The U.S.' Devious "Shoot-Down" Plan; Abalones and Nazis
Remember that family of evangelical Baptists that got shot up in the Amazon? Let me remind you. Having concluded a bout of predatory spiritual rampages among the hapless Indians along the Peruvian Amazon, this same family was halved in size after a bullet from a Peruvian fighter plane fatally pierced Veronica and Charity Bowers (mother and seven-month-old infant) while wounding Cessna pilot Kevin Donaldson and sparing the Baptist paterfamilias, Jim Bowers, and his son Cory.
As the Archive's preamble to the documents narrates, the U.S. began sharing real-time aerial tracking information with Colombia and Peru in July of 1990. When the Colombians told the U.S. they were thinking of a shoot-down policy for suspected drug planes, the U.S. State Dept. got nervous about the possible legal ramifications, if U.S. advisers were involved, as they undoubtedly would be. So the State Dept. proclaimed piously that both U.S. and international law precluded the use of weapons against civilian aircraft, except in self-defense. The Colombians said they wouldn't give up on the idea, but would shelve it, at least for a while.
Peru adopted a force-down policy in 1993, and at the end of that year the Colombians (probably after back-channel prodding from the U.S. shoot-down faction) said they would now implement the shoot-down strategy formulated in 1990. A U.S. interagency group began a review of the new policies in January 1994. On May 1 the Clinton administration, led by the Dept. of Defense, announced a suspension of the sharing of real-time aerial tracking data with the two governments.
This was the signal for savage hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat inside the U.S. government. On the one side were ranged those departments and agencies deriving funding and a sense of mission in life from the War on Drugs: the State Dept.'s bureaus of International Narcotics Matters (INM) and Inter-American Affairs (ARA), not to mention DEA, CIA, Customs and so forth. On the other side were the teams at State's legal department and at Justice, offering the view that it is a perilous strategy to shoot down civilian planes, and that "mistakes are likely to occur under any policy that contemplates the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight, even as a last resort." Veterans at State remembered the tremendous, self-righteous stink raised by the U.S. after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean airliner (KAL 007) that had penetrated its air space. The State Dept. cited a 1984 amendment of the Chicago convention on civil aviation?adopted in the wake of the KAL incident?banning the use of force against civil aircraft.
In the end Clinton characteristically tried to please both factions, while going along with the hawks. On June 21, 1994, he secretly okayed U.S. cooperation with Colombia and Peru's shoot-down/forcedown policy, allowing U.S. aerial tracking data to be used in operations against suspicious aircraft "if the President has determined that such actions are necessary because of the threat posed by drugtrafficking [sic] to the national security of that country and that the country has appropriate procedures in place to protect innocent aircraft."
As one bureaucrat happily noted, this Solomonic compromise would "reduce the [United States government's] exposure to criticism that such assistance violates international law."
Colombia and Peru would be instructed that one way to cope with the difficulties presented by international agreements against shooting down civil aircraft would be to declare a "national emergency"?as permitted under the relevant conventions. Another stratagem contemplated a campaign to convince nations deemed "aviation partners" to accept a "narrow exception" to international law in cases where "drug trafficking threatens the political institutions of a state and where the country imposes strict procedures to reduce the risk of attack against non-drug trafficking aircraft."
One element was conspicuous by its absence. Nowhere in the torrent of U.S. advice to Peru and Colombia was there any hint that military and intelligence assistance from the U.S. might be conditioned on a solution to the international legal problems. Significantly, the document notes that "The President explicitly did not condition the resumption of assistance on a solution to the international law problems associated with the USG's provision of such assistance." As the U.S. State Dept. proudly (but of course secretly) boasted to President Samper of Colombia in December of that year, the Clinton administration had made "a tremendous legal and administrative effort" to get the intelligence-sharing arrangements back on track. Ambassador Morris Busby was told to tell President Samper that "Because narcotics is very important to us, the administration expended a great deal of effort to change U.S. law and permit us to resume our cooperation."
By the way, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association did think the policy was a lousy idea. It turns out the CIA, the subcontractors and Southcom, Colombia and Peru have been responsible for downing anywhere from 25 to 30 small planes over the passage of the years since 1994. Who were they? No one seems to know and, please, the occupants of these planes weren't murdered in acts of international terrorism and piracy. No, they were "successfully interdicted," thus bringing a glow of satisfaction to the cheeks of those waging the war on drugs.
First Catch Your Abs
It's abalone season here on California's North Coast. Not being inclined to thrash about in choppy water in a wetsuit, poking about under rocks, I rely on the generosity of friends and this strategy was rewarded over the weekend with two fine abalone. The shell of a really big ab measures about 10 inches across. Mine, scheduled for the table Memorial Day, were about 8 inches each. Pry the mollusk out of the shell and kill it by whacking the bit that used to fasten the abalone to its rock. Then trim off the guts, put the abalone in a knotted trouser leg and hit it hard a few times with some sort of club. When suppertime comes along, slice the discus-shaped abalone vertically in thin slices, which you can also pound very gently. Fry for a few seconds in butter and it should melt in your mouth. The $50 portions you are offered in restaurants usually taste like bicycle tire, same as ill-prepared calamari.
Watching the little edge-suckers of the abalone quiver as it died gave me the same sort of guilt one gets boiling lobsters alive. The Nazis worried about this, too. In 1933, soon after they came to power, they passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals. Goering announced an end to the "unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments" and, in an unusual admission of the existence of such institutions, threatened to "commit to concentration camps those who still think they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property." Horses, cats and apes were singled out for special protection.
In 1936, after appropriate testing and research, the Nazi Ministry of Interior promulgated a law decreeing that crustaceans were to be dispatched in the most merciful possible manner, by throwing them into rapidly boiling water. Laws protecting wildlife were also passed, aiming to "awaken and strengthen compassion as one of the highest moral values of the German people." Actually, the measures may have been a legal veil for attacking the Jews. In making this attack Nazis allied themselves with animals, since both were portrayed as victims of Jewish oppressors.
Central to the equation of animals and Nazis as commonly oppressed by Jews was the composer Richard Wagner, an ardent veggie who urged attacks on laboratories and physical assault on vivisectionists, whom he associated with Jews, presumably because of kosher slaughtering methods. Wagner thought that the purity of Aryans had been compromised by meat-eating and a mixing of the races. Aryans and animals were allied in a struggle against contaminators, vivisectors and under-people in general. Goebbels later wrote that "both [Judaism and Christianity] have no point of contact to the animal element and thus, in the end, they will be destroyed. The Fuehrer is a convinced vegetarian on principle."
Flora as well as fauna were marshaled into desirable and undesirable types. Theorists of landscape design such as Willy Lange saw the purpose of the "nature garden" as not primarily to please humans. Plants, as much as animals, should have equal rights, with native plants much preferred over alien species. Lange denounced the formal garden as characteristic of the "South Alpine race."
These theories of landscape and the natural garden, with the notion of rootedness in the soil, also had an anti-Semitic content, with the Jews, like gypsies, being described as rootless nomads. Nazi gardeners zealously prosecuted campaigns of ethnic cleansing, pulling up alien intruders. One garden architect proclaimed that "only our knowledge of laws of blood and spiritually inherited property, and our knowledge of the conditions of the home soil and its plant world (plant sociology), enable and oblige us to design blood-and-soil rooted gardens."
This rubbish was hotly contested by some brave souls, among them Rudolf Borchardt, a Jew who died in 1942 trying to escape the Nazis. In 1938 he made a plea for international garden culture: "If this kind of garden-owning barbarian became the rule, then neither a gillyflower nor a rosemary, neither a peach-tree nor a myrtle sapling nor a tea-rose would ever have crossed the Alps. Gardens connect people, times and latitudes. If these barbarians ruled, the great historic process of acclimatization would never have begun and today we would still horticulturally subsist on acorns... The garden of humanity is a huge democracy..."
That being said, I would still like to throttle the person who imported broom into the United States, bringing it to Oregon in 1865. Try uprooting any broom with a stem thicker than a stick of dry spaghetti and you'll see what I mean.