Internet Samizdat Releases Suppressed Voices, History

Days after their son Greg died in the World Trade Center terror, Phyllis and Orlando Rodriguez wrote a letter to the New York Times that counseled against "violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering and nursing further grievances against us. It is not the way to go. It will not avenge our son's death. Not in our son's name. Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times."

The New York Times didn't publish the letter: It is just one of the crucial items of information that have been distributed since Sept. 11 to vast numbers of people using the Internet. Grassroots networks have used email to breach the barricades erected by U.S. mainstream media -- much as samizdat literature was passed from hand to hand in the old Soviet Union. Post-Sept. 11 samizdat ranges from interviews with Noam Chomsky to essays by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy to frontline dispatches by Robert Fisk of the London Independent.

One of the most fascinating items of Internet samizdat is a 1998 interview with Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security advisor, conducted by the French publication Le Nouvel Observateur (LNO). In the interview -- translated by author and CIA critic William Blum -- Brzezinski boasts that the CIA was supporting guerilla activities inside Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention, taking steps to "induce" the Soviets to intervene:

BRZEZINSKI: According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujaheddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

LNO: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

BRZEZINSKI: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

LNO: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

BRZEZINSKI: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.

LNO: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

BRZEZINSKI: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Interviewed in Oct. 2001 by columnist David Corn, Brzezinski said he still had no regrets about launching the Afghan covert operation, knowing it would likely induce the Cold War foe to fall into a trap.

The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan was indeed Vietnam-like in its brutality, killing more than a million Afghans and helping to tear apart a country that in 1979 had relatively little religious fanaticism and was making advances in the status of women.

In the upheaval, Afghanistan became a base for terrorists. Yet mainstream U.S. journalists refuse to mention the Nouvel Observateur interview and fail to ask Brzezinski obvious questions about how his Afghan policy may have helped us get into the current crisis. Instead, mainstream media repeatedly present Brzezinski and other former U.S. foreign policymakers as omniscient seers whose wise counsel can get us out of the crisis.