Free Blowback by Christopher Simpson Page A

citizens. These books sank without a trace, or faded fast, because they tell the sort of truths that Madison and Jefferson believed our Constitution should protect—truths that the people have the right to know, and needs to know, about our government and other powers that keep us in the dark.
    Thus the works on our Forbidden Bookshelf shed new light—for most of us, it’s still new light—on the most troubling trends and episodes in US history, especially since World War II: America’s broad use of former Nazis and ex-Fascists in the Cold War; the Kennedy assassinations, and the murders of Martin Luther King Jr., Orlando Letelier, George Polk, and Paul Wellstone; Ronald Reagan’s Mafia connections, Richard Nixon’s close relationship with Jimmy Hoffa, and the mob’s grip on the NFL; America’s terroristic Phoenix Program in Vietnam, US support for South America’s most brutal tyrannies, and CIA involvement in the Middle East; the secret histories of DuPont, ITT, and other giant US corporations; and the long war waged by Wall Street and its allies in real estate on New York City’s poor and middle class.
    The many vanished books on these forbidden subjects (among others) altogether constitute a shadow history of America—a history that We the People need to know at last, our country having now become a land with billionaires in charge, and millions not allowed to vote, and everybody under full surveillance. Through this series, we intend to pull that necessary history from the shadows at long last—to shed some light on how America got here, and how we might now take it somewhere else.
    Mark Crispin Miller

Prologue
    The press briefing room at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., is designed as a modern-day lions’ den, with the department’s spokesperson cast in the role of Daniel. The focus of the design is the lectern at the center of the room, which is filled with serpentine microphones and wires when a big story is about to be announced. The lions of the press are arranged along broad rising steps like the seats in an amphitheater.
    On August 16, 1983, U.S. government Nazi hunter Allan Ryan strode into that briefing room to announce an unprecedented 600-page report on the activities of a certain Klaus Barbie (alias Klaus Altmann, alias Becker, alias Merten, etc.) and on that one man’s relationship to the American intelligence agencies more than thirty years ago.
    â€œI didn’t really know how much of a bombshell this would be,” Ryan recalled later. “I was so immersed in the details of the investigation that I wasn’t quite sure what the reaction would be.” 1 When he arrived, he found more than 100 reporters crammed into the briefing room, about two dozen cameras complete with newscasters representing every major television organization in the world, hangers-on of every description, and so many microphones clipped to the lectern that they had to be rearranged before he could find a place for his notes. It was, one press corps veteran commented, the biggest crowd to turn out for a news briefing since the stormy investigations of Watergate days.
    The Justice Department had printed up the 200-page Barbie study, along with about 400 pages of documentary exhibits, and distributed it on schedule at the event. Ryan made a short presentationof the study’s conclusions about fifteen minutes after the reporters had those books in their hands.
    In a nutshell, the Justice Department’s study acknowledged that a U.S. intelligence agency known as the Army Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) had recruited Schutzstaffel (SS) and Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie for espionage work in early 1947; that the CIC had hidden him from French war crimes investigators; and that it had then spirited him out of Europe through a clandestine “ratline”—escape route—run by a priest who was himself a fugitive from war crimes