'Secret wars are bipartisan efforts'

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initiatives which occur behind the backs and against the will of the majority of the American people. A "Secret Team" of operatives has functioned clandestinely over the past 27 years with the consent and support of top U.S. government officials. Brian Willson and Holley Rauen Institute lawsuit against the "Secret Team" and a U.S. journalist based in Costa Rica, spoke with great detail about her groundbreaking investigative reporting which uncovered the CIA's role in organizing the contra war from Costa Rica.

Honey and her co-plaintiff and husband, Tony Avirgan, have been the targets of severe forms of harrassment while in Costa Rica. At a certain point, several death threats forced them to send their two children abroad.

Holley Rauen, an activist with the Nuremberg Action Committee, described the committee's 40-mile "witness for peace" walk through war-torn areas of Nicaragua. Rauen also reported on recent protests at the Concord Naval Weapons Station, including one during which her husband, Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran, was severely injured.

Willson followed and was given a thunderous reception. It was his first major public appearance since the day he was struck by a government ammunitions train, requiring the amputation of both his legs.

Daniel Sheehan, chief counsel of the Christic Institutue, detailed the revelations of his landmark suit against the "Secret Team." He also blasted the Congressional Contragate hearings as an "embarrassing, inadequate, and a basic self-conscious concealment and cover-up of this operation."

"The Republicans and the Democrats, and their leaderships," Sheehan said, "are trying to tell us that they have dealt with the problem that has brought pain and suffering to the people you see before you tonight and those who are not with us.' Sheehan continued, "But they are not telling the truth. They have not dealt with The following are excerpts from the talk by Ralph Schoenman to the Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice reception on Nov. 8. Schoenman was the director of the Bertrand Russell War Crimes Tribunal, which exposed the crimes of the U.S. government during the Vietnam War.

I want to take a brief moment to discuss the linkage between what Dan Sheehan has so ably documented here today and a prior investigation which we undertook to disclose the dynamics of U.S. crimes in Indochina; crimes which entailed saturation bombing on a scale such that every nine months a bomb equivalent to that of Hiroshima devastated that agrarian country.

I would like to suggest that the "team" that carried out this operation was not entirely secret, though it did in large measure consist of hired hands.

Although the task of documenting the crimes of these hired hands was indisputably important, I think that we also have to look at that other "secret team," that is, that handful of people who hold power in this country.

This is how Robert Townsend, the president of American Express and of Avis Corp., put it in his book, "Up the Organization": "America is run largely by and for about 5000 people. The 5000 appoint their own successors and are responsible to nobody."

It is worth noting that since 1945, 15 million people have died in colonial wars, a direct consequence of the interference of the United States. The Democratic Party has controlled the presidency or the Congress for 44 of these 50 years.

Professor William Domhoff, in "Fat Cats and Democrats," said: "A property party with two branches is one of the neatest devices ever stumbled upon by rich men determined to stay on top."

This Contragate crisis is not new. There is a "secret team" in North America. It is a handful of people who control the political process that dictates our lives and who hire the contract killers who carry out, on their behalf, the assassinations and the kind of criminal activity that Daniel Sheehan has explained and documented for us this afternoon.

Our task is to move ahead and to build a political movement not dependent on either of the capitalist parties, which are one big property party, until we sweep this handful of criminals into the dustbin of history, where they belong.