Jan. 9, 2013 - Steve Pieczenik
15:01
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| Music Music Music Music This is Dr. | |
| Steve Pchenik, and this is Steve Pchenik's talk, and tonight I want to talk about another article written in the New York Times. | |
| It turns out the New York Times is producing very interesting articles that allow me to comment on some of my own experiences that are relevant to the articles. | |
| This particular article, written by Simon Romero, R-O-M-E-R-O, it talks, it's entitled, After Years in Solitary and Austere Life as Uruguay's President. | |
| And it refers to someone I had known 30, 40 years ago, Jose Mujica, M-U-J-I-C-A, who's now the president of Uruguay and who has personally shunned the palatial trappings of being the president of Uruguay in the capital city of Montevideo. | |
| He has literally turned down every fanciful accoutrement that comes with being the president of a very wealthy country. | |
| This is a Catholic sporting nation of 3.2 million people, Uruguay. | |
| He's 77 years old and he shunned the opulent Suarez y Reyes presidential mansion with its staff of 42 people, remaining instead in his home where he and his wife have lived for years on a plot of land where they grow chrysanthemums for sale in the local markets. | |
| Visitors have to reach his house on O'Higgins Road, which is a dirt road, and his net worth, unlike many of our own presidents, when he took office in 2010 amounted to about $1,800, the value of a 1987 Volkswagen the value of a 1987 Volkswagen Beetle parked in his garage. | |
| He never wears a tie and donates about 90% of his salary, largely to a program for expanding housing for the poor. | |
| His current brand of low-key radicalism, a marked shift from his days wielding weapons, which I knew about because he was my enemy, as the chief of the Tupamaros, one of the most lethal terrorist gangs I had ever come across with, against, in 30 years of counterterrorism. | |
| And now, after many years in imprisonment and 10 years in solitary confinement and 15 years in imprisonment, he decided to come back into the political arena as a statesman and worked his way up from a local legislator all the way up to the legislative body and eventually into the presidency. | |
| And once in the presidency, he decided to live the life of a true citizen of the nation. | |
| And we believe that you don't need to have the accoutrements of power to wield power and to wield it with a gentle but firm stick. | |
| He's not a communist. | |
| He's not a terrorist. | |
| He's much more on the libertarian side where he has openly espoused the law for legalizing marijuana, same-sex marriage, and Pro-abortion and many of the ideals that are progressive parties, whether you agree with them or not, believe in. | |
| And this was a gentleman who was my avowed enemy. | |
| I talk about him because it's interesting that he comes out now to be an extremely humble, modest, and effective president in a country which has a major export of cattle and beef and is doing quite well, much better than we are. | |
| Their growth rate is 3.6%. | |
| Now, when I knew him, he was the chief of one of the most lethal and most imposing terrorist groups, which was the basis of a movie that Constantine Kostogravas drew inspiration from in his 1972 movie, State of Siege. | |
| And it was based on the abduction and execution in 1970 of Daniel Mitrion, an American advisor to Uruguay's security forces. | |
| You can read in between the lines, of course. | |
| He now claims, Mr. | |
| Morica, or Jose, Morica, or Jose as I knew him, that the group, the Tupumaros, tried by all means to avoid killing But he also euphemistically acknowledged that it was a military deviation. | |
| Historically, there was a brutal counterinsurgency that was initiated by the United States and subdued the Tupamaros, and the police captured Mojica, or Jose, as I knew him, in 1972. | |
| He spent about 14 years in prison, including more than a decade in solitary confinement, often in a hole in the ground. | |
| During that time, he would go on more than a year without bathing, and his companions, he said, were tiny frog and rats, whom he shared crumbs of bread. | |
| Some of the other Tupamaros, who were placed there for years in solitary confinement, failed to grasp the benefits of befriending rodents. | |
| I think that was a point of humor, but one of them, Henry Eagler, whom I did not know, was a medical student, underwent a severe mental breakdown before his release in 1985. | |
| For you, my listeners, it's not unusual for terrorists who've been captured to really break down in isolation, not because they're tortured. | |
| It's simply because they're not used to spending time with themselves and being devoid of an action for them. | |
| Very much like our own soldiers who are addicted to war or to the adrenaline of action and when they are no longer in battle, they really decompose or go into a severe depression. | |
| But the world of terrorism has its own ironies and that is if you tend to be a very good terrorist and an effective terrorist, ironically, you tend to be also a very good statesman. | |
| This was historically true of our own founding fathers, George Washington, Who really never had a major military background but had been involved in insurgencies in the French-Indian wars and had learned a lot from the British, both how the British fought those insurgency and how he despised the British commanders and how the Indians fought and the French fought. | |
| He subsequently utilized that terrorist and counterinsurgency, or what we now call asymmetric warfare, techniques to mobilize our Continental Army, which was really not much of an army. | |
| It wasn't Continental, and it was composed mainly of Many, many volunteers from the Northeast, primarily Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, New York, and many from Virginia. | |
| George Washington was considered a terrorist. | |
| There was no question about it, as were our other founding fathers. | |
| John Adams was a major terrorist and pamphleteer. | |
| Thomas Paine was a terrorist and pamphleteer. | |
| We had James Madison was considered a terrorist, as was many of the founding fathers, John Hancock and others. | |
| So eventually they all, not so ironically, became a statesman. | |
| So the notion that one man's terrorist is another man's statement is a very true idiom. | |
| This was true of Mandela in South Africa who was in prison On the island that I visited, and the British or the South Africanos were very rough on him. | |
| He was in isolation for over 30 years, but he was able to obtain several degrees and taught himself several different skills while in prison. | |
| But in those days he was considered a terrorist as was the ANC, the African National Congress, which is now the predominant legitimate party of South Africa. | |
| From my point of view, the man who was involved with Mandel in South Africa was not a terrorist. | |
| He was then the president of South Africa. | |
| De Klerk was quite an exceptional individual who defied his own brother who had been head of a terrorist group called the Brude Brothers or the Blood Brothers who threatened the clerk that if he released Mandela he, the clerk, would die and the clerk totally ignored his own brother's warnings and the warnings of the Afrikonos, the Brude Brothers and released Mandela and the rest is history. | |
| Apartheid was dissolved. | |
| Again, we go to another part of history which I've talked about in the Middle East. | |
| Menachem Begin was the head of the terrorist group that blew up the hotel in Jerusalem, killing more Jews, actually, than any others. | |
| And he went underground. | |
| He subsequently became a legitimate prime minister of Israel. | |
| As was Anwar Sadat, a terrorist, and was a member of the Islamic Brotherhood, had been in jail by the British, and was incarcerated for many years, and subsequently, through hard work and personal initiatives, as the vice president to Anwar Sadat, to Nasser, who called him the black donkey because he was far darker than Anwar Sadat. | |
| Then Nasser Anwar Sadat became probably one of the most effective and respected statesmen in the Middle East. | |
| I can think again of the Tupac Mardos who came into the forefront and many other terrorist groups. | |
| So whenever you hear the word terrorism, there is no specific profile for terrorism. | |
| There is no specific delineation. | |
| The notion that a terrorist comes out of poverty or needs a better working condition or background is total nonsense. | |
| Terrorism is just a euphemism that is used by the ruling states in order to justify their political actions and paramilitary and military actions against a minority power That uses terror. | |
| Now, terror is not the blowing up of buildings necessarily in planes crashing into buildings. | |
| It can be anything from fear to the intended use of a bomb to literally the dissemination of terror through pamphlets or agitation propaganda. | |
| So terrorism is a technique, it's not a strategy, and that's where clearly our presidents Bush Jr., Clinton, and Obama have made major, major mistakes in pursuing the war on terrorism. | |
| There can be no war by definition on terror because terror is an emotion. | |
| It's the equivalent of saying we're going to have a war on happiness or we're going to have a war on fright or a war on scariness. | |
| It doesn't exist. | |
| It makes no sense. | |
| If you're going after people who are involved in using terror, that's a police action, and that has primarily to do with 99.9%, not with drones or military invasions or incursions into a foreign state, but it deals with penetration of the terrorist group through human assets. | |
| Now, there are many things we're not able to do that other countries are able to do, particularly Israel, where they're able to kill their own people in order to ingratiate themselves into a terrorist group. | |
| We have a very hard time doing that. | |
| We're not very good in the United States in penetrating foreign groups. | |
| One, because of our language deficiency. | |
| Two, because our inability to understand the culture. | |
| And three, to really understand how terror arises within a community and how it's supported by the community. | |
| The notion that many of our generals have talked about, winning the hearts and minds, is just a euphemism for really not knowing very much about what they're doing. | |
| One unit of our military has done exceptionally well in combating extremism, and that has been the Marine Corps, which has in the past hired anthropologists and have been able, through the use of anthropologists who understand the local culture and the ethnic diversity and divergences and requirements of that ethnic community, they've been able to reduce violence in a particular area by 90%. | |
| It's not guns, bullets, or tanks, or airplanes that reduce violence. | |
| It's the understanding of human nature and the ability to manipulate it, which is a word that we don't often use in our intelligence community because we really have no ability to train in manipulation or really understand psychological warfare. | |
| So, this case of Mr. | |
| Jose Mujica, who is now the president of Uruguay, really gives me a kind of ironic smile to say that, oh my God, my enemy of 30, 40 years ago is now my ally, and a model of what it means to be a modest, humble, but effective president. | |
| He finally adds in his statement that he admired a passage from Don Quixote by Cervantes in which the knight Arant imbibes wine from a horn and dines on salted goat with his goatherd hosts delivering a harangue against the pestilence of gallantry. | |
| Quote, he says, the goat herds were the poorest people of Spain, said Mr. | |
| Mujica. | |
| Probably, he added, they were the richest, end quote. | |
| I think it would be fine if our past and future presidents would learn from the experiences of José Mujica, the present president of Uruguay. | |
| Thank you for listening to me tonight. | |
| I wish you good luck and good night. | |
| This is Dr. | |
| Steve Pechenek. |
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