Insurgent’s Handbook T.O.C
by Stan Goff
The Development of Domestic Counterinsurgency in the US
James Madison once said, “War is … the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.” He didn’t say that when there is not war to support an agenda of executive aggrandizement, a war shall have to be invented.
Lawrence, writing in his 1985 pamphlet The New State Repression, 16 years before 9-11, said:
Political repression exists in three discernable forms: police brutality, which is widespread violence committed by armed agents of the state against members of oppressed communities, nationalities, and classes, usually of a diffuse and relatively random character; vigilantism, which is violence committed by ostensibly private (non-government) individuals and organizations, sometimes random but more typically aimed at explicit targets [I will include sexual and domestic violence against women in this category, which will be explained later in this handbook. -SG]; and secret police activity, nearly always directed by elite government agencies against carefully chosen enemies considered to be political threats to established authority.
The existence of non-official, and non-systematic violence as a means of repression cannot be over-emphasized. Just as the Geneva Conventions and the Laws of Warfare — international laws that govern warfare — explicitly forbid many of the practices that are generally the only efficacious methods available to armed political resistance movements — the domestic control apparatus has an interest in maintaining a legal framework that favors established power.
The absence of uniforms, for example, is a common condition of armed resistance movements, yet this is explicitly outlawed in the post-WWII international legal framework.
Domestic “security” measures have to be seen in more than their legal framework. Strict interpretations of state actions are forced through gauntlet of difficult probative criteria, while the extra-legal actions of police in oppressed communities and the exercise of vigilantism, even when it supports the existing power structure, is seen as externalto the system, though it is an essential adjunct.
As insurgents, we must work outside the legal framework. That is not saying we should break the law, or that we shouldn’t. It is saying that we cannot accept the legalistic framework of the ruling stratum as our analytical framework. We have to see and name the extra-legal dimensions of political repression, of counterinsurgency directed against us, in order to appreciate the counterinsurgent state in its entirety.
Lawrence’s pamphlet was written in 1985, before the Clinton administration passed the so-called Crime Bill, which — with its add-ons — has resulted in the largest per capita prison population in history (around 725 inmates per 100,000 of population… China’s per capita rate is around 110 per 100,000). According to Wikipedia, “In 2002 roughly 93.2 % of prisoners were male. About 10.4 % of all black males in the United States between the ages of 25 and 29 were sentenced and in prison by year’s end, compared to 2.4 % of Hispanic males and 1.2 % of white males. As of June 30, 2005, about 1 out of every 136 U.S. residents was incarcerated either in prison or jail. The total amount being 2,186,230, with 1,438,701 in State and Federal prisons and 747,529 in local jails.”
Prison is the fourth leg of US domestic counterinsurgency. And again, special attention is given to African America, attention that has been a constant since Nixon began employing counterinsurgency doctrine as domestic “law enforcement.”
Just as Kitson used Northern Ireland as a “population-control laboratory,” the US state uses African America as its counterinsurgency laboratory.
H. R. Halderman’s memoirs of Nixon’s revulsion toward Blacks and his belief that they are “the whole problem,” does not show that fear motivates policy-makers; it shows that the real policy-makers, the ones behind the scenes, have to mount successful persuasion efforts aimed at decision-makers, like Nixon.
An important example of this is Louis Giuffrida.
When Nixon was bombing Cambodia and spying on his domestic “enemies” in 1971, then-Governor Ronald Reagan had hired a retired Army Colonel, Louis Giuffrida, to run a training program for California “emergency management personnel.”
In 1966, six Black law students had founded an organization in response to pervasive anti-Black police brutality (one of the pillars of population control) in the Bay Area. They named it the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. Harassment and provocation by the State of California, and counter-provocations by the BPP, led to the arrest of BPP leaders in 1968-9, and a gun battle between the BPP and police in 1969. Meanwhile, the BPP had branched out across the country. Eventually the BPP became the primary target of the counterinsurgency program COINTELPRO, and was destroyed. The point here is that Reagan hired Giuffrida to train California’s security apparatus in counterinsurgency.
It should not be lost on readers that when Reagan became president he appointed Giuffrida the first head of a new agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Giuffrida started his 1970 training program in California by establishing the California Specialized Training Institute (CSTI), which not only trained California’s “emergency responders” in counterinsurgency, but police from across the country. As California goes, so they say, so goes the nation. Nixon’s felonious Attorney General Edwin Meese became tight with Giuffrida and facilitated the national outreach of the CSTI.
One of Giuffrida’s CSTI texts was for a course called “Civilian Violence and Terrorism,” in which students were indoctrinated in the racialist rationalizations required to support a program of counterinsurgency, using African America as the “population-control laboratory.”
The racially separated segments of our society, as they have done repeatedly in the past, have emerged with periods of sporadic violence. A white man cannot ever be black, red, or brown and so long as the white man remains superior in numbers he will be the repressor and the constant target of the mad dog.
This was being taught to federal, state, and local law enforcement officers and emergency response personnel. But the more instrumental logic of power is revealed later in the same text. The text unapologetically acknowledges that American expansion was accomplished by the extermination and imprisonment of indigenous people, and notes that to keep that power, more of the same was in order.
With the exception of the mentally deranged or the intoxicated person, all acts of illegal and criminal violence have roots somewhere in our present social, economic, or political environment.
[Our] mission can be accomplished only if we fully understand that … legitimate violence is integral to our form of government for it is from this source that we can continue to purge our weakness… [I’ll leave reader’s to psychoanalyze the skin-crawling masculinity behind this choice of words. -SG]
It is necessary for the police executive to treat his occupation like all other executives. He must do it well but not so well he puts himself out of a job. He must reduce crime but not stop it.
He faces an impossible task of being required by law (actually or by his own interpretation) to preserve a free and democratic society and at the same time he must eliminate crime and violence. These tasks are totally incompatible…
This heavy-handed approach in foreign policy led directly to the Iran-Contra-Cocaine fiasco during the Reagan presidency, in which most of the principles avoided jail time, including the President of the United States, but where anyone who paid the least attention knew that this was a legal technicality and that the administration was guilty as hell. The whole episode created a crisis for the American security state and its domestic counterinsurgency strategy, by putting the alarming accumulation of executive power on public display.
Across the Atlantic, Reagan’s friend and collaborator, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had fallen prey to her own coterie of right-wing intelligence operators. One of the leaders of this crew was Brian Crozier.
Australian-born, and raised primarily in France, Crozier followed the Christopher Hitchens trajectory of detached academic leftist turned reactionary. This has also been the personal ideological path of several neo-cons, once enamored of sectarian Trotskyisms (alas, there are many). Crozier made a career out of free-lancing around the edges of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies throughout the Cold War as a kind of journalist/consultant (he was a propagandist). He was, in fact, a proto-neo-con; and he convinced Thatcher to support a private intelligence agency that would assist Thatcher in defeating the so-called Left in UK. Crozier also helped Thatcher write her speeches in ways suggestive of the future message-control of Karl Rove. For Crozier, the definition of Left was quite broad. He once said, warning of an impending leftist takeover, that UK had come to be “dominated by extreme Left Labour MPs and trade unions, whose long term goal…. is to transform Britain into another East Germany or Czechoslovakia. Without a correctly motivated intelligence and security apparatus, the subversives would win.”
Thatcher’s clueless intransigence eventually led to her political downfall, at the hands of her own party, in 1990. Reagan shuffled off to become a right-wing propaganda icon. The US invaded Iraq, and in this transitional moment, the Third Way was being prepared by a CIA-constructed British Labor Party and a Democratic Leadership Council-constructed US Democratic Party, in the persons of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
With them, a more nuanced approach to domestic counterinsurgency was inaugurated, relying more directly on the maxims of another British military pensioner with experience in Northern Ireland, Robin Evelegh.
Evelegh pointed out the inevitable drawbacks of a highly secretive executive and the constant employment of directly draconian measures.
A community that does not support the Police can be policed effectively, but it is markedly different from policing a community that helps its Police. The case is therefore made for the two fundamental measures necessary to achieve detection in a population… These are: to provide for the compulsory registration and identification of the population so that the Security Forces can know who is who, what they look like and where they live; and to make the active development of informers… by the Security Forces not only lawful but as easy as possible.
Lawrence remarked on Evelegh:
Methods currently in use in the U.S. have reduced the “political price” even further than Evelegh envisioned. Media campaigns to frighten parents about the possibility that their children might be kidnapped are followed by a concerted police/school/corporation (usually McDonald’s) offer to help protect kids by fingerprinting and photographing them; thus they are registered with the police long before they have any idea of the possible consequences [now DNA is routinely collected from kids -SG]. And Selective Service has purchased lists of young men who signed up long ago at an ice cream store to receive free treats for their birthdays; the government uses the lists to find 18-year-olds who haven’t registered for the draft.
The United States has managed to pursue a “two track” strategy, employing both Evelegh and Kitson’s proposals simultaneously. At the same time as apparently benign Evelegh-type policies are being implemented, such as requiring every child on Welfare to have a Social Security number, the more draconian Kitson methods are also advancing, mostly under the banner of anti-terrorism. [Readers are reminded that this was authored in 1985. -SG]
While the Bush administration has re-employed higher levels of Kitsonesque brutality in its domestic counterinsurgency, their most significant attempts have been to improve intelligence collection efforts directed at the US population, which was emphasized much more strongly by Evelegh.