contained 5 percent of the world’s population but now kept more than 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. To confine this giant new captive population generated by the so-called War on Drugs, the U.S. built more than 300 prisons at a cost of $27 billion during the 1990s alone. On top of those behind bars, by the turn of the millennium, more than four and half million Americans were on parole or probation, “doing time on the outside.”’ Twelve percent of the nation’s adult population now possessed a felony record – a major barrier to employment and to numerous other “opportunities,” including the right to vote (for what that’s really worth anymore under the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money) in many states.

A shocking 1 in every 3 Black adult males is now branded by the lifelong stigma of a felony record.”

Beyond sheer magnitude, the most striking thing about the new U.S. prison state was its heavily racialized nature. By 2001, Blacks comprised 12 percent of the U.S. population but nearly half of its 2 million prisoners. Between 1980 and 2002, the number of Black men in U.S. jails and prisons (mainly for nonviolent drug crimes) grew five-fold. Consider the following comparative incarceration rates at the turn of the millennium: Japan (40 per 100,000), Sweden (60 per 100,000), England (125), South Africa (400), Russia (675), U.S. (690), and Black adult U.S. men (4,848 per 100,000). More than a tenth of all prisoners on Earth is a Black U.S. “citizen” (ex-citizen). There are more black men behind bars than enrolled in colleges or universities in the U.S. By 2007 there were more Blacks under criminal supervision – in prison or jail, on probation or parole – than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War. A shocking 1 in every 3 Black adult males is now branded by the lifelong stigma of a felony record. That’s no small white-supremacist “law and order” payback for the great Black U.S. urban uprisings of the 190s.

It all reflects wild racial disparities in the enforcement of the nation’s drug laws – disparities that mock the notion of a “color-blind” and “post-racial America.” Whites use and sell illegal drugs – the main crimes driving U.S. mass incarceration – every bit as much as Blacks and Latinos. The vast majority of the nation’s drug users and dealers are white. Still, Blacks and Latinos together make up three-fourths of those sent to prison for drug offenses in the U.S.

Disturbing Parallels

The resulting giant army of Black prisoners and “ex-offenders” constitutes a criminalized “underclass” that cycles back and forth between the nation’s worst-off jobless and high-poverty ghetto zip-codes and a sprawling archipelago of high-tech mass confinement holding pens that are mainly located in predominantly white and rural parts of the nation. The prison construction and operation boom – fed by the rising “market” of Black drug criminals – has been a significant source of jobs, tax dollars, and associated local economic “multipliers” for mostly rural (“downstate” in Illinois, “upstate” in New York and Michigan) prison towns. As the distinguished criminologist Todd Clear noted nearly 20 years ago, “Each prisoner represents an economic asset that has been removed from that community and placed elsewhere [and]… represents as much as $25,000 in income for the community in which the prison is located, not to mention the value of constructing the prison facility in the first place. This can be a massive transfer of value: A young male worth a few thousand dollars of support to children and local purchases is transformed into a $25,000 financial asset to a rural prison community.”

A July 2001 story in the Detroit News was titled “Ionia Finds Stability in Prisons.” It reported that the “upstate” Michigan town of Ionia had become one of the state’s fastest growing and “most improved” cities thanks to its five thriving penitentiaries, whose 1600 workers collectively made $102 million. “The state’s urban centers dump their felons,” the News reported, “in prison towns and forget about them. Suburbs balks at housing felons…But Ionia sees things from the other end of the spectrum. The prisons bring, of all things, security.”

A young male worth a few thousand dollars of support to children and local purchases is transformed into a $25,000 financial asset to a rural prison community.”

Not surprisingly, prison-hosting communities, themselves often gravely challenged by the deindustrializing and (family-) farm-destroying gales of neoliberal capitalism, became part of a prison-industrial lobby that pushed for tougher drug and other laws and sentences to bring them more and more captive Black people from distant urban ghettoes. The communities commonly show up in the U.S. Census as half or more Black but when you visit their downtown business districts and adjacent neighborhoods they look lily-white. The explanation, of course, is that their Black populations are almost entirely incarcerated.

Consider the different racial meanings attached to the phrase “going downstate” by young white and Black high school students in the Chicago area. Beyond the shared favorable suggestion of a trip to the state’s high school basketball tournament, the connotations are sharply skin-colorized. For many white youths, the phrase evokes the image of a trip with Mom and Dad to begin academic careers at the University of Illinois or one of the state’s other public universities. But for Chicago area teens and young adults, “going downstate” typically means a trip under armed guard to take up residence at one of the state’s more than thirty prisons.

It’s a disturbing picture with unsettling parallels to chattel slavery: young Black men involuntarily removed as economic assets from Black communities to distant rural destinations where they are kept under lock and key by predominantly white overseers. Considering also the enhanced voting clout that disenfranchised prisoners bring rural communities (along with tax dollars and census count), another unpleasant historical parallel is with the U.S. Constitution’s notorious Three-Fifths Clause (whereby three-fifths of the South’s slaves population counted towards the congressional representation of the Slave states).

A Public-Private System That Kills

The economic scale of the nation’s system of racially disparate mass arrest, prosecution, sentencing, incarceration, and felony-marking is considerable. A 2007 report by the National Criminal Justice Reference Service found that criminal justice expenditures on “police, corrections, judicial, and legal services” had reached $228 billion per year, up by 171% since 1982. The number of Americans employed in these activities rose by 92%, from 1.3 million to 2.5 million (the nation’s largest corporate employer, Wal-Mart, has 1.3 million American workers today) over the same years.

It’s not just cops and prison guards who find reasonably remunerative employment in neoliberal America’s new “correctional” Leviathan. The nation’s 2.5 million criminal justice employees include prosecutors, court clerks, public defenders, parole officers, probation officers, prison medical staff, prison administrators, criminal justice instructors, correctional facilities managers, police identification and records officers, juvenile court counselors, medical examiners, court reporters, judges and magistrates, bailiffs, forensic science technicians, correctional treatment specialists, wardens, law librarians, law enforcement instructors, and…the list goes on.

The “correctional Keynesian” job programs is not limited to the public sector. On top of the millions employed directly in governmental criminal justice occupations, untold millions work in a vast network of private sector firms contracting with the mass arrest and incarceration system. From the building equipping, and maintenance of police stations, jails, prisons, and courts to running programs for “offender” counseling and rehabilitation to evaluating parolees drug tests countless other collateral tasks and services that are subcontracted out to private firms (including the big telecommunications firms that charge inmates and their families absurdly inflated rates for phone calls into and out of prison) by criminal justice offices, the prison-industrial complex built upon the nation’s giant army of disproportionately Black drug inmates and felons generates considerable employment and revenue beyond the public sector.

It’s a system that does not shirk from killing its Black human profit sources when ‘necessary.’”

The disproportionately nonwhite criminal class generates proceeds in other ways. It is charged, often at exorbitant rates, for various criminal justice processes and services, including court-ordered treatment programs. Local law enforcement agencies have taken billions of dollars in wealth through “asset forfeiture” laws that permit police to seize the property of accused drug offenders – curious form of primitive accumulation for correctional state capitalism in the neoliberal era.

The endemic police killings of mostly young Black men that sparked the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement are terrible reflections of this vicious and parasitic system. Hundreds of Black Americans die each year as heavily armed police try to round them up to serve as the critical human component for the mass incarceration, criminal supervision, and felony-marking regime – a system that keeps its victims either in prison or jail or stuck without remotely decent employment, housing, educational, financial, and political opportunities while “on the outside.”’ Like slavery and its Jim Crow successor regime in the U.S. South, it’s a system that does not shirk from killing its Black human profit sources when “necessary.”

It’s telling that one of the frequent causes of fatal police shootings is flight. Few things do more to provoke a U.S. police officer into using lethal force than a potential prisoner trying to run away. (Never mind that, legally speaking, police are permitted to use such force only in cases where they reasonably sense that their own lives or the lives of others are in imminent danger.) Running from a contemporary mass-incarcerationist prisoner-catcher – a badge-brandishing “peace officer” trained to “shoot to kill” – gets young poor Black (and poor white and Latino) men killed with chilling regularity in the U.S. today.

Jim Crow” New and Old

In her justly heralded book The New Jim CrowMass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010), Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander made a compelling case for seeing the nation’s multitude of criminally marked Black prisoners and felons as victims of a new system of racial caste suited to the ostensibly color-blind post-Civil Rights era. Provocatively timed with the recent ascendancy of a first technically Black U.S. President, her book noted a curious irony:

“As the United States celebrates the nation’s ‘triumph over race’ with the election of Barack Obama, the majority of young black men in major American cities are locked behind bars or labeled felons for life. Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago, but today an astounding percentage of the African American community is warehoused in prisons or trapped in permanent, second-class status, much like their grandparents before them, who lived under and explicit system of control….We have not ended racial caste in America: we have simply redesigned it… In the current era, it is no longer permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. Yet it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. The old forms of discrimination – discrimination in employment, housing, education, and public benefits; denial of the right to vote; and exclusion from jury duty – are suddenly legal once you’ve been labeled as felon.”

Alexander provided abundant evidence for her argument that the new Black criminal underclass is subjected to a type of de facto caste-like status in the U.S. today – a status that is commonly enforced through savage and ever-more militarized police-state violence.

The mass incarceration ‘new Jim Crow’ regime is a nationwide phenomenon with primarily Northern origins in the “law and order” campaign.”

Still, there are significant difficulties, historically speaking, with description of the neoliberal era’s racist mass imprisonment and criminal-marking order as a “Jim Crow” system new or old. The original Jim Crow regime was imposed on all Black people, regardless of wealth and status, and specifically in the former slave and Confederacy states of the U.S. South. It was dedicated to keeping Southern Blacks working under whites, sunup to sundown, primarily in cotton fields – as sharecroppers, tenant farmers, debt peons, wage-earners, prisoners, and even as flat-out slaves. The real Jim Crow sat atop a cotton production-ist regime in a time when Southern white authorities and owners were (after the collapse of Reconstruction) given the right to reconstitute Black cotton servitude” and national authorities agreed that Black lives were for the most to be restricted to the South in the interest of cheap cotton.

The mass incarceration “new Jim Crow” regime is a nationwide phenomenon with primarily Northern origins in the “law and order” campaign and related Drug War that emerged after Jim Crow’s final abolition and in response to the related Black urban uprisings and youth counter-culture that arose in the 1960s. While many members of the Black professional and upper classes (which have expanded significantly since and thanks to the Civil Rights era) can tell disturbing personal stories about white bias and harassment within and beyond the criminal justice system, the “new Jim Crow” and the terrible violence associated with it (including the police killings that have received so much media attention in the last year) are directed mainly at working and lower-class Blacks. Much of the new Black elite is less likely to be arrested, incarcerated, and shot by U.S. criminal justice authorities than the worst-off sections of the white working and lower classes.

The “new Jim Crow” emerged in a time when swaths of the U.S. Black population had long been removed not just from the agricultural toil of old but also from the industrial work that all-too transiently provided employment for millions of Black Americans in the North. While southern Black chain-gang Black prisoners (slaves for all intents and purposes) under the real Jim Crow regime commonly labored under the whip in cotton fields or other miserable production realms in the South, today’s nationwide Black (and white and Latino) U.S. prisoners are being warehoused, not worked, to death. Their Black lower- and working class lives matter to the U.S. state capitalist system not because of their capacity to labor in the handling of agricultural or industrial materials – cotton, sugar, tobacco, rice, animals and carcasses (on plantations or up on industrial killing floors), coal, steel, automobile frames, electrical wire, etc. – but rather as the critical raw material for the vast new social and spiritual Death Row that is the modern U.S. prison-industrial complex.

The original Jim Crow was about reconstituting and controlling a mostly unfree black cotton proletariat in the South and yoking it back to the hated crop. The “new Jim Crow” is about disciplining a deindustrialized Black lumpen proletariat and turning it into a largely inert, deindustrialized profit-source whose “value added” comes mainly from the mere fact of its captive existence. It is a curious kind of neo-slavery or “new Jim Crow”: a system without any cotton or any other raw material to be worked upon by a slave or a sharecropper or a convict lease prisoner or a debt peon or a wage-earner in a field or a mine or a slaughterhouse or a mill or a factory. Reflecting the reconstitution of racial caste in an age when finance capital has overseen the dismantlement of the nation’s manufacturing base, it’s a system in which poor Black Americans themselves are the key raw material. This is how their Black lives matter to authorities atop an ostensibly color-blind but still richly white-supremacist state-capitalist power structure whose mostly white gendarmes all too commonly end Black lives as punishment for an understandable “crime”: running away.

A Nation That Will “Thingify” Poor Blacks

It probably makes more sense call this “the new slavery” than it does to call it “the new Jim Crow,” though neither phrase quite captures the current neoliberal reality. The question of historical or sociological nomenclature is perhaps mainly academic. Whatever we want to call it, it seems clear that this at once new and old system of race and class oppression – traceable on numerous levels to the still relevant and savagely uncompensated crime of Black chattel slavery – is not about to about to go away because some cops and prison guards are equipped with body cameras and sent to “diversity training” workshops any more than slavery would have disappeared if some plantation overseers had been sent to Quaker Sunday schools. In this as in other areas (e.g., the crisis of livable ecology), a whole new and different and democratic political economy is required, one that takes us beyond the amoral socio-pathology of the profits system.

“A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years,” the great democratic socialist Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in 1967 (as violence erupted across the nation’s largely jobless northern ghettoes) “will ‘thingify’ them – make them things. Therefore they will exploit them, and poor people generally, economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them. All of these problems are tied together.”

Had he lived into the neoliberal era of “racially disparate [racist] mass incarceration” – an era that arose on the ashes of his efforts to build a great poor people’s movement to end poverty in America – King would certainly have updated this passage to make room for “the new Jim Crow.” He would put the mass imprisonment regime that arose in the wake of his assassination (or execution) and the brave new militarized police state that feeds that regime (often with weapons and methods applied from the American Empire abroad) at the heart of his understanding of how America has “thingified “poor Black lives and how American has betrayed ts grand promises of freedom and liberty.

Saturday, February 27, 2021

Far-right accelerationists hope to spark the next U.S. civil war ~~ Greg Huffman

https://www.facingsouth.org/2021/02/far-right-accelerationists-hope-spark-next-us-civil-war

~~ posted for dmorista ~~

"We want things to accelerate, we want things to get worse in the United States. And from that point, by virtue of the chaos that ensues, that would naturally present some opportunities for us. Law and order starts breaking down, power vacuums start emerging for those who are organized and ready, to take advantage of those." — Rinaldo Nazzaro, leader of the accelerationist hate group The Base, caught on a recorded call on the collaboration platform Wire in 2019
 

When President Trump's supporters, enraged by the lie that the election was stolen from him, stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, their ranks included members of far-right extremist and white-supremacist hate groups allegedly including members of the Three Percenters, the Oath KeepersProud Boys, and the This is Texas Freedom Force. Such groups have long schemed about the fall of the U.S. government, and their presence at a riot provoked by a president and other elected leaders shows how formerly fringe far-right ideologies have been brought into the U.S. political mainstream.


Also among those who stormed the Capitol were "accelerationists" who believe the fall of U.S. society has begun and should be hastened through violence in hopes of sparking a race war and creating a white ethno-state. As the Southern Poverty Law Center has observed, accelerationism isn't a new movement but "an iteration more inclined toward terroristic violence." White supremacists have embraced accelerationism in recent years, many inspired by the man who killed 51 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques in 2019 and who talked about the concept in his manifesto. Accelerationists typically have no political interest or social agenda. They don't care about election results, Democrats, Republicans, Trumpism, liberalism, or conservatism. They thrive on political and social instability and aim to throw as much gas on the fire as they can. They want the whole system gone, with maximum bloodshed.

Federal law enforcement has recognized the accelerationist threat. In December 2020, the FBI warned of possible attacks on state capitols by the far-right anti-government Boogaloo movement, saying that the members "believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, antigovernment actions leading to a civil war." Boogaloo groups in Michigan and Minnesota were reportedly scouting statehouses to look for security weaknesses, plot lines of fire, and identify strategic law enforcement positions.

Accelerationists also use violence to frame other groups and inflame social division. Several such incidents happened at Black Lives Matter protests in Minneapolis over the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd. In one, a man threw a hammer through an auto parts shop window, after which the protest erupted in looting and arson; police later identified so-called "Umbrella Man" as being a white supremacist whose aim had been to provoke disorder. In another, white supremacist Ivan Harrison Hunter of Texas was charged with throwing Molotov cocktails into a police station and then firing an AK-47 into it, shouting "Justice for Floyd." In yet another, Benjamin Ryan Teeter of North Carolina was charged with plotting with Hamas, the militant Islamic Palestinian nationalist movement, to blow up federal buildings and traffic in illegal weapons to hasten the fall of the U.S. government. And in Oakland, California, federal authorities charged Air Force Sgt. Steven Carrillo of murdering a security guard at a federal courthouse during a BLM protest. Hunter, Teeter, and Carrillo are all members of the far-right Boogaloo Bois. Teeter pleaded guilty last December, while Hunter's and Carrillo's cases are pending.

Ali Alexander, one of the organizers of the "Stop the Steal" rally that preceded the Capitol assault, emailed a private listserv of conservative activists stating that "accelerationists may have been right" about Big Tech's moves to de-platform conservatives, as Vice reported. And the assault — which itself could be seen as an accelerationist strategy — was carried out by people expressing accelerationist sentiments.

Alarmingly, many of those arrested for their roles in the attack have U.S. military ties. They included retired Air Force Lt. Col. Larry Brock of Grapevine, Texas, one of the men photographed carrying zip handcuffs inside the U.S. Senate chamber. Days before the riot Brock announced on Facebook, "I bought myself body armor and a helmet for the civil war that is coming." After his arrest, federal investigators said Brock — who was fired from a job in 2018 for making racial death threats — was ready to capture and execute members of Congress. Brock was charged with knowingly entering or remaining in a restricted building or grounds without lawful authority, and violent entry and disorderly conduct on U.S. Capitol grounds.

Then then there was 70-year-old retired veteran Lonnie Coffman of rural northern Alabama, who was arrested hours after the riot. Federal authorities found Coffman's pickup truck near the Capitol allegedly loaded with Molotov cocktails full of homemade napalm, a M4 carbine, shotguns, a hunting rifle, handguns, ammunition, machetes, crossbows and bolts, smoke grenades, and a list of Muslim members of Congress. Coffman is charged with possession of an unregistered firearm and carrying a handgun without a license.

Three members of the Oathkeepers, all military veterans, allegedly helped organize a team of at least 40 people who breached the Capitol and were arrested for conspiracy and a slew of other charges. According to authorities, Thomas Caldwell of Virginia coordinated with Oathkeepers from North Carolina in leading the group. His two co-defendants, Donovan Crowl and Jessica Watkins, are also members of the far-right Ohio State Regular Militia. Almost immediately after Biden's election, the group began organizing live combat training in North Carolina and Ohio to prepare for the attack on the Capitol. In a clear indication of a much wider conspiracy, federal indictments show a number of unindicted co-conspirators in Mississippi, North Carolina, and Virginia, as well as Ohio.

There have also been arrests of current military service members in connection with the Capitol attack. For example, Timothy Lewis Hale-Cusanelli of New Jersey — a member of the U.S. Army Reserves and a contractor with a top-secret security clearance at Naval Weapons Station Earle — faces numerous charges for his alleged role in the riot. Federal authorities say he is an avowed white supremacist and Neo-Nazi who has said another civil war is the only way for the U.S. "to get a clear bill of health."

On Jan. 27, DHS issued a stark domestic terror warning through the end of April. The notice cites a high threat environment based on the attack on the Capitol, conspiracy theories related to the 2020 election results and COVID-19, as well as racist and anti-immigrant sentiment. It warns of attacks on governmental facilities and critical infrastructure like power lines, health care facilities, and telecommunications. The same day, federal authorities in California arrested Ian Benjamin Rogers, a Three Percenter, on explosives charges, finding him with a number of homemade pipe bombs. Fueled by racial animus and pro-Trump election conspiracy theories, he was allegedly amassing a large cache of guns, explosives, and ammunition with plans to attack the offices of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the corporate offices of Twitter and Facebook. California authorities also charged Rogers with 28 felonies related to the possession of illegal firearms and explosives.

Documents filed as part of recent criminal prosecutions of people involved in The Base and Atomwaffen Division — accelerationist hate groups with headquarters or other operations in the U.S. South — reveal disturbing trends, including ties to foreign intelligence services and deep penetration of the U.S. military. Taken together with what happened at the U.S. Capitol, they show that accelerationist ideology is no longer lurking in the nation's basement but has arrived on its most public of stages.

The Base, from Russia with hate

In December 2020, William Garfield Bilbrough IV of Denton, Maryland, became the first member of the white-supremacist accelerationist group The Base — which in Arabic translates to "Al-Qaeda" — to be criminally sentenced for his activities with the organization. He got five years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges of conspiring to transport an alien and for transporting the alien, fellow Base member Patrik Mathews, a member of the Canadian military who fled his country to evade authorities. Federal charges remain pending against Mathews and Brian Mark Lemley of Maryland, another member of The Base who aided Mathews. Both men remain in federal detention.

The Base was started by New Jersey native Rinaldo Nazzaro, a Villanova alum with an elite prep-school education and a background in intelligence. The group has boasted cells in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, Australia, and Canada. Its U.S. presence includes a 105-acre farm in rural Silver Creek, Georgia, which served as a live-fire training center and safe house for members evading law enforcement. But Nazzaro himself operates from his home in Russia.

A DHS intelligence analyst from 2004 and 2006 and later an FBI analyst*, Nazzaro started Omega Solutions International, a security contracting firm, in 2010. Through at least 2014 he worked with the U.S. Special Operations Command in Afghanistan and Iraq on counterterrorism and psychological warfare operations with a top-secret security clearance. According to New York Magazine, in 2012 Nazzaro married a Russian national, and the couple moved back and forth between northern Virginia, the District of Columbia, and New York to a series of swank apartments, eventually having two children. In late 2017, Nazzaro and his family and moved to Russia, into a high-end flat in St. Petersburg. From there, his service with the U.S. government seemingly over, he made his entrée into the world of white supremacy and started The Base.

Using the online aliases "Norman Spear" and "Roman Wolf," Nazzaro came on the neo-Nazi scene seemingly out of nowhere in late 2017, associated with the Northwest Front in Oregon. After showing up on a variety of neo-Nazi podcasts, message boards, and training videos, he quickly gained a following. By December 2018 he was actively recruiting for The Base using his online aliases. Adopting the methods of its Arabic namesake, The Base was organized in small cells designed to operate completely independently of one another, compartmentalizing information and activities to maintain operational security. The Guardian revealed Nazzaro's true identity in early 2020 as he was purchasing 30 acres of property in rural Washington state for a training center for the group.

Throughout 2019, Nazzaro made a number of trips to the U.S. from Russia for small group meetings and encouraged his members to engage in live-fire exercises and to plan real operations. The result was a number of combat training sessions in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and at the Silver Creek farm in Georgia. But that year, members' reaction to the outing of a Base member by a news outlet touched off a series of arrests by federal and state authorities.

In August 2019, an undercover investigation by the Winnipeg Free Press identified Mathews as a member of The Base. Mathews was a combat engineer with expertise in explosives. As the Canadian military and Royal Canadian Mounted Police began investigating, he fled the country, illegally crossing into the U.S. where he was harbored by Base members Lemley and Bilbrough. A former U.S. Army Calvary scout with combat experience, Lemley shuttled Mathews from Michigan to locations in Virginia and Maryland and ultimately to the Georgia farm, where Mathews hid for several months. The farm was owned by the family of Base member Luke Austin Lane, the leader of the group's so-called "Southern Cell." Lane's close friend and Base associate in Silver Creek was Jacob Kaderli, a community college student known for his desire to fight in the Ukraine with far-right militias.
 
Lane, Kaderli, and other Base members were also adherents of The Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a Satanic occult group with neo-Nazi ideology that claims to have been established in the 1960s in the United Kingdom. Federal law enforcement has warned of O9A ideology and its growing popularity with neo-Nazis and white supremacists. In The Base, O9A wasn't just talk: At a Silver Creek training session in October 2019, Bilbrough, Kaderli, and other Base members stole a ram from a nearby farm, dropped LSD, and sacrificed the animal in an occult ceremony. Propaganda pictures of Base members with the decapitated ram circulated online as group propaganda and were later introduced in federal court by prosecutors.

But the FBI had been surveilling The Base, both electronically and with undercover agents, almost from the group's beginning. The arrests started after members began plotting murders as revenge for the outing of Mathews and other Base members and attacks at a January 2020 gun rights march in the Virginia capital to sow confusion and disorder.

The FBI made its first arrest of a member of The Base in November 2019. Richard Tobin was apprehended in his home state of New Jersey and charged with criminal civil rights violations after he allegedly ordered the group's members to vandalize synagogues in several states in response to the outing of Mathews. He called the proposed attacks "Operation Kristallnacht," a reference to the infamous 1938 Night of Glass pogrom in Germany when Nazi paramilitaries killed hundreds of Jews and smashed and burned Jewish homes, shops, restaurants and other property. Tobin's case is still pending.

January 2020 brought more arrests of The Base members, with Lemley and Mathews apprehended in Delaware. Lemley was charged with illegally transporting and harboring an alien, transporting an illegal machine gun, disposing of a firearm to an alien illegally in the U.S., and interstate transport of firearms with the intent to commit felonies, while Mathews was charged with being an alien in possession of a firearm and transporting firearms illegally in interstate commerce with intent to commit felonies. According to federal prosecutors, the pair was amassing ammunition and illegal weapons and had plans to kill police officers, gun rights marchers, and counter-protestors at the Virginia gun rally with the goal of stoking civil unrest and racial violence. They also discussed blowing up bridges and other critical infrastructure. Prosecutors say Lemley was also an active member of neo-Confederate organizations. As the FBI raided their apartment, the men destroyed their cell phones and flushed the parts down the toilet. Both have pleaded not guilty and are in custody awaiting trials that have been delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bilbrough was also arrested last January and appears to be cooperating with investigators. Federal court documents show his central role in Lemley's and Mathews' plans to carry out attacks at the Virginia gun rally, his involvement with other unnamed members of The Base in Alabama, and his plans to travel to Ukraine to fight with far-right militias. The Base member Yosef Barasneh of Oak Creek, Wisconsin, was also arrested by federal authorities in January 2020 and charged with criminal civil rights violations for vandalizing synagogues in Michigan and Wisconsin at the Tobin's direction. Barasneh pleaded guilty and is awaiting sentencing.

And that same month in Georgia, Lane and Kaderli along with IT specialist Michael John Helterbrand of Dalton, Georgia, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and participation in a criminal gang for allegedly plotting the killing of a couple from nearby Bartow County who had been erroneously identified as anti-fascist or "antifa" activists. According to Georgia prosecutors, the three men — with an undercover FBI agent in tow — went as far casing the victims' house and neighborhood multiple times, finalizing the date for the killing and tactical plans (including burning the home to destroy evidence), choosing weapons, and building silencers. They even planned on killing Base comrades Lemley and Mathews because they knew too much about the Bartow County murder plot. Investigators later claimed Lane even had a more extensive "hit" list that included his own father and local journalists. Kaderli and Helterbrand were also charged with animal cruelty for their part in the ritual killing of the ram, while Helterbrand landed in trouble in jail after a homemade knife was found in his cell during a routine search. All three Georgia men have pleaded not guilty. Their cases, like all the others, have been slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

From Russia, Nazzaro's reaction to the arrests on Wire was one word: "Fuck." He reportedly turned over the passwords for the group's Protonmail and social media accounts to other members and went quiet.

Federal authorities have concerns that Nazzaro is a Russian intelligence asset. If true, it would mean that the U.S. Special Operations Command and the FBI itself had been compromised by a foreign agent for years. It would also mean that the Russian government was actively using highly trained U.S. neo-Nazis and white supremacists to stoke racial and social division. Federal prosecutors said as much in open court during a December 2019 detention hearing in the case of Tobin, who himself was convinced that Nazzaro was a Russian spy and told federal investigators as much. Nazzaro has repeatedly denied any connection to Russian intelligence.

To date, Nazzaro has not been charged with any federal crimes, and neither he nor any of his companies appear on any "Blocked Party" lists issued by the U.S. Treasury Department. Those lists prohibit U.S. banks and companies from doing business with parties involved in terrorism, illegal activity, or subject to certain sanctions. But after the U.S. Capitol attacks, foreign governmental backing of violent domestic right-wing groups is a topic of renewed urgency.

Atomwaffen penetrates U.S. military

Taking its name for the German word for atomic weapons, Atomwaffen Division is a far-right accelerationist group created in 2015 by Brandon Russell in Florida and announced on the now-defunct neo-Nazi Iron March website. Since then, the group has expanded throughout the U.S. and to the U.K, Canada, Germany, and the Baltic states. Like The Base, it was set up to operate in small cells independent of one another.

In 2017, Russell and fellow founding member Devon Arthurs were jailed after Arthurs killed two Atomwaffen members at the New Tampa, Florida, townhouse he and Russell shared. During the investigation, police found coolers full of explosives, fuses, and detonators belonging to Russell as well as the radioactive materials thorium and americium. Russell was an active duty member of the Army National Guard and nuclear engineering student at the University of South Florida.  Still in uniform, he returned from maneuvers to find dead bodies and police in his home. Arthurs, charged with double murder by Florida authorities, pleaded not guilty and had his case put on hold while he received mental health treatment in a state hospital. Russell eventually pleaded guilty to federal explosives charges and was sentenced to five years in prison. Arthurs told law enforcement that Russell was planning to blow up synagogues, power lines, and the Turkey Point nuclear power plant near Miami.

But even with its creators in jail, Atomwaffen has flourished through its online presence — with deadly consequences. In December 2017, 17-year-old Nicholas Giampa of Virginia, reportedly a follower of Atomwaffen and in direct contact with the group, shot and killed his girlfriend's parents after they learned of his neo-Nazi activities and forced their daughter to break up with him. The teen then shot himself but survived; his injuries have left him incompetent to stand trial. And in January 2018, 20-year-old Atomwaffen member Sam Woodward allegedly stabbed to death 18-year-old Blaze Bernstein — an openly gay Jew — in California. Woodward joined Atomwaffen in 2016, was active online, and had attended live-fire combat training events in Texas. He has been charged with murder and hates crimes by California authorities and is awaiting trial.

Atomwaffen has penetrated the ranks of the U.S. military. In the spring of 2020, for example, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service acknowledged it was investigating an active duty sailor, David Cole Tarkington, for serving as recruiter for Atomwaffen on the Iron March platform, allegedly recruiting dozens of members. There's also the case of Vasillios Pistolis, an active-duty Marine who participated in the deadly Unite the Right march and riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017; after he was identified by ProPublica and other media outlets as an active member of Atomwaffen, the Marines finally drubbed Pistolis out of the Corps in 2018. And in September 2019, the FBI arrested Jarrett William Smith, an active-duty U.S. Army infantryman stationed in Kansas, after he disclosed to an undercover FBI agent his plot to kill antifa activists, blow up cell towers, and assassinate politicians and journalists. Smith was an Atomwaffen member who had also planned to fight with far-right militias in the Ukraine. He pleaded guilty and is currently in federal prison.

Smith's mentor in the far-right world was Craig Lang, a North Carolina native and U.S. Army veteran turned mercenary who is wanted by Florida and federal authorities for the double murder and robbery of a couple in connection with a bogus gun transaction and in a passport fraud scheme. Lang was dishonorably discharged in 2013 after he stole anti-personnel mines, assault rifles, and night vision gear and went AWOL, traveling from Fort Bliss in Texas to Harnett County, North Carolina, where he intended to kill his estranged wife. He was arrested before he could carry out his plot and disciplined by the military instead of the criminal justice system. According to federal court documents, Lang is closely associated with neo-Nazis and white supremacists and has fought with far-right militias in the Ukraine off and on for years. Currently in the Ukraine and fighting extradition to the U.S., Lang has become a cause célèbre for Ukrainian far-right militants.

And this past November, Liam Collins, Jordan Duncan, Justin Hermanson, and Paul Kryscuk were indicted by federal authorities in North Carolina on a variety of charges included illegally manufacturing, transporting, and selling firearms and silencers. Most of their customers were associated with Atomwaffen and were active-duty military. Collins, Duncan and Hermanson were U.S. Marines who had been stationed together at North Carolina's Camp Lejeune. According to federal affidavits, Collins had served as an Atomwaffen recruiter for years and frequently stated on Iron March that he joined the Marines to get combat training for use with Atomwaffen. He also discussed the frequent live-fire combat training sessions held by the group. At the time of the indictments, Hermanson was still on active duty at Camp Lejeune. After leaving the Marines, Duncan worked as a contractor for the Air Force and when arrested was still working as a contractor for the U.S. Navy. Their cases are still pending.

So are others: In late December 2020, accidentally unsealed federal court documents showed federal authorities in Wisconsin were investigating individuals associated with Atomwaffen who were planning attacks against power lines and power plants in the Southeastern U.S. — plans they wanted fast-tracked if President Trump lost reelection. That investigation is ongoing.

U.S. authorities respond

After an increasingly deadly trend of right-wing domestic terror attacks in 2018 and 2019 involving accelerationist ideology, Democrats in Congress took notice.

In July 2020, the House Committee on Homeland Security's Intelligence and Counterterrorism Subcommittee held a hearing titled "Assessing the Threat from Accelerationists and Militia Extremists." Among those who testified was Dr. Heidi Beirich, a political scientist who's the co-founder and chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) and the former director of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project. In her testimony, Beirich detailed how social media platforms enabled the spread of accelerationist ideology from violent neo-Nazis to further radicalize other right-wing groups like militias and the Boogaloo movement:

The true accelerant of these movements is the Internet. It was nearly impossible for extremists in earlier eras to connect and recruit when their only tools were faxes and phones, and no one was monetizing or advertising their content. Much as Hitler used the new radio to push his views into German families' homes, thereby radicalizing an entire country into genocidal thinking, extremists who saw the potential of the Internet in the 1990s have been able to successfully use mainstream online platforms in the same way. Given that the major platforms did not begin to enforce their anti-hate terms of service until after the Charlottesville, Virginia, riots in 2017, and still are muddling their responses to these issues today, there is no way to know how many millions were and still are radicalized online. But make no mistake, the dynamics that created today's growing accelerationist terrorist problem originate in cyberspace.

Beirich added that it is "particularly disturbing" that a movement whose ideas are linked to terrorism and the building of an international white supremacist network organizes openly online, and noted that Twitter took down related accounts in July 2020 only after GPAHE released a report on the movement's dangers. Among her recommendations to Congress for addressing the problem is passing the Raising the Bar Act, which would establish a baseline of where each social media platform is in terms of dealing with problematic content and then hold the platforms accountable for doing better, and the Transnational White Supremacist Extremism Review Act, which directs the Office of Intelligence and Analysis at the Department of Homeland Security to develop and disseminate a threat assessment regarding threats to the U.S.  from foreign violent white supremacist extremist organizations.

Beirich also discussed the importance of addressing far-right extremism in the U.S. military. The concern is longstanding; in 2006 Defense Department investigators revealed that there were potentially tens of thousands of active-duty service members with ties to neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The problem has taken on fresh urgency in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol given that a National Public Radio analysis found that nearly 1 in 5 people charged over their alleged involvement in the incident appear to have a military history. In addition, a 2019 poll conducted by the Military Times and Syracuse University Institute for Veterans and Military Families found that one-third of active-duty troops said they had "personally witnessed examples of white nationalism or ideological-driven racism within the ranks in recent months."  Earlier this month, the Defense Department's inspector general announced an investigation into the effectiveness of Pentagon policies and procedures barring service members from advocacy of or participation in white-supremacist or other extremist groups.

President Biden in his Jan. 20 inaugural address promised to confront and defeat "a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism." Meanwhile, his choice to lead the Defense Department — retired Gen. Lloyd Austin, the nation's first Black defense secretary — said during his Jan. 19 confirmation hearing that he too would work to combat extremism in the military.

"The Defense Department's job is to keep America safe from our enemies," Austin testified. "But we can't do that if some of those enemies lie within our own ranks."

* After initial publication of this story, DHS confirmed to Vice that it employed Nazzaro, who had posted commendation letters from DHS and the U.S. Marines.

From left to right, Georgia residents Luke Austin Lane of Floyd County, Jacob Kaderli of Dacula, and Michael Helterbrand of Dalton were arrested last year and charged with conspiracy to commit murder and participation in a criminal gang for allegedly plotting the killing of a couple from nearby Bartow County who had been erroneously identified as anti-fascist or "antifa" activists. They are members of a violent hate group known as The Base, which is part of a far-right trend toward the ideology of "accelerationism" that sees the U.S. as in decline and promotes racial violence to hasten its collapse and the creation of a white ethno-state.

Friday, February 26, 2021

How Real Nazis Came to the Americas: the Recruitment of Klaus Barbie ~~ JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/02/26/how-real-nazis-came-to-the-americas-the-recruitment-of-klaus-barbie/

~~ posted for dreamjoehill2 ~~

Klaus Barbie’s ID card for the Bolivian secret police.

By the time Klaus Barbie went on the payroll of an American intelligence organization in 1947, Klaus Barbie had lived several lifetimes of human vileness. Barbie sought out opponents of the Nazis in Holland, chasing them down with dogs. He had worked for the Nazi mobile death squads on the Eastern Front, massacring Slavs and Jews. He’d put in two years heading the Gestapo in Lyons, France, torturing to death Jews and French Resistance fighters (among them the head of the Resistance, Jean Moulin. ) After the liberation of France, Barbie participated in the final Nazi killing frenzy before Allies moved into Germany.

Yet the career of this heinous war criminal scarcely skipped a beat before he found himself securing entered on the US payroll in postwar Germany. The Barbie was shipped out of Europe by his new paymasters along the “ratline’ to Bolivia. There he began a new life remarkably similar to his old one: working for the secret police, doing the bidding of drug lords and engaging in arms trafficking across South America. Soon, his old skills as a torturer became in high demand.

By the early 1960s, Barbie was once again working with the CIA to put a US-backed thug in power. In the years that followed, the old Nazi became a central player in the US-inspired Condor Program, aimed at suppressing popular insurgencies and keeping US-controlled dictators in power throughout Latin America. Barbie helped organize the so-called “Cocaine Coup” of 1980, when a junta of Bolivian generals seized power, slaughtering their leftist opponents and reaping billions in the cocaine, boom, in which Bolivia was a prime supplier.

All this time, Klaus Barbie was one of the most wanted men on the planet. Even so, Barbie flourished until 1983, when he was finally returned to France to face trial for his crimes. In the whole sordid history of collusion between US intelligence agencies, fascists and criminals, no one more starkly represents the evils of such partnerships than Klaus Barbie.

+++

On August 18, 1947, three men sat over drinks in a café in Memmingen in American-occupied Germany. One was Kurt Merck, a former officer in Nazi Germany’s military intelligence agency, the Abwehr. Merck had worked in France during the war and had been scooped up by American intelligence, who debriefed him and who soon put him on the payroll. The second man was Lieutenant Robert Taylor, an American officer in the Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC). The third man was Klaus Barbie, at that time on the run from the French and the Soviets, and number three on a US/British list of wanted SS men. Barbie had already been roughly interrogated by the British and did not care to repeat the experience.

Merck was an old friend of Barbie’s. Despite interservice rivalries  between the Gestapo and the Abwehr, the two had worked together in France and had gotten along well. Merck was more than willing to vouch for the American officer that Barbie would be a good hire. Merck had been recruited by the Counter-Intelligence Corps in 1946, at a time when US intelligence agencies were trying to recruit Nazi talent. CIC’s cover story for this unwholesome bit of head-hunting was the need to root out and suppress a supposed network of Hitler Youth, whose fanatical detachments had pledged to fight on, no matter what official terms of surrender had been signed.

But CIC’s real interest in Barbie had nothing to do with the so-called Werewolves of the Hitler Youth. Barbie’s hiring as an agent of the CIC was contingent on his willingness to impart information about British techniques of interrogation and about the identities of SS men the British might have tried to recruit as their own agents. Barbie was only too happy to comply, particularly as this enthusiastic torturer had been slightly bruised when he questioned by the British.

For the next four years, the third most wanted SS man in Germany worked for the US Army’s Counter-Intelligence Corps. The Americans set up Barbie in a hotel in Memmingen, brought his family from Kassel and partly paid him in commodities–cigarettes, medicines, sugar and gasoline–that he sold for a handsome price on the black market. After initial debriefings about the intentions and techniques of the British, Barbie’s main assignment, as described in a CIC memo, was to file reports on “French intelligence activities in the French Zone and their agents operating in the US Zone.”

By 1948, the French government had received information that Barbie was living under the protection of the US somewhere in Germany. The French were more eager than ever to get their hands on Barbie, who had already been sentenced to death in absentia for his war crimes. Barbie was needed to testify in the upcoming trial of René Hardy, the Resistance man who saved his own skin from Barbie’s torture by turning Jean Moulin. But the CIC had no intention of handing over its prize catch to the French, even on loan for the Hardy trial.

Barbie’s handlers at the CIC, who saw the French as allies of Stalin, had nightmares about Barbie spilling the beans on his American employers. Eugene Kolb, the US Army Intelligence officer who had worked with Barbie for a year, said that the Gestapo man couldn’t be returned to the French because he “knew too much about our agents in Europe and the French intelligence agency was saturated with communists.” Kolb’s opinion is backed up by CIC memos, which suggest that the French Sûretė’s intention was to “kidnap Barbie, reveal his CIC connections and embarrass the US.”

So it transpired that in December 1950, the US decided to trundle Barbie and his family down the ratline, an escape hatch from Europe for Nazi agents created by CIC officers Lt. Colonel James Milano and Paul Lyon. Lyon and Milano had been shuttling Nazis out of Germany, Austria and eastern Europe since 1946, sending them to Argentina, Chile, Peru, Brazil and Bolivia. The tour guide for this operation was himself a war criminal, Father Krunoslav Draganovic, a Croatian priest who oversaw the relocation of several hundred thousand Jews from Yugoslavia to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. As the fascist government in Croatia began to crumble at the end of the war, the priest made his way to the safety of the Vatican. Then Draganovic, exploited the cover of his position with the Red Cross and with the Vatican, shuttled hundreds of war criminals out of Europe.

Many of Draganovic’s first recruits were members of the Ustashi regime, the deaths squads under the control of Croatian dictator Ante Pavelic, who supervised one of the bloodiest killing sprees of the war. Hundreds of thousands of Serbs–on some estimates more than two million–were slaughtered by Pavelic’s forces to fulfill his insane desire to make Croatia a “100 percent Catholic state.” Pavelic would show his favorite trophy to visitors at his office: a forty-pound jar of human eyeballs extracted from his Serbian victims. After the war, Draganovic helped Pavelic secure safe passage to Argentina, where he became a frequent dining companion of Juan and Eva Peron.

Some of the other notable Nazis who Draganovic helped escape Europe for South America included Colonel Hans Rudel, who went to Argentina, where he headed Peron’s air force and became a leader of the international neo-Nazi movement; Dr. Willi Tank, a chief designer for the Luftwaffe; and Dr. Carl Vaernet, who had overseen surgical experiments on homosexuals at Buchenwald, castrating gay men and replacing their testicles with metal balls. Vaernet was adored by the Perons, who made the Nazi doctor head Buenos Aires’s public health department.

In 1947, the Counter-Intelligence Corps contracted with Father Draganovic to help them dispose of some their own problematic agents and recruits, namely Nazi scientists, doctors, intelligence operatives and engineers. The deal was brokered in Rome by CIC officer Paul Lyon, who noted that Draganovic had established “several clandestine evacuation channels to various South American countries for various types of European refugees.”

This priest Draganovic was not an altruist, even on behalf of his Nazi colleagues. He demanded from the American intelligence agencies $1,400 for each war criminal who passed through his doors, and the US intelligence agencies were glad to pay his price.

A memo from an intelligence officer working at the US State Department explained that “the Vatican justifies its participation by its desire to infiltrate not only European countries, but Latin American countries as well, [with] people of all political beliefs, as long as they are anti-communists and pro-Catholic church.”

Fearing that Barbie might slip through their fingers, the French protested directly to John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner in Germany. McCloy icily replied that the US would not hand over Barbie to the French for possible execution, “because the allegations of the citizens of Lyons can be disregarded as being hearsay only.”

McCoy knew this to be untrue. In 1944 Barbie’s name was prominently displayed in McCloy’s own office on a list called CROWCASS (the Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects), where Barbie was identified as being wanted for “the murder of civilians and the torture and murder of military personnel.”

Barbie was hardly the only SS man whom McCloy and his cohorts endeavored to shield from justice. Another Adolf Eichmann’s righthand man, Baron Otto von Bolschwing. This SS officer was hired by the CIC in 1945, where he quickly became one of the agency’s most productive assets, recruiting, interrogating and hiring former SS officers. Von Bolschwing was later traded to the CIA, where he  plied his tradecraft in East Germany. Like Barbie, von Bolschwing was a top-rank war criminal, having been one of Eichmann’s ideological gurus on Jewish matters, helping to script the plan to “purge Germany of the Jews” and rob them of their wealth. It was von Bolschwing who had directed one of the most vicious slaughters in the war, the murder of hundreds of Jews in Bucharest. The Bucharest pogrom is described in detailed by historian Christopher Simpson in his remarkable book, BlowbackSimpson writes:

“Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up for execution. Some victims were actually butchered in a municipal meat-packing plant, hung on meathooks, and branded as ‘kosher meat’ with red-hot irons. Their throats were cut in an intentional desecration of kosher laws. Some were beheaded. ‘Sixty Jewish corpses [were discovered] on the hooks used for carcasses,’ US ambassador to Romania Franklin Mott Gunther wired back to Washington after the pogrom. ‘They were all skinned… [and] the quantity of blood about [was evidence] that they had been skinned alive.’ Among the victims, according to eyewitnesses, was a girl no more than five years old, who was left hanging by her feet like a slaughtered calf, her body bathed in blood.”

In 1954, von Bolschwing was brought to the United States. Richard Helms, who had helped recruit many of these criminals, defended the protection and use of people like von Bolschwing, saying: “We’re not in the Boy Scouts. If we’d wanted to be in the Boy Scouts we would have joined the Boy Scouts”–a typically flippant way of rationalizing his recruiting practices.

Barbie’s Counter-Intelligence Corps handlers went to extraordinary lengths to protect their recruit. Eugene Kolb rejected the idea that Barbie might have physically tortured people on the grounds that he “was such a skilled interrogator, Barbie did not need to torture anyone.” In fact, it’s pretty clear that Klaus Barbie was a sadistic monster whose vocational priorities were the infliction of pain and ultimately death, rather than the subtle extraction of information.

Barbie’s expertise as a torturer relied on the use of bullwhips, needles pushed under fingernails, drugs, and, most uniquely, electricity send by nodes attached to the nipples and testicles. His upward career path at the SS, heralded by games of volleyball with Heinrich Himmler in Berlin in 1940, came to an abrupt end when he beat Jean Moulin to death with getting any information out of him. Even so, a generation later, Barbie and his CIA operatives would happily cooperate in applying his old techniques to left oppositionists in Bolivia and elsewhere.

When it came to Barbie’s anti-Semitism, his American intelligence patrons once again sprang to his defense. Lieutenant Robert Taylor contended that Barbie “was not an anti-Semite. He was just a loyal Nazi.” Another CIC memo held that Barbie “showed no particular enthusiasm towards the idea of killing Jews.” In fact, Klaus Barbie got his start as an officer for the SD, a subunit of the SS charged by Reinhard Heydrich with solving the Jewish “problem” as rapidly as possible.

In an early purge in Holland, Barbie led the infamous raid on the Jewish farm village of Wieringermeer, where Klaus and his men use German shepherd dogs to round up 420 Jews, who were sent to their deaths in the stone quarries and experiment gas chambers of Mauthausen.

From the training grounds of Holland, Barbie was transferred in July 1941 to the Eastern Front, where he joined one of the SS’s so-called “special task forces,” the Einsatzgruppen. These mobile killing units were assigned the task of murdering every communist and Jew they could find in Russia and the Ukraine, without regard–in Heydrich’s phrase–“to age or sex.” In less than a year, these roving death squads under command of men such as Barbie killed more than a million people. Here was the model for the CIA’s death squads in Vietnam–William Colby’s Phoenix Program and cognate operations– and in Latin America, where CIA-sponsored hit teams in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Colombia and Argentina applied similar methods of brutal terror, killing hundreds of thousands. There’s nothing, in terms of ferocity, to separate a Barbie-run slaughter in Russia from later operations at My Lai or El Mozote.

Rewarded with a new promotion for his work on the Eastern Front, Barbie headed to Lyons in 1942. One of his tasks was to help fulfill Himmler’s recent order that the SS in France deport at least 22,000 Jews to concentration camps in the east. Erich Bartlemus took up the task with enthusiasm. Barbie and Bartlemus raided the offices of the Union Générate des Israelites de France in Lyons, seizing records showing the addresses of Jewish orphans and other children hidden In the countryside. Later that day, Barbie arrest one hundred Jews, sending them off to their deaths at Auschwitz and Sobibor. Next Barbie descended upon the Jewish orphans’ home at Izieu, rounding up forty-one children aged three to thirteen, along with ten of their teachers. All were trucked off to the Nazi death camps. Reporting on this raid of the schoolhouse to his supervisor, Barbie noted, “Unfortunately in this operation it was not possible to secure any money or valuables.”

During his time in Lyons, Barbie was excitedly alert to the sufferings of the prisoners he held in Montluc prison. The SS man apparently derived a sadistic pleasure from locking his prisoners in cells for days at a time with the mutilated corpses of their friends. He would reassemble captured members of the French Resistance before mock firing squads, apply hot irons to the soles of their feet and palms of their hands, repeatedly plunge their heads into toilets filled with piss and shit and entice his black Alsatian dog, Wolf, to snap at their genitals.

Klaus Barbie’s torture of Lise Leserve was particularly horrific. He shacked her naked body to a beam and beat her with a spiked chain. But despite his “great skill” as an interrogator, Barbie never got Leserve to talk. She survived her torture and a year in Ravensbrück work camp to testify against him at his trial in 1984.

With the Allies advancing on Lyons, Barbie prepared to flee Lyons in 1944. But before he left, he ordered the remaining 109 Jewish inmates of Montluc machine-gunned to death and had their bodies dumped in bomb crater near the Lyons airport. Barbie also endeavored to wipe out the last of the French Resistance leaders under his control. On August 20, 1944, Barbie’s mean loaded 120 suspected members of the Resistance on covered lorries and drove them to an abandoned warehouse near St. Genis Laval. The prisoners were led into the building, where they were quickly machine-gunned. The mound of corpses was drenched in gasoline and the building was destroyed by phosphorus grenades and dynamite. The explosion sent body parts flying into town 1,000 feet away.

Such were the highlights on the resumé of the man who was dispatched in 1951 along with his family by US military intelligence to a Counter-Intelligence Corps safehouse in Austria. There the Barbie family was given a crash course in Spanish and furnished with $8,000 in cash. Barbie was provided, courtesy of in-house forgers, with his new identity: Klaus Altmann, mechanic. In sinister jest, Barbie picked the name Altmann himself, after the name of the chief rabbi in Barbie’s hometown of Trier. The Rabbi Altmann had been one of the luminaries of the anti-Nazi resistance until 1938, when he went into exile in Holland, where he was tracked down in 1942 and sent to his death at Auschwitz.

From Vienna the Barbies were passed via Draganovic’s ratline to Argentina and then on to Bolivia. A CIC internal memo triumphantly noted about the rescue of this war criminal that “the final disposal of an extremely sensitive individual has been handled.”

To be continued…