John Pilger’s entry posted today on the The Guardian’s Comment Is Free blog entitled “The old Iran-Contra death squad gang is desperate to discredit Chavez” is an interesting read. In it, Pilger confronts some of Latin America’s harsh realities and, having also made a documentary entitled The War On Democracy, which “shows that the principles of democracy can be found more readily among the poorest people of Latin America than anywhere near the corridors of the White House. It features an exclusive interview with Hugo Chávez and Pilger also speaks to former US government officials who claim the CIA waged covert wars in Latin America”, his views on the subject carry some weight.

In the entry Pilger writes…

“In making my film The War on Democracy, I sought the help of Chileans like Roberto and his family, and Sara de Witt, who courageously returned with me to the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi, which she somehow survived. Together with other Latin Americans who knew the tyrannies, they bear witness to the pattern and meaning of the propaganda and lies now aimed at undermining another epic bid to renew both democracy and freedom on the continent.

The disinformation that helped destroy Allende and give rise to Pinochet’s horrors worked the same in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas had the temerity to implement modest, popular reforms. In both countries, the CIA funded the leading opposition media, although they need not have bothered. In Nicaragua, the fake martyrdom of La Prensa became a cause for North America’s leading liberal journalists, who seriously debated whether a poverty-stricken country of 3 million peasants posed a “threat” to the United States. Ronald Reagan agreed and declared a state of emergency to combat the monster at the gates. In Britain, whose Thatcher government “absolutely endorsed” US policy, the standard censorship by omission applied. In examining 500 articles that dealt with Nicaragua in the early 1980s, the historian Mark Curtis found an almost universal suppression of the achievements of the Sandinista government - “remarkable by any standards” - in favour of the falsehood of “the threat of a communist takeover”.

The similarities in the campaign against the phenomenal rise of popular democratic movements today are striking. Aimed principally at Venezuela, especially Chávez, the virulence of the attacks suggests that something exciting is taking place; and it is. Thousands of poor Venezuelans are seeing a doctor for the first time in their lives, having their children immunised and drinking clean water. New universities have opened their doors to the poor, breaking the privilege of competitive institutions effectively controlled by a “middle class” in a country where there is no middle. In barrio La Línea, Beatrice Balazo told me her children were the first generation of the poor to attend a full day’s school. “I have seen their confidence blossom like flowers,” she said. One night in barrio La Vega, in a bare room beneath a single lightbulb, I watched Mavis Mendez, aged 94, learn to write her own name for the first time.

More than 25,000 communal councils have been set up in parallel to the old, corrupt local bureaucracies. Many are spectacles of raw grassroots democracy. Spokespeople are elected, yet all decisions, ideas and spending have to be approved by a community assembly. In towns long controlled by oligarchs and their servile media, this explosion of popular power has begun to change lives in the way Beatrice described.

It is this new confidence of Venezuela’s “invisible people” that has so inflamed those who live in suburbs called country club. Behind their walls and dogs, they remind me of white South Africans. Venezuela’s wild west media is mostly theirs; 80% of broadcasting and almost all the 118 newspaper companies are privately owned. Until recently one television shock jock liked to call Chávez, who is mixed race, a “monkey”. Front pages depict the president as Hitler, or as Stalin (the connection being that both like babies). Among broadcasters crying censorship loudest are those bankrolled by the National Endowment for Democracy, the CIA in spirit if not name. “We had a deadly weapon, the media,” said an admiral who was one of the coup plotters in 2002. The TV station, RCTV, never prosecuted for its part in the attempt to overthrow the elected government, lost only its terrestrial licence and is still broadcasting on satellite and cable.

Yet, as in Nicaragua, the “treatment” of RCTV is a cause celebre for those in Britain and the US affronted by the sheer audacity and popularity of Chávez, whom they smear as “power crazed” and a “tyrant”. That he is the authentic product of a popular awakening is suppressed. Even the description of him as a “radical socialist”, usually in the pejorative, wilfully ignores the fact that he is a nationalist and social democrat, a label many in Britain’s Labour party were once proud to wear.

In Washington, the old Iran-Contra death squad gang, back in power under Bush, fear the economic bridges Chávez is building in the region, such as the use of Venezuela’s oil revenue to end IMF slavery. That he maintains a neoliberal economy, described by the American Banker as “the envy of the banking world” is seldom raised as valid criticism of his limited reforms. These days, of course, any true reforms are exotic. And as liberal elites under Blair and Bush fail to defend their own basic liberties, they watch the very concept of democracy as a liberal preserve challenged on a continent about which Richard Nixon once said “people don’t give a shit”. However much they play the man, Chávez, their arrogance cannot accept that the seed of Rousseau’s idea of direct popular sovereignty may have been planted among the poorest, yet again, and “the hope of the human spirit”, ofwhich Roberto spoke in the stadium, has returned.”

It is often overlooked that the most powerful weapon in the world is, in fact, information. And given that, the use of highly developed counter-intelligence is therefore the pinnacle of power. The United States largely learned the art of counter-intelligence during the Second World War from the British, its undisputed historical masters, and, after the creation of the CIA, went on to perfect it during the Cold War, though credit must also be given the Soviets for their efforts as well. It has been used domestically, internationally, and has infiltrated every medium that is able to be influenced by it, from educational curriculums to newspapers to television. It can be used to discredit foreign leaders, political movements, distort economic realities, and justify military interventions. It can even scapegoat an entire religion for the sake of national hysteria based on the actions of a handful.

In the world of intelligence, it doesn’t get more dirty, nor secretive, than counter-intelligence. During the Cold War it was employed with perfection in such cases as the overthrow of Mosaddeq in Iran (a democratically elected leader), Allende in Chile (a democratically elected leader), and Árbenz in Guatemala (a democratically elected leader) - just not the right sort of democratically elected leaders.

In all three cases, the cause for their removal was purely economic, inferring that they were not in line with those who had benefited from lucratively established practices in their countries. In all three cases, they were painted as communist, or highly socialist, bringing into question the possibility that they might align themselves with the Soviets.

In all three cases it worked. In fact, it worked so well that the realities of their removal are usually dismissed in many curriculums at the post secondary level, some of which actually lean on the propaganda that was used in the counter-intelligence operations themselves. In such cases, operations such as AJAX and PBSUCCESS are explained away as Cold War necessities.

The point of counter-intelligence is not to spread false information. It is to spread confusion so that disinformation seems logical by comparison. The recreation of truth is not particularly the point, only the acceptance that wrongdoing is, in some way, afoot. Thus, portions of populations can be swayed to condemn governments, religious leaders, and even other ethnicities within their societies purely based on a lack of knowledge and the fear that that causes.

Also of importance is the fact that counter-intelligence is commonly double edged. While its use is employed in one fashion in a foreign locale, it is applied in a completely different fashion domestically. Thus, a divergence of realities is created that, domestically, causes public condemnation of those being targeted while, at the same time, creating the required confusion of those being manipulated abroad. In the context of a free society, such as the United States, it is important that this element exists, as it helps project legitimacy.

We are, like it or not, products of decades of counter-intelligence that has, in no small way, affected how we view others. This reality has only helped strengthen and diversify the power of counter-intelligence initiatives, and has most certainly been amplified in a domestic sense to an unprecedented level.