Breaking The Silence

In the spring of the year 2001, I attended a class at Seattle Central Community College entitled Literature of the Holocaust and the Holocaust. It was a class of history that described the collective emotional and economic state of the world during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, as well as what drove Europe and the rest of the world to World War II and to the Holocaust...

By the end of that quarter, Dr. Cohen, our Jewish professor, asked us to write a final paper entitled The Act of Being a Witness. She asked if we were survivors of a historical event such as WWII and the Holocaust, and based on all the books that we had read, how we would tell our story to the world. So I began my modest final paper with the following paragraph:

“If one day something diabolical like the holocaust happened in some part of the world... and I was one of the few survivors to witness this event from an angle that was not possible for most people, and saw myself with the amazing responsibility to tell the world, how would I tell about it? Would I ever have peace in my soul? For sure I would talk about it. But I would also write, because writing is one way to let my testimony endure long after I passed away from this world...”

When I gave that final paper to Dr. Cohen, I told her: “Thank God we are living in America in the year 2001. We don’t have to deal with fascism, and America will never become totalitarian as those Europeans countries once were. Here I have freedom of speech, and I can become whatever I want.”

Months after that conversation with Dr. Cohen, the terrorist attacks of September 11th happened, and were followed by two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, America and the world have not been the same. And much of the chaos that plagued Europe before WWII now plagues America and the rest of the world. And tragically, before my own eyes, I have witnessed history repeating itself in many ways.

During the Bush Administration, I saw a kind of neo fascism and McCarthyism taking over the United States. And under the US Patriot Act, freedom in America became something from the past.

This is an Article published by DAVID N. GIBBS on April 7, 2003.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.

Dwight D. EisenhowerDwight D. Eisenhower 1

The aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack has reignited a longstanding debate about whether academics should work for the intelligence services, especially the CIA. In the new atmosphere of patriotic commitment, American academics have been called upon to serve in the war against terrorism--especially by serving as consultants to the Agency. In this article I will argue against collaboration between universities and intelligence agencies; and I will show that the practice is incompatible with reasonable academic norms, especially in the social sciences....

The new collaboration between academics and the intelligence agencies has elicited little debate or negative comment. On the contrary, such collaboration has been endorsed across the ideological spectrum. In November 2002, the liberal American Prospect published an article by Chris Mooney entitled: "Good Company: Its Time for Academics and the CIA to Work Together. Again."2 To the best of my knowledge, there has been no extended response to the Mooney article in The American Prospect or in any other publication.

While pundits never tire of the cliché that American universities are dominated by leftist faculty, who are hostile toward the objectives of established foreign policies, the reality is altogether different: The CIA has become "a growing force on campus," according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. The "Agency finds it needs experts from academia, and colleges pressed for cash like the revenue." Longstanding academic inhibitions about being publicly associated with the CIA have largely disappeared: In 2002, former CIA Director Robert GatesRobert Gates became president of Texas A & M University, while the new president of Arizona State University, Michael Crow was vice-chairman of the Agency's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel Inc. Current CIA Director George TenetGeorge Tenet delivered the commencement address at the Rochester Institute of Technology.3 The CIA has created a special scholarship program, for graduate students able and willing to obtain security clearances. According to the London Guardian, "the primary purpose of the program is to promote disciplines that would be of use to intelligence agencies."4 And throughout the country, academics in several disciplines are undertaking research (often secret) for the CIA.

To be sure, such consultation has a long history, extending back to the beginning of the Cold War. During the 1950s, the CIA and military intelligence were among the main sources of funding for the social sciences, having supported such institutions as the Columbia's Russian Research Institute, Harvard's Russian Research Center, and MIT's Center for International Studies. Outside the campus setting, major research foundations, including the Ford Foundation and the Asia Foundation, were closely integrated with the Agency. The field of political communications was transformed during the early Cold War by large-scale U.S. government funding, in which leading academics helped intelligence agencies to develop modern techniques of propaganda and psychological warfare

According to another most recent article, published in the Washington Post, in recent years, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have struggled to find qualified recruits who can work the streets of the Middle East and South Asia to penetrate terrorist groups and criminal enterprises. The proposed program is an effort to cultivate and educate a new generation of career intelligence officers from ethnically and culturally diverse backgrounds.

Under the proposal, part of the administration's 2010 intelligence authorization bill, colleges and universities would apply for grants that would be used to expand or introduce courses of study to "meet the emerging needs of the intelligence community." Those courses would include certain foreign languages, analysis and specific scientific and technical fields.

The students' participation in the program would probably be kept secret to prevent them from being identified by foreign intelligence services, according to an official familiar with the proposal.

Students attending participating colleges and universities who agree to take the specialized courses would apply to the national intelligence director for admittance to the program, whose administrators would select individuals "competitively" for financial assistance. Much like the support provided to those in the military programs, the financial assistance could include "a monthly stipend, tuition assistance, book allowances and travel expenses," according to the proposal. It also would involve paid summer internships at one or more intelligence agencies...

Students Denounce Pentagon Surveillance of Counter-Recruitment Activities through the Homeland Security

One more article published by the santacruz.indymedia.org says that most recently (article published in 2005), at Hampton University in Virginia, students disseminating information against military recruiters on campus were threatened with expulsion. Other schools that have witnessed incidents of extreme repression against student activists include the University of Wisconsin Madison, Kent State, Harold Washington College, Holyoke Community College, George Mason University, San Francisco State University, City College of New York, and Seattle Central Community College.

To know more about this article, go to: http://santacruz.indymedia.org/newswire/display/19173/index.php

Chronicles of an Alien was the way I found to let the world know what happened to me. And here is what was happening throughout America during that time, when my nightmare began: