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In 2007, geologists for the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality told their bosses that a proposal for a radioactive waste dump in West Texas was fatally flawed because of the landfill’s proximity to the Ogallala and Dockum aquifers. Then-agency head Glenn Shankle (now a lobbyist for the dump’s owner, Waste Control Specialists) overruled his employees, issuing licenses for the two adjacent landfills in Andrews County. But as a compromise of sorts, he required Waste Control to conduct a number of tests and studies to prove that the site was dry enough.

Critics, including three whistleblowers who quit the agency in protest, were hardly mollified—in a sane world, they said, the company would have to prove that the dump wouldn’t leak radioactive waste into the groundwater before getting a permit, not after. But that’s all the TCEQ bosses were offering.

Now, some of the results from those studies are in. They are hardly reassuring. Waste Control, owned by Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, has identified nine areas inside and near the proposed landfills where groundwater is present. The company has argued to the TCEQ in recent filings that these so-called “pockets of groundwater” are isolated from the aquifers and not a cause for concern. Some of them, the company says, are probably linked to playas—surface depressions, common to West Texas, that fill with water. Others, Waste Control contends, result from small depressions in the top of the red bed clay. The playas will be filled in with soil, the company promises, and the depressions in the clay are too small to matter.

Even so, the presence of any water is troubling. “If you have water in the ground you shouldn’t put a landfill there,” says Patricia Bobeck, a hydrogeologist who left the TCEQ in September 2007 and went public with her complaints that upper management had ignored the environmental and safety risks. Water can provide a pathway for radioactive particles to move quickly through the earth and permanently contaminate drinking or agricultural water.

Bobeck says the latest findings only underscore what she and other experts have been saying for years. “The people who rejected this site were not acting on a hunch,” she says. “WCS has corroborated that with their own data.”

In the past year, Waste Control, at the TCEQ’s request, has drilled dozens of new wells. Many of them, including some within the footprint of the radioactive waste dump, have inches or feet of water at the bottom.

“These wells indicate that the area around the byproduct excavation and southeastern portion of the low level site are much wetter than previously thought,” wrote Conrad Kuharic, a TCEQ geologist, in a February memo.

In its license application, Waste Control had argued that the landfills would be well away from a “dry line,” a shifting boundary on a map dividing wet wells from dry. But in April, confronted with the evidence from its own wells, the company conceded that that critical line had moved 200 feet closer, almost inside the landfills. Increased rainfall in the future may put the “dry line” inside the dump, TCEQ experts have contended. That, Bobeck says, is “bad news. This landfill by law cannot be placed in proximity with water.”

For years, Waste Control has touted its 1,300-acre dump site as nearly geologically perfect for containing radioactive waste for tens of thousands of years. The company’s primary selling point has been what it calls the “almost impenetrable red bed clay” in which the waste will be buried.

But the red bed is leaking. After giant earthmovers dug deep into it, water began seeping out of the walls. On the southern wall, enough seeped out to form a pool of standing water. In December, the company claimed that the water would soon dissipate. But when a trio of TCEQ geologists visited Waste Control’s dump in January, a month and a half later, they noted that the puddle had actually grown (see photo above).

Bobeck is skeptical that the discovery of groundwater in the radioactive waste dump will prompt the TCEQ to crack down. The additional studies, she says, were never intended to change Waste Control’s course.

Not surprisingly, the company agrees. “Groundwater occurrences in the vicinity of the Byproduct landfill have no impact on current planning for the operation of the landfill,” the company told the TCEQ in May.

Investigative reporting for this article was supported, in part, by a grant from the Open Society Institute.

The revolving door between government and the private sector is a time-worn tradition in Texas. But here’s a case that on its bare facts is particularly egregious.

In January, six months after stepping down as the executive director of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Glenn Shankle signed on as a lobbyist for Waste Control Specialists, the company recently licensed by TCEQ to build a massive radioactive waste dump in West Texas. His lobby contract is worth between $100,000 and $150,000, according to the Texas Ethics Commission.

When Shankle left TCEQ in June 2008, the agency was readying, per Shankle’s orders, two licenses authorizing Waste Control to bury millions of cubic feet of radioactive waste. The four-year license review process had been one of the most time-consuming and contentious in agency history.

Shankle’s own technical staff, geologists and engineers had concluded definitively that the dump could not legally be permitted. An Aug. 14, 2007, memo drafted by two geologists and two engineers bluntly stated that the landfill’s proximity to two aquifers made it “highly likely” that radioactive waste would leak into the groundwater. The site, they wrote, “cannot be improved through special license conditions.” They recommended denying the license. With little explanation, Shankle overruled them. His only sop to the staff were license conditions requiring additional studies before construction.

Amazingly, Shankle said in a brief telephone interview yesterday—one of the few times he has ever spoken to the press—that he had never heard of any of this.

“I was not aware of that,” Shankle said of his own technical staff’s recommendations. If true, that’s stunning. According to the Houston Chronicle:

When WCS President Rodney Baltzer learned of the [August 14] memo, he immediately sought out meetings with the agency’s executive director, Glenn Shankle, who decided in December [2007] to begin drafting the license.

In fact, records from TCEQ, previously discussed in the Observer, show that during the time period after the staff’s recommendation, Shankle was frequently meeting with Waste Control officials, attorneys and lobbyists. Waste Control is owned by Harold Simmons, the Dallas billionaire and major Republican donor who helped bankroll Swift Boat ads attacking John Kerry in 2004 and television ads in 2008 linking Barack Obama to Bill Ayers.

Baltzer left nine messages for Shankle and four for [Deputy Executive Director Dan] Eden between July 2007 and January 2008, according to phone logs that reflect only missed calls. Eden met with Waste Control officials at least five times during that period. Former Republican Congressman Kent Hance, a Waste Control investor and chancellor of the Texas Tech University System, paid a visit to Shankle’s office in early November.

Cliff Johnson, a principal in Textilis Strategies, an Austin-based firm that lobbies for Waste Control, visited with Shankle in September. Shankle also met with Giblin, Baltzer, and Mike Woodward, a Waste Control lobbyist and attorney with Hance’s law firm, during that period.

The outcome of this full-court press was the Shankle-ordered drafting of the coveted disposal licenses, permits that are worth untold millions to the company. In fact, without these licenses Waste Control is a losing venture. Last year, Waste Control lost $21.5 million, according to SEC filings for Valhi, Waste Control’s parent company. In other words, Shankle had done a very big favor for Waste Control.

The move so upset his staff that three of them quit in protest. One of them, Glenn Lewis, who coordinated one of the license review teams, reacted with disgust and anger when told yesterday that Shankle was lobbying for Waste Control.

“Even the Mafia was more circumspect than this,” Lewis said. “To find out now that Mr. Shankle—who was in constant communication with WCS throughout this ordeal—now is on retainer for [WCS] is shocking in that it is so brazen and such an insult to everybody who worked on that application. It just shows that any objective appraisal by the TCEQ was from its inception a fantasy and that big money and a lot of political power won once again. … They should have just issued the license the day after it was received and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

When it was suggested to Shankle that there was at least the appearance of a quid pro quo, he responded: “The freedom of the press can go so far. You’re making some very serious allegations.” Then he hung up.

Steve Satterwhite.

Fox News presides over Collin County's ant-terrorism center.

One morning in February, more than 2,000 cops, fire marshals, and public health officials in the Dallas-Fort Worth area received a memo—stamped “For Official Use Only”—that contained shocking information: Middle Eastern terrorists and “their supporting organizations” had gained a stronghold in America. The memo warned:

A number of organizations in the U.S. have been lobbying Islamic-based issues for many years. These lobbying efforts have turned public and political support towards radical goals such as Shariah law and support of terrorist military action against Western nations. … [T]he threats to Texas are significant.

Who were these Osama bin Lobbyists who had convinced Americans to support terrorism? Citing a grab bag of right-wing blogs and news sources, the memo lists the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the International Action Center, Act Now to Stop War and End Racism—”ANSWER”—and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. It also suggests that a class on Islamic finance taught at the Treasury Department “indicates the possibility that the government hopes to secure recycled petrodollars in exchange for conforming to Shariah economic doctrine.” The memo ends by calling on law enforcement to “report” the activities of the organizations.

The missive reads like a rant by a paranoid conspiracy nut. In fact, the so-called “Prevention Awareness Bulletin” is a weekly product of the North Central Texas Fusion System, a terrorism and crime-prevention intelligence center run by the Collin County Department of Homeland Security. The system gathers and shares information for a 16-county area that includes Dallas and Forth Worth. The bulletin is written by the architect and operator of the fusion system, Bob Johnson, a former chief scientist for defense contractor Raytheon Co. Johnson has a background in data mining, the controversial, computer-aided practice of trolling massive quantities of data in pursuit of patterns and links.

At Raytheon, Johnson oversaw a short-lived project in Garland for the U.S. Special Forces Command that mined public information as well as classified files to sniff out Al-Qaida. The program, identified in congressional testimony as Able Danger, generated attention in 2005 and 2006 when former Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, claimed that Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, before the terror attacks. Weldon asserted that Johnson had told him that he personally had identified Atta. The allegations fired up 9/11 conspiracy buffs, but were dismissed by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.

Among his critics in Texas, Johnson is better known as “Son of Sam”—the son of U.S Rep. Sam Johnson, the conservative Republican congressman who has represented Collin County since 1992.

In 2004, Collin County tapped ADB Consulting LLC, which stands for Anita and Dr. Bob, to build the fusion system. Anita Miller, also a former Raytheon employee, is Johnson’s wife. On the couple’s personal Web site, anitaanddrbob.com, which has since been taken down, they wrote that they were “ecstatic” to “be implementing a system similar to what we have advocated since before 9/11 for the security of our homeland. For us, the Fusion System is a dream come true!”

Their dream has been profitable. Since 2004, Anita and Dr. Bob have received $1.1 million in no-bid contracts. At least $80,000 of that money has been passed along, in the form of a subcontract, to Anita’s brother, Elbert Bassham, who runs a one-person consulting firm listed at a Marfa post-office box that he shares with a beauty salon.

“I’m not aware of any other fusion center that has a husband-and-wife team building, running, and managing it,” says James Paat, CEO of Sypherlink Inc., an Ohio-based data integration company that lost the subcontract. In a 2007 letter to Collin County, Paat accused ADB Consulting of rigging the scoring process and asked that the contract be rescinded.

Funding for the fusion system comes from state and federal Homeland Security grants as well as Collin County funds.

“It certainly has the stench of corruption,” says Mohamed Elibiary, an interfaith leader from Plano who has called for more oversight of fusion systems. Collin County put management of the fusion center up for competitive bidding in March, but County Judge Keith Self says the system is so customized that it’s unlikely that anyone else can run it.

Contacted by the Observer at his home in Santa Fe, Johnson said he wouldn’t respond to media inquiries. Asked whether he has a responsibility to taxpayers to answer questions about the system, Johnson responded, “I have a responsibility to Collin County; that’s all.”

The February bulletin isn’t the only questionable Johnson product. He has designed tools that purport to measure, at any given moment, the threat of terrorism at the global, regional, and local levels. The World Terrorism Metric relies on computer models that crunch vast quantities of raw information culled from the Internet. The threat level is presented on a gauge; the needle moves as the terror risk increases or decreases.

Johnson claims the output is unbiased. The assumptions built into the model are certainly inventive. Factors include the price of a barrel of oil (divided by three), the level of democratic activity as measured by the number of business-related words in Internet news stories, and the movement of options contracts (Johnson trades options on the side). Happily, in February the North Central Texas gauge registered a threat level of zero.

It’s tempting to dismiss the fusion center as one man’s risible, if expensive, computer science project. But the U.S. Department of Homeland Security took the menacing February memo seriously enough that it sent a three-person team to train North Texas fusion personnel on federal rules. In 2007, a former senior intelligence analyst for the Collin County fusion system described the center to an online trade publication as the “wild west,” a place where analysts could try out new technologies before “politics” caught up with them.

So what, exactly, is Dr. Bob building in there?

Fusion centers arose amid post-9/11 efforts to get local and state law enforcement involved in anti-terrorism. Federal authorities wanted the nation’s 800,000 or so local and state cops turned into a vast “eyes and ears” network. Information from this army could be fed into local, regional, and state centers where various data streams would be “fused” into a powerful intelligence product. Private-sector databases, criminal records, tips, credit reports, medical records, accounts of suspicious activity—anything that might help analysts “fight a global jihadist adversary,” in the words of the Congressional Research Service, would be used to connect dots.

Many cities and states happily accepted the charge, not to mention the Homeland Security dollars tagged for fusion. Today there are about 60 fusion centers nationwide, and five in Texas. There’s no sign they’re going away. In March, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told a national conference of fusion centers that they would be the “centerpiece of state, local, federal intelligence-sharing for the future.” The Obama stimulus package contains $250 million for fusion.

The meteoric rise of this confoundingly complex and patchwork system has scary implications for privacy and civil liberties.

“We’ve built this network, and nobody’s policing it,” says Mike German, a former FBI agent now with the ACLU. “Nobody knows exactly what each fusion center is doing. … Even the best fusion centers operate under a cloak of secrecy.” Part of the problem, German says, is that fusion centers fall in a “no-man’s-land” between federal and state governments. Such ambiguity can lead fusion centers to pick and choose which rules apply to them. A 2007 study by the Government Accountability Office found that one-third of all fusion centers reported a lack of guidance on the proper handling of information, including privacy and civil-liberties concerns.

Even in this murky, variegated world, the North Central Texas Fusion System is a bit of an oddball. Most fusion systems are run by either state police agencies or big-city police departments. Many are tightly focused on providing tactical support to police officers and detectives in the field.

The North Central Texas center, on the other hand, is owned by a suburban county’s small Homeland Security Department and serves a region that already has two other fusion systems. Its mission is startlingly broad: “[T]o provide on-going data analysis to prevent and to provide early-warning of all hazards (e.g. tornadoes, flooding, pandemics, hazard spills and plumes, and terrorist attacks).”

The center has tried to deploy a telephone system to automatically alert residents of approaching natural disasters. But when a hailstorm swept through the area in April 2008, residents were warned of the storm after it had passed. “We found out weather moves too fast,” says Kelley Stone, Collin County’s Homeland Security director.

Undeterred, he’s looking at applying the same early-warning concept to residents who might fall in the path of a plume of destruction unleashed by bioterrorism.

The North Central Texas Fusion System is housed in a wing of the squeaky-clean, no-nonsense Collin County Sheriff’s Office, situated at what seems to be the very point where encroaching suburbia meets the receding countryside. A driver on nearby Interstate 35 would never guess that the theoretical nerve center of terror and crime prevention for more than 6 million people is headquartered in this building.

Stone, who’s directed Collin County Homeland Security since its inception in 2002, leads a tour of the facility. There’s not much to see. One office hosts two agents on loan from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Another locked room holds the center’s senior intelligence analyst, Oscar Martinez. The biggest space is devoted to an emergency command center stocked to the gills with telephones, computer terminals, videoconferencing equipment and a half-dozen or so flat-screen TVs all tuned to Fox News. “We depend a lot on news sources,” says Stone.

Stone, a native of New Boston in Northeast Texas, has spent a lifetime in law enforcement and the past 24 years with the Collin County Sheriff’s Office. He eagerly highlights changes the fusion center has made recently. Homeland Security has given him a talking-to.

“I just want to make sure that we have the training, policies, and procedures in place to ensure that we don’t violate anyone’s civil rights,” Stone says. The February bulletin, he says, was “inappropriate” and shouldn’t have gone out. (He’ll repeat that, apropos of nothing, several times.)

Stone points to the system’s mission, projected on a video screen hooked up to a laptop: “The right data. To the right person. At the right time. While protecting the individual rights of all citizens.” Stone insists the last part wasn’t tacked on recently. Perhaps, but the line hadn’t appeared before in any of the fusion center’s materials.

Most of the center’s activity happens on 20 computer servers humming away in an unseen, secure room. The system holds some 90 million records and is stuffed with data-mining programs and analytical tools customized by Bob Johnson.

The computers contain over 2 terabytes of raw data, the equivalent of about one-fifth of all the information contained in the books at the Library of Congress. Each week the database soaks up an additional 350,000 new “structured data records” and 10,000 new “unstructured data items,” according to a March grant proposal to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

The database is clearly being fed, but with what?

Stone says most information is drawn from law-enforcement records, such as incident reports or jail records. An open-records request by blogger Bill Baumbach, who has been dogging the fusion system at CollinCountyObserver.com, produced information-sharing agreements with just four law-enforcement entities in the Metroplex, two of them small-town police departments in Wylie and Murphy. The Department of Public Safety, which oversees the Texas Intelligence Center and the Texas Data Exchange, or TDEx, says it has no relationship with the center.

“Right now we’re just in the infancy stage,” Stone says. “We have to get our capabilities up and running.”

Two highly placed sources in the Texas criminal intelligence and fusion communities say the North Texas center is less a cutting-edge than a butt of jokes. “Police chiefs get the bulletins and just hit the delete button,” says one. The center has struggled to attract attention among law enforcement officials in the Metroplex, where two other information-sharing systems have emerged in recent years: a fusion center run by the Dallas Police Department and a law enforcement-only system assembled by the North Central Texas Council of Governments. The latter system has aspirations to serve the whole state.

The Collin County center tends to exaggerate the scope of its mission to justify funding, the sources say. “Kelley likes to think he’s supporting umpteen different agencies in the region,” says one of the sources.

Still, there is evidence that the North Texas Fusion System has a wide dragnet.

“Unstructured data is acquired through the open internet, open source, emails, websites and blogs,” reads one recent grant proposal. The March document also lists sources such as e-mail from crime analysts, cause-of-death sheets, suspicious-activity reports, and emergency-response plans.

County Judge Keith Self, a career Army officer with experience in high-tech information warfare, confirmed that the county jail is recording telephone calls and feeding them to the fusion system, which employs software that transcribes every word of conversations, more than 6,600 hours each year. The software, which cost $130,000, according to public records, can also translate foreign languages into English, though it’s not clear that component is operational yet.

The conversations are entered into the database, allowing them to be searched along with all the other information in the system. The purpose is to detect crimes being plotted or recruitment into “Islamic gangs,” according to an article in Texas County Progress, a statewide magazine for county officials.

Free-ranging conversations can be misinterpreted, and innocent people inadvertently linked to suspected criminal activity or even terrorism, critics suggest. A benign conversation, for example, about a terrorist attack in the news could be misconstrued as plotting. Moreover, translation of languages—especially when automated—is notoriously difficult. Small errors in the spelling of a name could lead to an innocent person being fingered. And if mistakes aren’t purged from the system, the same error can be repeated and compounded many times over.

“The old adage from the early day of computing was garbage in, garbage out,” says German, the former FBI agent. “You start mixing reliable information with unreliable, and it makes the whole system unreliable.”

The Collin County center’s tenet is, “the more data, the better,” a data-mining truism. “There is a natural human tendency to summarize, filter, or limit data,” states a recent center document. “This is not a healthy approach for a Fusion System, however, because the key piece of data that solves a crime or identifies an imminent terrorist attack is likely to be in the data that is discarded.”

The center approach rests on the belief that signs of a coming attack—called “pre-incident indicators”—can be detected by pumping huge quantities of data, from scurrilous blogs to carefully vetted police reports, into a database and then sifting through the undifferentiated mess for clues and patterns. The practice is typically called predictive data mining and was condemned by a committee of the National Research Council in October as “neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal.”

Fred Cate, a member of the committee and director of the Center for Applied Cybersecurity Research at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, points out that data mining has been used for years by marketers to match products with potential customers. But this targeted marketing only works because data miners have plowed through hundreds of thousands of transactions to locate a connection between, say, age and ownership of big-screen TVs.

“That doesn’t work when fighting terrorism,” says Cate, “because thankfully we don’t have many terrorist incidents. We don’t have a million incidents to extract from; we have a dozen.”

In a January bulletin, the center listed some of the behavioral clues it considers important in identifying terrorists, including suicide bombers. Among them: ownership of heavy vehicles, sweating and mumbling, inappropriate attire, interest in cameras, and paying in cash—all of which could, of course, describe a big night on the town in Dallas.

According to fusion system documents, the North Texas center’s database is accessible to almost 1,000 users—cops, fire marshals, health officials, first responders, and Homeland Security personnel—through a secure Web portal. The primary feature is a single-line query tool that allows users to search across the entire universe of information using key words—a person’s name, a location, a vehicle description.

Bob Johnson has also developed tools that allow users to visualize links between seemingly disparate pieces of information and project them onto a map. The recent grant proposal hints that the fusion system is looking into ways to diagram social networks, highlighting the myriad connections among individuals in much the same way that MySpace or Facebook does.

Kelley Stone, the security director in Collin County, prefers to emphasize narrow law-enforcement applications. He cites a case in which a constable used the database to track down a wanted child molester. “A lot of success stories like that,” Stone says. “The average citizen thinks [the police] have access to all this information, but the fact of the matter is you’re real limited until you have a system like this.”

The fusion system is a way, Stone says, of overcoming the “stovepiping” problem, the tendency of police departments to hoard valuable criminal information and not share it across jurisdictional boundaries. That sort of use is hardly what worries critics, who see the fusion center’s activities as both ineffectual and potentially dangerous.

“What’s their authority for gathering information off the Internet?” asks German. “Are we devoting law-enforcement resources to gathering information off the Internet every day? To what end? Now does anyone who posts something on the Internet have to worry that they’re being run through a data-mining program? It’s a 1984 version of America that doesn’t even make sense from a security standpoint.”

Investigative reporting for this article was supported, in part, by a grant from the Open Society Institute.

Empire’s Workshop, the superb new book by historian Greg Grandin, begins with a reference to one of the 20th century’s master storytellers. “The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once remarked that the lack of camels in the Koran proves its Middle Eastern provenance: only a native author, he explained, could have so taken the animal for granted as not to mention it.” Perhaps, suggests Grandin, “a similar familiarity explains the absence of Latin America in recent discussions about the United States and its empire.”

A professor of history at New York University, Grandin’s earlier book, The Last Colonial Massacre, examined the legacy of U.S. intervention in Latin America during the Cold War. The net result, he argues, was the elimination of homegrown versions of social democracy.

Before finishing his doctorate, Grandin worked for a year with the United Nations Truth Commission investigating political violence in Guatemala. “Working as something of a house historian to an institution largely staffed by lawyers made me appreciate the value of historical analysis,” he later wrote. “[L]awyers get nervous with any attempt to move beyond the immediate mechanics of an act to get at the larger ‘why.'” For those trying to get at the larger “why” of U.S. involvement in Iraq, Grandin’s latest book is indispensable.

The following interview is excerpted from a series of e-mail exchanges with the Observer.

Texas Observer: Latin America and the Middle East would seem to have very little in common. In Empire’s Workshop you make the case that we can only understand the War on Terror if we examine the history of U.S. engagement with Latin America during the 20th century. Why?

Greg Grandin: Because it was in Latin America where the modern New Right—the coalition of religious fundamentalists, neoconservative militarists and nationalists, and free-marketeers that then stood behind Reagan and today behind Bush—first moved U.S. diplomacy away from a policy of “containment” to “rollback,” paving the way for what neocons today like to call a “global democratic revolution.” All of the debates we are hearing today about the ability of the executive branch to wage an unaccountable war, along with all of Bush’s abuses of power—the wiretaps, manipulation of the media, torture in the name of freedom, the creation of an interagency war party designed to undercut the foreign policy establishment—can be traced back to Ronald Reagan’s Central American policy, which in retrospect has to be understood as the New Right’s first attempt to restore the imperial presidency.

TO: A watershed event was the U.S.-supported coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

GG: The CIA’s 1954 coup was significant in a number of ways. First, it was the agency’s first serious Latin American Cold War covert operation. It was much more ambitious than anything it had done in, say, Iran the year before, drawing more extensively on psychological and disinformation tactics to destabilize the government of democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz. Second, it signaled that the United States had definitively sacrificed democracy at the altar of Cold War security concerns. Actually, as early as 1948 the State Department had indicated that its tolerance for political openness in Latin America was contingent on political stability, but this coup marked a point of no return. It opened the door to Washington’s wholesale support of military dictators and, eventually, death squads. In Latin America, the coup radicalized a generation of reformers who would no longer point to the United States as a democratic model to follow, but an obstacle to democracy. A perfect example of this would be Che Guevara, who was in Guatemala at the time of the coup working as a young, socially conscious medical doctor attending to the poor. He was forced to flee into Mexico, where he met Fidel Castro. Che would eventually adopt as one of his mottos “Cuba will not be Guatemala” to explain the militancy of the Cuban Revolution.

TO: You suggest that Reagan’s policy toward Central America, especially Nicaragua, facilitated the emergence of the New Right around an ideology of what you call “punitive idealism.” Would you explain what this concept means, and how it became a central part of U.S. policy in Latin America?

GG: In the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, neoconservatives boldly announced a revolution in American diplomacy. The old divisions between realism and idealism, we were told, no longer held. Bush himself put it succinctly in his second inaugural address when he proclaimed that “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Some neocons called this “hard Wilsonianism,” claiming that the best way to ensure America’s security is to spread democracy throughout the world. There was much discussion about how the Republican Party came to embrace such a vision of security, for that kind of soaring rhetoric had previously been the property of the Democrats, from Wilson to Kennedy. Some make mention of Ronald Reagan’s championing of the human rights of Soviet and Eastern European dissidents, while others focused on the rise of the neoconservatives and their recasting of the Cold War as a struggle between the forces of good and evil, exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz’s celebrated role in convincing Reagan to force Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to step down and make way for free elections, a remarkable about-face for an administration that had long embraced the dictator. But they all ignore Reagan’s Central American policy, perhaps because of the high body count. After all, hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans killed as a result of U.S. policy left a blot—as even some of his defenders admitted—on Reagan’s embrace of the language of human rights.

But it was exactly in such carnage that the neoconservative ideology was born. The New Right came to power in the 1980s as a response to the crisis of the 1970s. That crisis had three essential dimensions. Militarily, the U.S. had been kicked out of Southeast Asia and discredited by a poorly armed peasant insurgency. Politically, Watergate had cracked opened the establishment, exposing a government that ruled not by consent and transparency, but by manipulation, surveillance, and coercion. And economically, competition from the developing world and Europe, along with the costs of Vietnam, eroded America’s privileged position in the global economy since the end of World War II. The Reagan Revolution responded to this crisis by pledging to pacify the Third World, and Central America, then in the midst of a revolutionary upheaval, was the logical place to start. But this crisis also had a forth dimension, a moral one. To re-establish American power in the world, that power had to be justified in ethical terms. It was in Central America where the Republican Party first fully embraced human rights, nation-building, and democratization as diplomatic objectives, even as it was patronizing ruthless thugs. It was not enough to simply finance and train rapists, murderers, and torturers. They had to be hailed, said Reagan, as the “moral equivalents of our founding fathers.” The “Salvador Option,” in other words, is less a specific reference to a reliance on paramilitary killers to keep order than the essence of the Bush Doctrine. Call it death-squad nation-building.

TO: Empire’s Workshop distinguishes itself from other recent works on the new American empire because it explains how Washington politicians use engagements in foreign countries to shape domestic political culture. In other words, we can’t just point at politicians or multinational corporations to explain the new American empire. Would you argue that the American public is part of this process? If so, would you identify the type of domestic coalition the New Right managed to bring together as they asserted Washington’s power over Central America in the 1980s?

GG: Yes, over the last year or so there have been a number of books that have sought to take the measure of this or that group within the Bush coalition to explain how we wound up believing we could telegraph democracy to Iraq through the barrel of a gun. There was Francis Fukuyama on the neocons, for instance, along with Kevin Phillips on the theocons. Other scholars have looked at nationalists and militarists. Empire’s Workshop can be read as a missing link connecting these works, examining how the coalition that gave rise to the Bush administration’s pre-emptive warfare doctrine was itself forged in the crucible of war. Now most accounts of the rise of the New Right focus on its domestic dimensions, linking it to a backlash against the crisis of authority and social liberalization of the 1960s, situating it within economic and demographic shifts such as post-1973 industrialization and the transfer of the nation’s economic and political center of gravity from the Northeast to the Southwest and West. But few studies have explicitly understood the New Right not only to be an internationalist movement, but that its energy and success can be found in that internationalism. The Reagan Revolution could only sustain itself by continually marshaling its base in the name of an expansive foreign policy, pulling into its gravitational field a diverse constellation of nationalists, militarists, religionists, idealists, and economic elites.

TO: Can you say more about the religious dimension of this revolution?

GG: There’s been much discussion about how evangelicals and secular neocons come together over Israel. Likewise, during the 2004 presidential campaign, many seemed to believe that if you scratch a conservative evangelical, if you could neutralize “cultural” issues like abortion, a la Thomas Frank, you would find a New Deal populist.

But Christian evangelicals were deeply involved in the process of “remoralizing” not just American power but the free-market capitalist base of that power. Again, Central America is key. In order to bypass congressional and public opposition to its Central American policy, the White House mobilized its fundamentalist base, in effect outsourcing the hearts-and-minds component of low intensity warfare to religious conservatives. This mobilization, in turn, both increased evangelical involvement in foreign policy and helped fuse the religious and secular branches of the New Right.

Evangelicals shared with neocon militarists a sense that America had grown dangerously weak, and that only a rebirth of political will, or spiritual renewal, would save it. Their understanding of themselves as a persecuted people engaged in an end-time struggle between good and evil mapped easily onto the absolutism of anti-communist militarists. This happened in the case of the Central American Cold Warriors, many of whom, such as CIA director William Casey and Oliver North, were themselves members of ultraconservative Christian sects like Opus Dei or the Knights of Malta—the Da Vinci Code has nothing on what happened in Central America.

One aspect of the Central American wars largely overlooked is the importance of Liberation Theology, along with the Christian humanism of the domestic solidarity movement, in uniting the New Right. Well before radical Islam, Liberation Theology was the “political religion” that secular anti-communists, mainstream conservative theologians, and pulpit–thumping fundamentalists squared off against. So when Jeane Kirkpatrick remarked that the U.S. nuns who were raped, mutilated, and murdered by Salvadoran security forces in 1980 were “not just nuns, they were political activists,” she was being more than cruel. She was signaling her disapproval of a particular kind of peace Christianity, or Christian humanism.

TO: Has the so-called War on Terror facilitated the resurgence of that coalition?

GG: Yes. After Reagan left office and the Central American crises wound down, the alliance between evangelicals and secular idealists would begin to fracture. Prominent fundamentalists, such as Pat Robertson, distrusted George Herbert Walker Bush. And obviously they had little sympathy for the Clinton administration. Yet many fundamentalists extended their increasingly confident engagement in world affairs well beyond Central America. In some ways, some of the most committed congressional “internationalists” are Christian conservatives like Virginian Representative Frank Wolf and Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who have consistently pushed Washington to deal with global humanitarian issues such as AIDS, sex trafficking, slavery, religious freedom, malaria, and genocide prevention. After 9/11, evangelical internationalists once again joined with a now fully empowered cohort of neocons to push George W. Bush—who if we remember promised a “humble” foreign policy during his first campaign—to embrace so-called “hard Wilsonianism” and to “remoralize” America’s role in the world.

In the run-up to Bush’s invasion of Iraq, the neoconservative punditry spent energy rehabilitating the concept “empire,” insisting that the world needed an imperial power to impose stability, and the only candidate available for the job was the United States. And while they evoked the Roman and British empires to make their case, they consistently ignored the one place where the U.S. had its most prolonged and intimate imperial experience: Latin America. So if you really wanted to know what the world would look like under a Pax Americana, you shouldn’t look at Roman Gaul or Australia, but violence-ridden, impoverished Central America. This of course is exactly what Dick Cheney, of all people, did in the 2004 vice-presidential debate when he held up El Salvador—not post-WWII Germany or Japan—as a model for what he hoped to achieve in Iraq. But this comparison struck too close to the bone, for shortly after Cheney made his remarks, the press started comparing the rise of death squads in Iraq to what took place in El Salvador. Too close a look at Latin America, it turns out, would raise some inconvenient questions, one of which should be: If Washington can’t bring stability and meaningful democracy to Latin America, a region that falls squarely within its own sphere of influence and whose population shares many of the values of the United States, then what are the chances that it will do so for the world?

TO: Why is raising awareness of the historical roots of the War on Terror your chosen strategy?

GG: “History” is abused
n all sorts of w
ys by those who want to reduce every issue or conflict to its barest emotional simplicity in order to justify American power in the world. Hugo Chávez stands in a long line of Third World nationalists whom U.S. officials inevitably compare to Hitler. So I suppose it is a bit naïve, but hopefully raising awareness can draw the poison out of disingenuous metaphors.

Obviously the use of history to rally the nation to a cause is not in any way new, but as I try to show in my book, it did reach a new stage of public manipulation with the domestic propaganda—

psychological warfare, really—associated with Iran-Contra. Public relations firms contracted by the White House polled the American people for lists of emotive keywords, which were then transformed into talking points and distributed to government officials, scholars, media outlets, and NGOs. Yet it was Ronald Reagan, listed by the PR boys as an “asset” due to his communication skills, who best embodied the triumph of emotion over substance. With little respect for history or fact, Reagan played on popular fears and self-perceptions, presenting support for the Contras as keeping faith with America’s “revolutionary heritage.” After all, polling data revealed that the White House’s two most “exploitable themes” were the idea that the Contras were “Freedom Fighters” fighting for “freedom in the American tradition” and the idea that American “history requires support to freedom fighters.” Who could argue with that?

Patrick Timmons is an assistant professor of Justice Studies at San José State University in California.