If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy of the past century, this is what crawls out…

invasions … bombings … overthrowing governments …
occupations … suppressing movements for social change …
assassinating political leaders … perverting elections …
manipulating labor unions … manufacturing "news" …
death squads … torture … biological warfare …
depleted uranium … drug trafficking … mercenaries …

It's not a pretty picture.
It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.

http://killinghope.org/

Read the full details in:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II.
by William Blum



Introduction:


The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows:

* making the world safe for American corporations;

* enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress;

* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;

* extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power."

This in the name of fighting a supposed moral crusade against what cold warriors convinced themselves, and the American people, was the existence of an evil International Communist Conspiracy, which in fact never existed, evil or not.

The United States carried out extremely serious interventions into more than 70 nations in this period.

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/US_Interventions_WBlumZ.html

Following the bombing of Iraq in 1991, the U.S. wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Following its bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the United States wound up with military bases in Kosovo, Albania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Bosnia and Croatia.

Following its bombing of Afghanistan in 2001-2, the United States wound up with military bases in Afghhanistan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Yemen and Djibouti.

Following its bombing and invasion of Iraq in 2003, the United States wound up with bases in Iraq.

This is not very subtle foreign policy. Certainly not covert. ...

Plus a new Embassy in Pakistan now being built . . . ???

It is spring 1975. Saigon has just fallen. The last of the Americans are fleeing for their lives. Fallout from Watergate hangs heavy in the air in the United States. The morning papers bring fresh revelations about CIA and FBI misdeeds. The Pike Committee of the House of Representatives is investigating CIA foreign covert activities. On the Senate side, the Church Committee is doing the same. And the Rockefeller Commission has set about investigating the Agency's domestic activities.
The CIA and its influential supporters warn that the crescendo of disclosures will inhibit the Agency from carrying out the functions necessary for national security.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, they are busy preparing for their next secret adventure: Angola. To undertake a military operation at such a moment, the reasons, one would imagine, must have been both compelling and urgent. Yet, in the long history of American interventions it would be difficult to find one more pointless or with less to gain for the United States or the foreign people involved.

The origin of our story dates back to the beginning of the 1960s when two political movements in Angola began to oppose by force the Portuguese colonial government: the MPLA, led by Agostinho Neto, and the FNLA, led by Holden Roberto. (The latter group was known by other names in its early years, but for simplicity will be referred to here only as FNLA.)

The United States, not normally in the business of supporting "liberation" movements,. decided that inasmuch as Portugal would probably be unable to hold on to its colony forever, establishing contact with a possible successor regime might prove beneficial. For reasons lost in the mists of history, the United States, or at least someone in the CIA, decided that Roberto was their man and around 1961 or 1962 onto the Agency payroll he went.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Angola_KH.html

From the article:



I heard about the Angola mercenary force in the mid eighties from a vietnam vet who claimed to have been a merc there. If he was being truthful, and the news reports seem to bear him out, a mere 24 american mercs sounds like a little fib on Stockwell's part.

Introducing the marvelous new world of Death Squads


When the leading members of the US diplomatic mission in Brazil held a meeting one-day in March 1964, they arrived at the consensus that President Joao Goulart's support of social and economic reforms was a contrived and thinly veiled vehicle to seize dictatorial power. The American ambassador, Lincoln Gordon, informed the State Department that ' a desperate lunge for totalitarian power might be made at any time."'

The Brazilian army chief of staff, General Humberto de Alencar Castelo (or Castello) Branco, provided the American Embassy with a memorandum in which he stated his fear that Goulart was seeking to close down Congress and initiate a dictatorship. Within a week after the expression of these concerns, the Brazilian military, with Castelo Branco at its head, overthrew the constitutional government of President Goulart, the culmination of a conspiratorial process in which the American Embassy had been intimately involved. The military then proceeded to install and maintain for two decades one of the most brutal dictatorships in all of South America.

What are we to make of all this? The idea that men of rank and power lie to the public is commonplace, not worthy of debate. But do they as readily lie to each other? Is their need to rationalize their misdeeds so great that they provide each other a moral shoulder to lean on; "Men use thoughts only to justify their injustices," wrote Voltaire, "and speech only to conceal their thoughts."

The actual American motivation in supporting the coup was something rather less than preserving democracy, even mundane as such matters go. American opposition to Goulart, who became president in 1961, rested upon a familiar catalogue of complaints:
US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara questioned Brazil's neutral stand in foreign policy. The Brazilian ambassador in Washington, Roberto Campos, responded that "neutralism" was an inadequate term and explained that "what was involved was really a deep urge of the Brazilian people to assert their personality in world affairs."

American officials did not approve of some of the members of Goulart's cabinet, and said so. Ambassador Campos pointed out to them that it was "quite inappropriate" for the United States "to try to influence the composition of the cabinet."

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Brazil_KH.html

John Foster Dulles had called on me in his capacity as Secretary of State, and he had exhausted every argument to persuade me to place Cambodia under the protection of the South East Asia Treaty Organization. I refused ... I considered SEATO an aggressive military alliance directed against neighbors whose ideology I did not share but with whom Cambodia had no quarrel. I had made all this quite clear to John Foster, an acidy, arrogant man, but his brother soon turned up with a briefcase full of documents "proving" that Cambodia was about to fall victim to "communist aggression" and that the only way to save the country, the monarchy and myself was to accept the protection of SEATO. The "proofs' did not coincide with my own information, and I replied to Allen Dulles as I had replied to John Foster: Cambodia wanted no part of SEATO. We would look after ourselves as neutrals and Buddhists. There was nothing for the secret service chief to do but pack up his dubious documents and leave.
Prince Norodom Sihanouk, in his memoirs

The visits of the Brothers Dulles in 1955 appear to have been the opening salvos in a campaign of extraordinary measures aimed at pressuring the charismatic Cambodian leader into aligning his nation with the West and joining The Holy War Against Communism. The coercion continued intermittently until 1970 when Sihanouk was finally overthrown in an American-backed coup and the United States invaded Cambodia.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Cambodia_KH.html

When Salvador Allende, a committed Marxist, came within three percent of winning the Chilean presidency in 1958, the United States decided that the next election, in 1964, could not be left in the hands of providence, or democracy.

Washington took it all very gravely. At the outset of the Kennedy administration in 1961, an electoral committee was established, composed of top-level officials from the State Department, the CIA and the White House. In Santiago, a parallel committee of embassy and CIA people was set up.

"U.S. government intervention in Chile in 1964 was blatant and almost obscene," said one intelligence officer strategically placed at the time. "We were shipping people off right and left, mainly State Dept. but also CIA, with all sorts of covers." All in all, as many as 100 American operatives were dedicated to the operation.

They began laying the groundwork for the election years ahead, a Senate investigating committee has disclosed, "by establishing operational relationships with key political parties and by creating propaganda and organizational mechanisms capable of influencing key sectors of the population." Projects were undertaken "to help train and organize 'anti-communists"' among peasants, slum dwellers, organized labor, students, the media, etc..

After channeling funds to several non-leftist parties, the electoral team eventually settled on a man of the center, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democratic Party, as the one most likely to block Allende's rise to power. The CIA underwrote more than half the party's total campaign costs, one of the reasons that the Agency's overall electoral operation reduced the U.S. Treasury by an estimated $20 million-much more per voter than that spent by the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns combined in the same Year in the United States. The bulk of the expenditures went toward propaganda.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Chile_KH.html

The assassination of Patrice Lumumba

Within days of its independence from Belgium on 30 June 1960, the land long known as the Belgian Congo, and later as Zaire, was engulfed in strife and chaos as multiple individuals, tribes, and political groups struggled for dominance or independence. For the next several years the world press chronicled the train of Congolese governments, the endless confusion of personalities and conspiracies, exotic place names like Stanleyville and Leopoldville, shocking stories of European hostages and white mercenaries, the brutality and the violence from all quarters with its racist overtones.
Into this disorder the Western powers were "naturally" drawn, principally Belgium to protect Its vast mineral investments, and the United States, mindful of the fabulous wealth as well, and obsessed, as usual, with fighting "communism".

Successive American administrations of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, looking through cold-war binoculars perceived an East-West battleground. The CIA station in the Congo cabled Washington in August that "Embassy and station believe Congo experiencing classic communist effort takeover government." CIA Director Allen Dulles warned of a "communist takeover of the Congo with disastrous consequences ... for the interests of the free world". At the same time, Dulles authorized a crash-program fund of up to $100,000 to replace the existing government of Patrice Lumumba with a "pro-western group''.
*****

Years later, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon told a Senate investigating committee (the Church committee) that the National Security Council and President Eisenhower had believed in 1960 that Lumumba was a "very difficult if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world." This statement moved author Jonathan Kwitny to observe:
"How far beyond the dreams of a barefoot jungle postal clerk in 1956, that in a few short years he would be dangerous to the peace and safety of the world! The perception seems insane, particularly coming from the National Security Council, which really does have the power to end all human life within hours.

Patrice Lumumba became the Congo's first prime minister after his party received a plurality of the votes in national elections. He called for the nation's economic as well as political liberation and did not shy away from contact with socialist countries. At the Independence Day ceremonies he probably managed to alienate all the attending foreign dignitaries with his speech, which read in part:
"Our lot was eighty years of colonial rule ... We have known tiring labor exacted in exchange for salary which did not allow us to satisfy our hunger ... We have known ironies, insults, blows which we had to endure morning, noon, and night because we were "Negroes" ... We have known that the law was never the same depending on whether it concerned a white or a Negro ... We have known the atrocious sufferings of those banished for political opinions or religious beliefs ... We have known that there were magnificent houses for the whites in the cities and tumble-down straw huts for the Negroes."

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Congo_KH.html

You forgot to mention past and ongoing medical experimentation on American troops without their consent (oil adjuvants, radiation, hypnosis, PCP, LSD, and god knows what else...) And also experimentation on American citizens (i.e.: MK Naomi.)

Poke around here for a dose of the truth.

http://www.hss.energy.gov/HealthSafety/ohre/roadmap/roadmap/index.html

This is MIHOP, no doubt about it...

Scuba

http://www.hss.energy.gov/HealthSafety/ohre/roadmap/histories/0461/0461_a.html

Scuba

get Mariano Barrosa's, semi-fictional flick, "In the Time of the Butterflies" about the demise of the Mirabel sisters at the hands of our buddy/brutal dictator Trujillo in the Dominican Republic while we were effing up their country... In his book “Killing Hope”, historian William Blum quotes then-U.S. president John F. Kennedy as saying, “Balaguer is our only tool. The anti-communist liberals are not strong enough. We must use our influence to take Balaguer along the road of democracy.” This after the CIA likely facilitates Trujillo's assassination.

or for a little more reality without all the reading throw on "Year Zero" (Cambodia), "Stealing a Nation" (Diego Garcia) or "War on Democracy" (our "backyard" that nobody gives a shit about), all documentaries by John Pilger


I like to read and Blum's book is worth the time.

Thanks for the posts O_G

http://www.documentary-film.net/

I really like this site. Ihaven't even "signed up" yet can view the free docs here.
100's to choose from, many not available mainstream sources.

This sums it ups well:

* preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;

Even here on DU, people are convinced capitalism is the best possible model so far...how can something that murders to survive be considered "a good idea- the best so far"

We have a lot of "so far" to go.

Terrific summation of capitalism . . . !!!

As I've often mentioned here, they've been pretty much teaching kids in school

that capitalism and democracy are synonymous --

in fact they are antonymous --!!!


Also including some comments I made lower in the thread which may be of itnerest
to you . . .


Eisenhower's efforts for peace were undermined by CIA/intelligence . . .
And when he made the statement about the MIC, he included "intelligence" which was
removed twice from his speech.

Ike was betrayed many times over --
one notable way was the U2-Gary Powers flight -
Ike had told them to ground the U2 flights for months before the Paris Peace talks.

Peace isn't profitable for the MIC --

and as Howard Zinn has often pointed out --

"What isn't profititable isn't produced --
Banks, high rise luxury buildings, skyscrapers --
but not housing for poor
Nuclear weapons, air craft carriers and submaries.

Militariztion of society - wealth turned to war.
Profit first = capitalism
In a capitalist society the needs of people come second
to the needs of big business.
Constant factor in the US as capitalistic society."

Zinn also comments . . .

"PATRIOTISM is being used today as it has always been used to try to encircle
everybody in the nation in support of war and the advance of national power."

"PATRIOTISM is used to create the illusion of a common interest in the country."

"PATRIOTISM pretends to a common interest and the flag is the symbol of that
common interest."

"PATRIOTISM plays the same role as certain phrases in our language play . . .
'national security' - 'national interest' - 'national defense'"

"PATRIOTISM is a way of mobilizing people for causes that may not be in people's
interests."

Hermann Goring:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

keep at it -- !!!

:)

Those words should be posted on every bulletin board in our Junior High and

High Schools -- !!!

trying to say with the infamous "God damn America" and the chickens coming home to roost sermon.

We got a history that some people just refuse to look at.

The idea of America is nice, but the reality of CORPORATE America fuckin sucks. Soon they will own us all.

A 'great venture': overthrowing the government of Iran
by Mark Curtis

This is a slightly abridged version of part of chapter four of Mark Curtis's book The Ambiguities of Power: British Foreign Policy since 1945 (Zed Press, 1995).

SNIP

When the coup scenario finally began, huge demonstrations proceeded in the streets of Tehran, funded by CIA and MI6 money, $1 million dollars of which was in a safe in the US embassy (57) and £1.5 million which had been delivered by Britain to its agents in Iran, according to the MI6 officer responsible for delivering it. (58)

According to then CIA officer Richard Cottam, 'that mob that came into north Tehran and was decisive in the overthrow was a mercenary mob. It had no ideology. That mob was paid for by American dollars.' (59) One key aspect of the plot was to portray the demonstrating mobs as supporters of the Communist Party - Tudeh - in order to provide a suitable pretext for the coup and the assumption of control by the Shah. Cottam observes that agents working on behalf of the British 'saw the opportunity and sent the people we had under our control into the streets to act as if they were Tudeh. They were more than just provocateurs, they were shock troops, who acted as if they were Tudeh people throwing rocks at mosques and priests'. (60) 'The purpose', Brian Lapping explains, 'was to frighten the majority of Iranians into believing that a victory for Mussadeq would be a victory for the Tudeh, the Soviet Union and irreligion'. (61)

The head of the CIA operation also sent envoys to the commanders of some provincial armies, encouraging them to move on to Tehran. (62) In the fighting in the capital, 300 people were killed before Musaddiq's supporters were defeated by the Shah's forces. A US general later testified that 'the guns they had in their hands, the trucks they rode in, the armoured cars that they drove through the streets, and the radio communications that permitted their control, were all furnished through the military defence assistance program'. (63)

'All in all', US Iran analyst Barry Rubin comments, 'only five Americans with a half-dozen Iranian contacts had organised the entire uprising'. (64) The British input, however, had clearly been significant. One Iranian agent of the British - Shahpour Reporter, who subsequently served as adviser to the Shah - was later rewarded with a knighthood, before becoming a chief middleman for British arms sales to Iran, in particular for the manufacturers of Chieftain tanks and Rapier missiles. (65) Two years after the coup, the head of the MI6 end of the operation became Director of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, one of Britain's leading 'independent' academic research institutes. (66)

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articles/l30iran.htm

in this country.

go a long way toward understanding what the real politic is behind the facade.
Throw on a topping of Smedley Butler, serve with side dishes of Zinn, Pilger and Gore Vidal, and for bittersweet dessert there's Arundhati Roy whose writing occasionally just melts in your mouth.

Bill Blum knows his stuff.

Good post

"serving your country."

That's what the enlistees THINK they're doing, and they're mostly uninformed enough to believe that they're actually being patriotic.

But everyone who tries to make America a better place is "serving their country," and being sent to kill people in a foreign country just because they are against American business interests is "serving the corporations."

That's the TRUTH.

Yes, the military is civilian controlled, but the civilians who control it are CORRUPT, and why would anyone who knows the score want to serve a CORRUPT Establishment?

military industrial complex.
We did not listen then and we are not listening now.
None of this can be corrected until and unless we get the money out of politics and make it illegal to give money to lawmakers.
The MIC has vast sums of money that they can through around and keep things as they are and they are doing it every day.

considering a lot of this shit went down on his 'watch'. Guilt, I guess.

k&r

And when he made the statement about the MIC, he included "intelligence" which was
removed twice from his speech.

Ike was betrayed many times over --
one notable way was the U2-Gary Powers flight -
Ike had told them to ground the U2 flights for months before the Paris Peace talks.

Peace isn't profitable for the MIC --

and as Howard Zinn has often pointed out --

"What isn't profititable isn't produced --
Banks, high rise luxury buildings, skyscrapers --
but not housing for poor
Nuclear weapons, air craft carriers and submaries.

Militariztion of society - wealth turned to war.
Profit first = capitalism
In a capitalist society the needs of people come second
to the needs of big business.
Constant factor in the US as capitalistic society."

Zinn also comments . . .

"PATRIOTISM is being used today as it has always been used to try to encircle
everybody in the nation in support of war and the advance of national power."

"PATRIOTISM is used to create the illusion of a common interest in the country."

"PATRIOTISM pretends to a common interest and the flag is the symbol of that
common interest."

"PATRIOTISM plays the same role as certain phrases in our language play . . .
'national security' - 'national interest' - 'national defense'"

"PATRIOTISM is a way of mobilizing people for causes that may not be in people's
interests."

So was he hapless or did he just go along to get along? A guy that ran the Normandy invasion should have some executive skills...

In either case it shows that it really doesn't matter who is president, the capitalists rule.

guess he didn't have the courage -- !!!

Agree with you on the evils of capitalism, however -- !!!

And he knew what he could and could not do.
That is why he saved that MIC speech for when he was leaving office.
Had he done it any earlier they would have destroyed him.

There is a groundswell of new thought from people who see the futility of fighting against a system that controls the money, laws, media and government positions. They have grown much to powerful to confront directly, because they can put inordinate pressure to bear on any group that threatens them.

They have the ability to shape opinion through economic and media channels effectively, and the masses of people that are easily manipulated, i.e. Those educationally and emotionally starved people that must belong to a group, will spread the mas plague to the people that see the fraud for what it is.

We, as the ones that have studied history, and see that "Living the Good Life" is not the same as true freedom in the Natural Sense have only one recourse.

We need to stop cooperating with the system. We need to take control of our own lives and become unsupporting entities to the system that holds all the cards. We need to stop participating in the Military Industrial Complex by supporting Companies like Monsanto, DOW, Boeing, or Titan.

Life does not end without Internet. Grass can be mown without a weedeater or lawnmower. Food can be grown without chemicals or oil.

The system that manipulates us is slowly and inexoribly taking away our choices in food, self sufficiency and environmental qaulity. These are the basic needs of every human that allows them to ignore the system and live their lives on the fringe.

Gandhi was right. Simplify. Make your own clothes, tools, food, and the Goverment is powerless. When they tell you to fight, don't say yes or no. Just act stupid. When they tell you to consume when you have no income, start saving more.

America is evolving, and the current system is failing miserably. The Federal Reserve needs to wipe all its debts out, and this is why we are seeing so many areas of unrest appearing at the same time. They need a worldwide collapse in as much as a mega corporation needs a name change or merger, in order to wipe out 50 years of receipts that show how bankrupt they really are.

Simplify, simplify, simpify....is what Throe said many years ago.

:evilfrown:
Yea we're special all right!

The old Republican refrain of "'They' hate us for our freedoms" is fantasy easily shot down with "No, they hate us because we have been killing them indiscriminately for decades".

The truth hurts, America.

at the end of WWII.

Bushes, Rockefellers, Walkers, Dulleses, etc (the whole BFEE) were BEHIND Hitler and the Nazi 3rd Reich.

What we have now is the Fourth Reich (which has temporarily been hindered by Obama).

But Obama's failure to prosecute these treasonous and murderous bastards permits the naziism to continue (as we see in Honduras today)

Very worthwhile thread

K&R

The unforgivable revolution

*****

In the American lexicon, in addition to good and bad bases and missiles, there are good and bad revolutions. The American and French Revolutions were good. The Cuban Revolution is bad.

*****

... in the infamous ClA-organized invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs... over 100 exiles died in the attack. Close to 1,200 others were taken prisoner by the Cubans. It was later revealed that four American pilots flying for the CIA had lost their lives as well. The Bay of Pigs assault had relied heavily on the Cuban people rising up to join the invaders, but this was not to be the case. As it was, the leadership and ranks of the exile forces were riddled with former supporters and henchmen of Fulgencio Batista, the dictator overthrown by Castro, and would not have been welcomed back by the Cuban people under any circumstances.

Despite the fact that the Kennedy administration was acutely embarrassed by the unmitigated defeat-indeed, because, of it-a campaign of smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost immediately. Throughout the 1960s, the Caribbean island was subjected to countless sea and air commando raids by exiles, at times accompanied by their CIA supervisors, inflicting damage upon oil refineries, chemical plants and railroad bridges, cane fields, sugar mills and sugar warehouses; infiltrating spies, saboteurs and assassins ... any thing to damage the Cuban economy, promote disaffection, or make the revolution look bad ... taking the lives of Cuban militia members and others in the process ... pirate attacks on Cuban fishing boats and merchant ships, bombardments of Soviet vessels docked in Cuba, an assault upon a Soviet army camp with 12 Russian soldiers reported wounded ... a hotel and a theater shelled from offshore because Russians and East Europeans were supposed to be present there.
These actions were not always carried out on the direct order of the CIA or with its foreknowledge, but the Agency could hardly plead "rogue elephant". It had created an operations headquarters in Miami that was truly a state within a city-over, above, and outside the laws of the United States, not to mention international law, with a staff of several hundred Americans directing many more Cuban agents in just such types of actions, with a budget in excess of $50 million a year, and an arrangement with the local press to keep operations in Florida secret except when the CIA wanted something publicized.
Title 18 of the US Code declares it to be a crime to launch a "military or naval expedition or enterprise" from the United States against a country with which the United States is not (officially) at war. Although US authorities now and then aborted an exile plot or impounded a boat-sometimes because the Coast Guard or other officials had not been properly clued in-no Cubans were prosecuted under this act. This was no more than to be expected inasmuch as Attorney General Robert Kennedy had determined after the Bay of Pigs that the invasion did not constitute a military expedition.
The commando raids were combined with a total US trade and credit embargo, which continues to this day, and which genuinely hurt the Cuban economy and chipped away at the society's standard of living. So unyielding has the embargo been that when Cuba was hard hit by a hurricane in October 1963, and Casa Cuba, a New York social club, raised a large quantity of clothing for relief, the United States refused to grant it an export license on the grounds that such shipment was "contrary to the national interest''.

Moreover, pressure was brought to bear upon other countries to conform to the embargo, and goods destined for Cuba were sabotaged: machinery damaged, chemicals added to lubricating fluids to cause rapid wear on diesel engines, a manufacturer in West Germany paid to produce ball-bearings off-center, another to do the same with balanced wheel gears-"You're talking about big money," said a CIA officer involved in the sabotage efforts, "when you ask a manufacturer to go along with you on that kind of project because he has to reset his whole mold. And he is probably going to worry about the effect on future business. You might have to pay him several hundred thousand dollars or more.''

*****

What undoubtedly was an even more sensitive venture was the use of chemical and biological weapons against Cuba by the United States. It is a remarkable record.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Cuba_KH.html

Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy


On the night of 30 May 1961, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, mass murderer, torturer par excellence, absolute dictator, was shot to death on a highway in the outskirts of the capital city, Ciudad Trujillo.

The assassination set off a chain of events over the next five years which featured sustained and remarkably gross intervention into the internal affairs of the Dominican Republic by the United States, the likes of which had not been seen in Latin America since the heyday of American gunboat diplomacy.
The United States had been an accomplice in the assassination itself of the man it had helped to climb to power and to endure for some 30 years. It marked one of the rare occasions that the US government acted to overthrow a right-wing despot, albeit anti-communism was still the motivating force.
Whatever repugnance individual Washington policy makers may have felt toward Trujillo's
incredible violations of human rights over the years, his fervent adherence to American policies, his repression of the left, and, as a consequence, the vigorous support he enjoyed in Congress (where Trujillo's money was no stranger) and in other influential American circles, were enough to keep successive United States administrations looking the other way.

When, in January 1959, Fulgencio Batista fell before the forces of Fidel Castro in near by Cuba, a reconsideration of this policy was thrust upon Washington's agenda. This historic event seemed to suggest that support of right-wing governments might no longer be the best way of checking the rise of revolutionary movements in Latin America, but rather might be fostering them. Indeed, in June a force of Dominican exiles launched an invasion of their homeland from Cuba. Although the invasion was a complete failure, it could only serve to heighten Washington's concern about who was swimming around In "The American Lake".

*****

The decision to topple Trujillo was reinforced in early 1960 when the United States sought to organize hemispheric opposition to the Castro regime. This policy ran head-on into the familiar accusation that the United States opposed only leftist governments, never those of the right, no matter how tyrannical. The close association with Trujillo, widely regarded as Washington's "protégé", was proving increasingly to be an embarrassment. The circumstances were such that President Eisenhower was led to observe that "It's certain that American public opinion won't condemn Castro until we have moved against Trujillo." (The president's apparent belief in the independence of the American mind may have been overly generous, for Washington was supporting right-wing dictatorships In Guatemala, Nicaragua, Haiti and elsewhere before and after Trujillo's assassination, yet the American public fell readily into line in condemning Castro.)

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/DominicanRepublic_KH.html

... because of the irresponsibility of its own people." Thus spoke Henry Kissinger, principal adviser to the President of the United States on matters of national security.

Kissinger, is that old guy still alive? I bet he wouldn't say the same thing about Honduras...

Can you imagine that both Carter *and* Kissinger won the Nobel PEACE Prize? :wtf:

And 200,000 more


In 1975 Indonesia invaded the former Portuguese colony of East Timor, which lies at the eastern end of the Indonesian archipelago and which had proclaimed its independence after Portugal relinquished control. It was the beginning of a massacre that continues into the 1990s. By 1989, Amnesty International estimated that Indonesian troops, with the aim of forcibly annexing East Timor, had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. The level of atrocity has often been on a par with that carried out against the PKI in Indonesia itself.

The invasion of 7 December 1975-of which, said the New York Times: "By any definition, Indonesia is guilty of naked aggression"-was launched the day after US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Indonesia following a meeting with President Suharto.

Columnist Jack Anderson later reported:
'By December 3, 1975, an intelligence dispatch to Washington reported that "Ranking Indonesian civilian government leaders have decided that the only solution in the Portuguese Timor situation is for Indonesia to launch an open offensive against Fretilin, the leading East Timorese resistance movement."
But it was essential to neutralize the United States. For the Indonesian army relied heavily on U.S. arms which, under our laws, could not be used for aggression.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/EastTimor_KH.html

90% of Americans couldn't find Timor without a GPS, why is that considering the magnitude of the horror? Why is that, how did this not make it on the radar?

Can Samantha Power explain this to me, or was that an oopsie?

From democracynow.org:

AMY GOODMAN: Allan suggested we walk to the front of the crowd between the soldiers and the Timorese, because although we knew that the army had committed many massacres, we hoped that we, as a foreign journalists, could serve as a shield for the Timorese. Standing with headphones on and microphone and camera out in full view, we went and stood in the middle of the road, looking straight at the approaching troops. Behind us, the crowd was hushed as some Timorese tried to turn away, but they were hemmed in by cemetery walls.

ALLAN NAIRN: The soldiers marched straight up to us. They never broke their stride. We were enveloped by the troops, and when they got a few yards past us, within a dozen yards of the Timorese, they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once, and they opened fire. The Timorese, in an instant, were down, just torn apart by the bullets. The street was covered with bodies, covered with blood. And the soldiers just kept on coming. They poured in, one rank after another. They leaped over the bodies of those who were down. They were aiming and shooting people in the back. I could see their limbs being torn, their bodies exploding. There was blood spurting out into the air. The pop of the bullets, everywhere. And it was very organized, very systematic. The soldiers did not stop. They just kept on shooting until no one was left standing.

AMY GOODMAN: A group of soldiers grabbed my microphone and threw me to the ground, kicking and punching me. At that point, Allan threw himself on top of me, protecting me from further injury. The soldiers then used their rifle butts like baseball bats, beating Allan until they fractured his skull. As we sat on the ground, Allan, covered in blood, a group of soldiers lined up and pointed their M16s at our heads. They had stripped us of all of our equipment. We just kept shouting, “We’re from America!” In the end, they decided not to execute us.

Massacre: The Story of East Timor

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/28/massacre_the_story_of_east_timor

also.. John Pilger has a 1993 documentary on Timor called "Death of a Nation"

also.. East Timor Action Network for more info. --->http://www.etan.org/

Cheerio!
Agony

Simple, "The people will believe what the media tells them they believe." George Orwell

I guess you could call the source of this capitalism and greed. I recommend the movies by Gillo Pontecorvo (1919-2006). More than likely many of you DUers have seen his examination of Algerian independence from the French in his movie The Battle of Algiers which was rereleased coincidentally in time for the Iraq invasion. But he also directed BURN which was based on an earlier period - the Hatian revolution. Marlon Brando starred in this amidst much controversy from the British. :kick:

Human rights, Washington style


The United States was supporting the government of El Salvador, said President Ronald Reagan, because it was trying "to halt the infiltration into the Americas, by terrorists and by outside interference, and those who aren't just aiming at El Salvador but, I think, are aiming at the whole of Central and possibly later South America and, I'm sure, eventually North America." Psychiatrists have a term for such perceptions of reality. Thev call it paranoid schizophrenia. If the insurgents in El Salvador, the smallest country by far in all of Central and south America, were engaged in what Ronald Reagan perceived as a plot to capture the Western Hemisphere, others saw it as the quintessential revolution.

Viewed in the latter context, it cannot be asserted that the Salvadorean people rushed precipitously into revolution at the first painful sting of repression, or turned to the gun because of a proclivity towards violent solutions, or a refusal to "work within the system" or because of "outside agitators", or any of the other explanations of why people revolt, so dear to the hearts of Washington opinion makers. For as long as anyone could remember, the reins of El Salvador's government had resided in the hands of one military dictatorship or another, while the economy had been controlled by the celebrated 14 coffee and industrial families, with only the occasional, short-lived bursting of accumulated discontent to disturb the neat arrangement.

In December 1980, New York Times, reporter Raymond Bonner asked Jose Napoleon Duarte "why the guerrillas were in the hills". Duarte, who had just become president of the ruling junta, responded with an answer that surprised Bonner: "Fifty years of lies, fifty years of injustice, fifty years of frustration. This is a history of people starving to death, living in misery. For fifty years the same people had all the power, all the money, all the jobs all the education, all the opportunities."
In the decades following the famed peasant rebellion in l932, which was crushed by an unholy massacre, a reform government had occupied the political stage only twice: for nine months in 1944, then again in 1960. The latter instance was precipitated by several thousand students of the National University who staged a protest against the curtailment of civil liberties. The government responded by sending in the police, who systematically smashed offices, classrooms, and laboratories, beat up the school's president, killed a librarian, bayoneted students, and raped dozens of young women. Finally, when the students amassed anew, troops opened fire upon them point-blank.

The bloody incident was one of the turning points for a group of junior military officers. They staged a coup in October aimed at major social and political reforms, but the new government lasted only three months before being overthrown in a counter-coup which the United States was reportedly involved in. Dr. Fabio Castillo, a former president of the National University and a member of the ousted government, testified years later before the US Congress that in the process of overthrowing the reform government, the American Embassy immediately began to "intervene directly", and "members of the U.S. Military Mission openly intensified their invitation to conspiracy and rebellion".

Throughout the 1960s, multifarious American experts occupied themselves in El Salvador by enlarging and refining the state's security and counter-insurgency apparatus: the police, the National Guard, the military, the communications and intelligence networks, the co-ordination with their counterparts in other Central American countries ... as matters turned out, these were the forces and resources which were brought into action to impose widespread repression and wage war. Years later, the New York Times noted: "In El Salvador, American aid was used for police training in the 1950's and 1960's and many officers in the three branches of the police later became leaders of the right-wing death squads that killed tens of thousands of people in the late 1970's and early 1980's."

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/ElSalvador_KH.html

Surely he was under that rock, too!

and clandestine government which has assassinated leaders all over the world --

INCLUDING IN AMERICA --!!!

Malcolm X was the first to give that news to the American public -- but I don't

think most of us could completely understand his warning because so few Americans

understood then what our government had actually been doing all over the world.

OH and raping and killing nuns.

HUGO CHAVEZ doesn't have mass graves & Death Squads. But ALVARO URIBE does. Why is Uribe our "ally"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Colombia

Who has the world's largest population of displaced people? Number 1 is Sudan. Number 2 is Colombia.

http://www.semana.com/noticias-headlines/colombia-the-second-worlds-largest-number-of-displaced-people/123341.aspx

Thanks Bill. Thanks Joe. Thanks Neofucks.

I know you have to start a book somewhere, but Teddy Roosevelt deserves attention in this regard as well.

But, the chickens are coming home to roost in the usual way. Bankruptcy, disillusion, and defeat.

"America is the first country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual intervening period of civilization." -  Oscar Wilde

did the Russians! :sarcasm:

Citizen#1 "Stop the war."
Citizen#2 "Why do you hate America?"

There are very good reasons for American foreign policy that only we can know. When we do it, it isn't genocide; it's democracy. It isn't a right-wing coup by our puppet; it's legitimate concerns expressed by a strict-constitutionalist who just happens to be a General and a Fascist.

Besides, we mean well.

And we can do anything we like in Latin America because (Marilyn?) Monroe said so.
And they don't have twitter down there.
And Obama is a good guy so I say give him a chance.
And it sets a bad example for some establishment stooge to be elected President and then become a "populist". Very bad precedent, that.

Like bin Laden suggested, every American should read Blum. Perhaps then they would really understand why the world hates us - & no Georgie, it's not because of our freedoms, which you worked so hard to strip away.


The Author Who Got A Big Boost From bin Laden
Historian 'Glad' of Mention As Sales of Book Skyrocket

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/20/AR2006012001971.html

snip...

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 21, 2006; Page C01

Twenty-four hours after Osama bin Laden told the world that the American people should read the work of a little-known Washington historian, William Blum was still adjusting.

Blum, who at 72 is accustomed to laboring in relative left-wing obscurity, checked his emotions and pronounced himself shocked and, well, pleased.

"This is almost as good as being an Oprah book," he said yesterday between telephone calls from the world media and bites of a bagel. "I'm glad." Overnight, his 2000 work, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower," had become an Osama book.

more...

From Blum's end of the conversations, you could tell the reporters were expecting him to express some kind of discomfort, remorse, maybe even shame. Blum refused to acknowledge feelings he did not have.

"I was not turned off by such an endorsement," he informed a New York radio station. "I'm not repulsed, and I'm not going to pretend I am." He patiently reiterated the thesis of his foreign-policy critique -- that American interventions abroad create enemies.

You could almost hear the ticking of a stopwatch. These were Blum's 15 American minutes, brought to him by a murderous zealot on the other side of the world who had named him to a kind of Terrorists Book-of-the-Month Club. The CIA duly verified the audiotape from bin Laden, and there it was: Blum had a bona fide book blurb from the evil one.


more at link

Another good book, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman", same point, anyone read it ? Most excellent.

After reading John Perkins and that his "in" was the Peace Corp it is too easy to be cynical...

Along the same lines, if you haven't already, you might consider reading Chalmers Johnson's trilogy: "Blowback", " The Sorrows of Empire" and "Nemesis". OUCH!

Cheerio!
Agony

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6AWl18xWak

From Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine.

President Taft "The day is not far distant when three Stars & Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x2971276#2971655

And the U.S. had no moral superiority over the rest of the world.

But that's what you get, when you recruit Nazis into your new intelligence agency.

Couple that with fascist leaning people in the right wing, and it's not hard to see that problems just might pop up somewhere down the road. Then again, it could have been the fascist feather on the right wing all on their own, but I suspect that they just found new pals to play with.

As for Harry S. Truman... Where did the buck stop again?

You can't expect to correct a problem, if you can't acknowledge an error.

I have no idea --

However Allen Dulles worked to bring in Nazis under Operation Paperclip --

presumably, JFK may have eventually found out about that --

We do know that the Nazis were used to found the CIA and also funneled into the FBI --

USIA, NASA - Werner von Braun.

As I recall it, JFK may have woken up to this treachery over Werner Von Braun --

JFK evidently took qutie some exception to von Braun's plan to use nuclear fuel in space!!

and approved of it. He was no fool by anyones standards. He was willing to allow it to continue because it would give this country an advantage in dealing with the Soviets. It would give this country an edge in building a space program. Both goals that President Truman would fully support.

Didn't Truman . . have John McCloy at his elbow constantly --- ?

McCloy was ultra right wing -- and also was pushing Truman to drop the atomic bomb on

Japan.

Later, McCloy was on Warren Commission.

Always thought less of Truman because of the bomb -- Rosenbergs --

Henry Wallace would have made the better VP/President --

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_A._Wallace

In Jim Marrs "Rise of the Fourth Reich" among many other inventions, there seems to be

some evidence that the atomic bombs we dropped were given to us by the Nazis making deals.

Some speculation is that they understood knocking out NYC or London wouldn't win the war,

but that the retaliation would be something Germany wouldn't survive.

They had processed uranium and plutonium and theory is that some of that went into the fourth

bomb which US presumably did make.

confirmed that Julius Rosenberg was working for the Soviet Union. He was guilty as charged. Ethal Rosenberg was the victim in this case, all she did was some typing for him. She had no part in the espionage operations and was innocent of the charges.

elected officials - two I'm aware of were Rep. Gerald Ford, later to become our
first unelected VP and President -- also notorious for his assistance on the
Warren Commission in moving the back wound from JFK's right shoulder to near his
neck!

This wound also had NO OUTLET so the BS skills of Ford and Specter should be understood
as vast deviousness. Further the wound was made at a 45 degree DOWNWARD angle!!

The other member of Congress was Sen. Strom Thurmond --
and how much better off might our nation have been without his racism?

"Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution,"
said the President of the United States



"It's the best damn Government since Pericles," the American two-star General declared. (The news report did not mention whether he was chewing on a big fat cigar.)
The government, about which the good General was so ebullient, was that of the Colonels' junta which came to power in a military coup in April 1967, followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings, torture, and killings, the victims totaling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "communist takeover". Corrupting and subversive influences in Greek life were to be removed. Among these were miniskirts, long hair, and foreign newspapers; church attendance for the young would be compulsory.

So brutal and so swift was the repression, that by September, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands were before the European Commission of Human Rights to accuse Greece of violating most of the Commission's conventions. Before the year was over Amnesty International had sent representatives to Greece to investigate the situation. From this came a report which asserted that "Torture as a deliberate practice is carried out by both Security Police and the Military Police."

The coup had taken place two days before the campaign for national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. Papandreou had been elected in February 1964 with the only outright majority in the history of modern Greek elections. The successful machinations to unseat him had begun immediately, a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek Military, and the American military and CIA stationed in Greece.

Philip Deane (the pen name of Gerassimos Gigantes) is a Greek, a former UN official, who worked during this period both for King Constantine and as an envoy to Washington for the Papandreou government. He has written an intimate account of the subtleties and the grossness of this conspiracy to undermine the government and enhance the position of the military plotters, and of the raw power exercised by the CIA in his country. ... Greece was looked upon much as a piece of property to be developed according to Washington's needs. A story related by Deane illustrates how this attitude was little changed, and thus the precariousness of Papandreou's position: During one of the perennial disputes between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus, which was now spilling over onto NATO, President Johnson summoned the Greek ambassador to tell him of Washington's "solution". The ambassador protested that it would be unacceptable to the Greek parliament and contrary to the Greek constitution. "Then listen to me, Mr. Ambassador," said the President of the United States, "fuck your Parliament and your Constitution. America is an elephant. Cyprus is a flea. If these two fleas continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good.... We pay a lot of good American dollars to the Greeks, Mr. Ambassador. If your Prime Minister gives me talk about Democracy, Parliament and Constitutions, he, his Parliament and his Constitution may not last very long."

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Greece_KH.html

Lying -- one of the few growth industries in Washington


What can be said about an invasion launched by a nation of 240 million people against one of 110 thousand? And when the invader is, militarily and economically, the most powerful in the world, and the target of its attack is an underdeveloped island of small villages 1,500 miles away, 133 square miles in size, whose main exports are cocoa, nutmeg and bananas...

The United States government had a lot to say about it. The relation which its pronouncements bore to the truth can be accurately gauged by the fact that three days after the invasion the deputy White House press secretary for foreign affairs resigned, citing "damage to his personal credibility''.
One of the fundamental falsehoods concerning the invasion of Tuesday, 25 October 1983 was that the United States had been requested to intervene by an urgent plea on the 21st from the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), comprising six countries and joined in this instance b Barbados and Jamaica. These countries purportedly feared some form of aggressive act from the new ultra-leftist regime in Grenada which had deposed socialist leader Maurice Bishop. Bishop had been expelled from the ruling party on 12 October, placed under house arrest the next day, and murdered on the 19th.
Even if the fears were valid, it would constitute a principle heretofore unknown under international law, namely that state A could ask state B to invade state C in the absence of any aggressive act toward state A by state C. In Washington, State Department lawyers worked overtime, finally settling on sections of an OECS mutual assistance pact, the Charter of the OAS, and the United Nations Charter as legal justifications for the American action. These documents, however, even with the most generous interpretation, provide for nothing of the sort.. Moreover, Article Six of the OECS pact requires all members to approve decisions of the organization's Authority (the heads of government). Grenada, a member, certainly did not approve. It was not even at the meeting, although US officials were present to steer the direction of the discussions.

As matters later transpired, Tom Adams, the Prime Minister of Barbados, stated that the United States had approached him on 15 October concerning a military intervention. (The State Department declined to comment when asked about Adams' statement.) Then "sources close to Jamaican Prime Minister Edward Seaga" asserted that the plea by the Caribbean nations "was triggered by an offer from the United States"-"Issue an appeal and we'll respond" was the message conveyed by Washington. Furthermore, on 26 October, the US ambassador to France, Evan Galbraith, stated over French television that the Reagan administration had been planning the invasion for the previous two weeks, that is, not only well before the putative request from the Caribbean countries, but, if Galbraith is to be taken literally, even before Bishop was overthrown or before this outcome could have been known with any certainty, unless the CIA had been mixed up in the intra-party feud .

Eventually it was disclosed that at some point before the invasion the government of Eugenia Charles, the Prime Minister of Dominica, who headed the OECS, had been the recipient of covert CIA money "for a secret support operation".

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Grenada_KH.html

and those Cubans, they were building a landing strip! No good could come of that.....

But for the death and carnage it would be comic opera, as it is, just another war crime.

Very bad taste.

sorry I missed this until now...

While the world watched


To whom does a poor banana republic turn when a CIA army is advancing upon its territory and CIA planes are overhead bombing the country? The leaders of Guatemala tried everyone-the United Nations, the Organization of American States, other countries individually, the world press, even the United States itself, in the desperate hope that it was all a big misunderstanding, that in the end, reason would prevail. Nothing helped. Dwight Eisenhower, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles had decided that the legally-elected government of Jacobo Arbenz was "communist", therefore must go and go it did, in June 1954.

In the midst of the American preparation to overthrow the government, the Guatemalan Foreign Minister, Guillermo Toriello, lamented that the United States was categorizing "as 'communism' every manifestation of nationalism or economic independence any desire for social progress, any intellectual curiosity, and any interest in progressive liberal reforms."

*****

The Guatemalan president , who took office in March 1951 after being elected by a wide margin, had no special contact or spiritual/ideological ties with the Soviet Union or the rest of the Communist bloc. Although American policymakers and the American press, explicitly and implicitly, often labeled Arbenz a communist, there were those in Washington who knew better, at least during their more dispassionate moments. Under Arbenz's administration Guatemala had voted at the United Nations so closely with the United States on issues of "Soviet imperialism" that a State Department group occupied with planning Arbenz's overthrow concluded that propaganda concerning Guatemala's UN record "would not be particularly helpful in our case". And a State Department analysis paper reported that the Guatemalan president had support "not only from Communist-led labor and the radical fringe of professional and intellectual groups, but also among many anti-Communist nationalists in urban areas".

*****

The centerpiece of Arbenz's program was land reform. The need for it was clearly expressed in the all-too-familiar underdeveloped-country statistics: In a nation overwhelmingly rural, 2.2 percent of the landowners owned 70 percent of the arable land; the annual per capita income of agricultural workers was $87. Before the revolution of 1944, which overthrew the Ubico dictatorship, "farm laborers had been roped together by the Army for delivery to the low-land farms where they were kept in debt slavery by the landowners."

The expropriation of large tracts of uncultivated acreage which was distributed to approximately 100,000 landless peasants, the improvement in union rights for the workers, and other social reforms, were the reasons Arbenz had won the support of Communists and other leftists, which was no more than to be expected. When Arbenz was criticized for accepting Communist support, he challenged his critics to prove their good faith by backing his reforms themselves. They failed to do so, thus revealing where the basis of their criticism lay.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Guatemala_KH.html

A less publicized "final solution"


Indians tell harrowing stories of village raids in which their homes have been burned, men tortured hideously and killed, women raped, and scarce crops destroyed. It is Guatemala's final solution to insurgency only mass slaughter of the Indians will prevent them joining a mass uprising.
This newspaper item appeared in 1983. Very similar stories have appeared many times in the world press since 1966, for Guatemala's "final solution" has been going on rather longer than the more publicized one of the Nazis.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the misery of the mainly-Indian peasants and urban poor of Guatemala who make up three-quarters of the population of this beautiful land so favored by American tourists. The particulars of their existence derived from the literature of this period sketch a caricature of human life. In a climate where everything grows, very few escape the daily ache of hunger or the progressive malnutrition ... almost half the children die before the age of five ... the leading cause of death in the country is gastroenteritis. Highly toxic pesticides sprayed indiscriminately by airplanes, at times directly onto the heads of peasants, leave a trail of poisoning and death ... public health services in rural areas are virtually non-existent ... the same for public education ... near-total illiteracy. A few hundred families possess almost all the arable land ... thousands of families without land, without work, jammed together in communities of cardboard and tin houses, with no running water or electricity, a sea of mud during the rainy season, sharing their bathing and toilet with the animal kingdom. Men on coffee plantations earning 20 cents or 50 cents a day, living in circumstances closely resembling concentration camps ... looked upon by other Guatemalans more as beasts of burden than humans. A large plantation to sell, reads the advertisement, "with 200 hectares and 300 Indians" ... this, then was what remained of the ancient Mayas, whom the American archeologist Sylvanus Morely had called the most splendid indigenous people on the planet.

The worst was yet to come.

*****

... in 1960, nationalist elements of the Guatemalan military who were committed to slightly opening the door to change were summarily crushed by the CIA. Before long, the ever-accumulating discontent again issued forth in a desperate lunge for alleviation-this time in the form of a guerrilla movement-only to be thrown back by a Guatemalan-American operation reminiscent of the Spanish conquistadores in its barbarity.

In the early years of the 1960s, the guerrilla movement, with several military officers of the abortive 1960 uprising prominent amongst the leadership, was slowly finding its way: organizing peasant support in the countryside, attacking an army outpost to gather arms, staging a kidnapping or bank robbery to raise money, trying to avoid direct armed clashes with the Guatemalan military.

Recruitment amongst the peasants was painfully slow and difficult; people so drained by the daily struggle to remain alive have little left from which to draw courage, people so downtrodden scarcely believe they have the right to resist, much less can they entertain thoughts of success; as fervent Catholics, they tend to believe that their misery is a punishment from God for sinning.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Guatemala2_KH.html

Who will rid me of this man?


What does the government of the United States do when faced with a choice between supporting: (a) a group of totalitarian military thugs guilty of murdering thousands, systematic torture, widespread rape, and leaving severely mutilated corpses in the streets ... or (b) a non-violent priest, legally elected to the presidency by a landslide, whom the thugs have overthrown in a coup? ... But what if the priest is a "leftist"?

During the Duvalier family dictatorship-Francois "Papa Doc", 1957-71, followed by Jean-Claude "Baby Doc", 1971-86, both anointed President for Life by papa-the United States trained and armed Haiti's counter-insurgency forces, although most American military aid to the country was covertly channeled through Israel, thus sparing Washington embarrassing questions about supporting brutal governments. After Jean-Claude was forced into exile in February 1986, fleeing to France aboard a US Air Force jet, Washington resumed open assistance. And while Haiti's wretched rabble were celebrating the end of three decades of Duvalierism, the United States was occupied in preserving it undcr new names.

Within three weeks of Jean-Claude's departure, the US announced that it was providing Haiti with $26.6 million in economic and military aid, and in April it was reported that "Another $4 million is being sought to provide the Haitian Army with trucks, training and communications gear to allow it to move around the country and maintain order.' Maintaining order in Haiti translates to domestic repression and control; and in the 21 months between Duvalier's abdication and the scheduled elections of November 1987, the successor Haitian governments were responsible for more civilian deaths than Baby Doc had managed in l5 years.

The CIA was meanwhile arranging for the release from prison, and safe exile abroad, of two of its Duvalier-era contacts, both notorious police chiefs, thus saving them from possible death sentences for murder and torture, and acting contrary to the public's passionate wish for retribution against its former tormenters. In September, Haiti's main trade union leader, Yves Richard, declared that Washington was working to undermine the left before the coming elections. US aid organizations, he said, were encouraging people in the country side to identify and reject the entire left as "communist". though the country clearly had a fundamental need for reformers and sweeping changes. Haiti was, and is, the Western Hemisphere's best known economic, medical, political, judicial, educational, and ecological basket case.

At this time Jean-Bertrand Aristide was a charismatic priest with a broad following in the poorest slums of Haiti, the only church figure to speak out against repression during the Duvalier years. He now denounced the military-dominated elections and called upon Haitians to reject the entire process. His activities figured prominently enough in the electoral campaign to evoke a strong antipathy from US officials. Ronald Reagan, Aristide later wrote, considered him to be a communist. And Assistant Secretary of State for InterAmerican Affairs, Elliott Abrams, saw fit to attack Aristide while praising the Haitian government in a letter to Time magazine during the election campaign. The Catholic priest first came to prominence in Haiti as a proponent of liberation theology, which seeks to blend the teachings of Christ with inspiring the poor to organize and resist their oppression. When asked why the CIA might have sought to oppose Aristide, a senior official with the Senate Intelligence Committee stated that "Liberation theology proponents are not too popular at the agency. Maybe second only to the Vatican for not liking liberation theology are the people at Langley ."

Aristide urged a boycott of the elections, saying "The army is our first enemy." The CIA, on the other hand, funded some of the candidates.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Haiti_KH.html

War and pornography



"I think it's time we held Sukarno's feet to the fire," said Frank Wisner, the CIA's Deputy Director of Plans (covert operations), one day in autumn 1956. Wisner was speaking of the man who had led Indonesia since its struggle for independence from the Dutch following the war. A few months earlier, in May, Sukarno had made an impassioned speech before the US Congress asking for more understanding of the problems and needs of developing nations like his own.

The ensuing American campaign to unseat the flamboyant leader of the fifth most populous nation in the world was to run the gamut from large-scale military maneuvers to seedy sexual intrigue. The previous year, Sukarno had organized the Bandung Conference as an answer to the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), the US-created political-military alliance of area states to "contain communism". In the Indonesian city of Bandung, the doctrine of neutralism had been proclaimed as the faith of the underdeveloped world. To the men of the CIA station in Indonesia the conference was heresy, so much so that their thoughts turned toward assassination as a means of sabotaging it.
*****
... Sukarno had made trips to the Soviet Union and China (though to the White House as well), he had purchased arms from Eastern European countries (but only after being turned down by the United States), he had nationalized many private holdings of the Dutch, and, perhaps most disturbing of all, the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) had made impressive gains electorally and in union organizing, thus earning an important role in the coalition government.

It was a familiar Third World scenario, and the reaction of Washington policy-makers was equally familiar. Once again, they were unable, or unwilling, to distinguish nationalism from pro-communism, neutralism from wickedness. By any definition of the word, Sukarno was no communist. He was an Indonesian nationalist and a "Sukarnoist" who had crushed the PKI forces in 1948 after the independence struggle had been won. He ran what was largely his own show by granting concessions to both the PKI and the Army, balancing one against the other. As to excluding the PKI, with its more than one million members, from the government, Sukarno declared: "I can't and won't ride a three-legged horse."

To the United States, however, Sukarno's balancing act was too precarious to be left to the vagaries of the Indonesian political process. It mattered not to Washington that the Communist Party was walking the legal, peaceful road, or that there was no particular "crisis" or "chaos" in Indonesia, so favored as an excuse for intervention. Intervention there would be.

...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Indonesia57_KH.html

Liquidating President Sukarno ... and 500,000 others



Estimates of the total number of Indonesians murdered over a period of several years following an aborted coup range from 500,000 to one million. In the early morning hours of 1 October 1965, a small force of junior military officers abducted and killed six generals and seized several key points in the capital city of Jakarta. They then went on the air to announce that their action was being taken to forestall putsch by a "Generals' Council" scheduled for Army Day, the fifth of October. The putsch they said, had been sponsored by the CIA and was aimed at capturing power from President Sukarno. By the end of the day, however, the rebel officers in Jakarta had been crushed by the army under the direction of General Suharto, although some supportive army groups other cities held out for a day or two longer.

Suharto-a man who had served both the Dutch colonialists and the Japanese invaders-and his colleagues charged that the large and influential PKI was behind junior officers' "coup attempt", and that behind the party stood Communist China. The triumphant armed forces moved in to grab the reins of government, curb Sukarno's authority (before long he was reduced to little more than a figurehead), and carry out a blood bath eliminate once and for all the PKI with whom Sukarno had obliged them to share national power for many years. Here at last was the situation which could legitimate these long- desired actions.

Anti-Communist organizations and individuals, particularly Muslims, were encouraged to join in the slaying of anyone suspected of being a PKI sympathizer. Indonesians of Chinese descent as well fell victim to crazed zealots. The Indonesian people were stirred in part by the display of photographs on television and in the press of the badly decomposed bodies of the slain generals. The men, the public was told, had been castrated, their eyes gouged out by Communist women. (The army later made the mistake of allowing official medical autopsies to be included as evidence in some of the trials, and the extremely detailed reports of the injuries suffered mentioned only bullet wounds and some bruises, no eye gougings or castration.)

What ensued was called by the New York Times "one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history." Violence, wrote Life magazine, "tinged not only with fanaticism but with blood-lust and something like witchcraft."

Twenty-five years later, American diplomats disclosed that they had systematically compiled comprehensive lists of "Communist" operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres, and turned over as many as 5,000 names to the Indonesian army, which hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. Robert Martens, a former member of the US Embassy's political section in Jakarta, stated in 1990: "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."

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Making it safe for the King of Kings


"So this is how we get rid of that madman Mossadegh," announced John Foster Dulles to a group of top Washington policy makers one day in June 1953. The Secretary of State held in his hand a plan of operation to overthrow the prime minister of Iran prepared by Kermit (Kim) Roosevelt of the CIA. There was scarcely any discussion amongst the high powered men in the room, no probing questions, no legal or ethical issues raised.

"This was a grave decision to have made," Roosevelt later wrote. "It involved tremendous risk. Surely it deserved thorough examination, the closest consideration, somewhere at the very highest level. It had not received such thought at this meeting. In fact, I was morally certain that almost half of those present, if they had felt free or had the courage to speak, would have opposed the undertaking."
Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore and distant cousin of Franklin, was expressing surprise more than disappointment at glimpsing American foreign-policy-making undressed.

The original initiative to oust Mossadegh had come from the British, for the elderly Iranian leader had spearheaded the parliamentary movement to nationalize the British owned Anglo-lranian Oil Company (AIOC), the sole oil company operating in Iran. In March 1951, the bill for nationalization was passed, and at the end of April Mossadegh was elected prime minister by a large majority of Parliament. On 1 May, nationalization went into effect. The Iranian people, Mossadegh declared, "were opening a hidden treasure upon which lies a dragon".

As the prime minister had anticipated, the British did not take the nationalization gracefully, though it was supported unanimously by the Iranian parliament and by the overwhelming majority of the Iranian people for reasons of both economic justice and national pride. The Mossadegh government tried to do all the right things to placate the British: It offered to set aside 25 percent of the net profits of the oil operation as compensation; it guaranteed the safety and the jobs of the British employees; it was willing to sell its oil without disturbance to the tidy control system so dear to the hearts of the international oil giants. But the British would have none of it. What they wanted was their oil company back. And they wanted Mossadegh's head. A servant does not affront his lord with impunity.

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L'Armee Clandestine

For the past two years the US has carried out one of the most sustained bombing campaigns in history against essentially civilian targets in northeastern Laos.... Operating from Thai bases and from aircraft carriers, American jets have destroyed the great majority of villages and towns in the northeast. Severe casualties have been inflicted upon the inhabitants ... Refugees from the Plain of Jars report they were bombed almost daily by American jets last year. They say they spent most of the past two years living in caves or holes.

Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong, 1970

is something of which we can be proud as Americans It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there ... is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective.

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State, 1971

The United States undertook the bombing campaign because its ground war against the Pathet Lao had failed.

The ground war had been carried out because the Pathet Lao were led by people whom the State Department categorized as "communist", no more, no less.
The Pathet Lao (re)turned to warfare because of their experiences in "working within the system".

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Destabilization in slow motion


*****

When the American military forces left Nicaragua for the last time, in 1933, they left behind a souvenir by which the Nicaraguan people could remember them: the National Guard, placed under the direction of one Anastasio Somoza ... Three years later, Somoza took over the presidency and with the indispensable help of the National Guard established a family dynasty which would rule over Nicaragua, much like a private estate, for the next 43 years. While the Guardsmen, consistently maintained by the United States, passed their time on martial law, rape, torture, murder of the opposition, and massacres of peasants, as well as less violent pursuits such as robbery, extortion, contraband, running brothels and other government functions, the Somoza clan laid claim to the lion's share of Nicaragua's land and businesses. When Anastasio Somoza II was overthrown by the Sandinistas in July 1979, he fled into exile leaving behind a country in which two-thirds of the population earned less than $300 a year. Upon his arrival in Miami, Somoza admitted to being worth $100 million. A US intelligence report, however, placed it at $900 million.

It was fortunate for the new Nicaraguan leaders that they came to power while Jimmy Carter sat in the White House. It gave them a year and a half of relative breathing space to take the first steps in their planned reconstruction of an impoverished society before the relentless hostility of the Reagan administration descended upon them; which is not to say that Carter welcomed the Sandinista victory.
In 1978, with Somoza nearing collapse, Carter authorized covert CIA support for the press and labor unions in Nicaragua in an attempt to create a "moderate" alternative to the Sandinistas. Towards the same end, American diplomats were conferring with non-leftist Nicaraguan opponents of Somoza. Washington's idea of "moderate", according to a group of prominent Nicaraguans who walked out on the discussions, was the inclusion of Somoza's political party in the future government and "leaving practically intact the corrupt structure of the somocista apparatus", including the National Guard, albeit in some reorganized form. Indeed, at this same time, the head of the US Southern Command (Latin America), Lt. General Dennis McAuliffe, was telling Somoza that, although he had to abdicate, the United States had "no intention of permitting a settlement which would lead to the destruction of the National Guard". This was a notion remarkably insensitive to the deep loathing for the Guard felt by the great majority of the Nicaraguan people.

*****

After the Sandinistas took power, Carter authorized the CIA to provide financial and other support to their opponents. At the same time, Washington pressured the Sandinistas to include certain men in the new government. Although these tactics failed, the Carter administration did not refuse to give aid to Nicaragua. Ronald Reagan was later to point to this and ask: "Can anybody doubt the generosity and good faith of the American people?" What the president failed to explain was:
a) Almost all of the aid had gone to non-governmental agencies and to the private sector, including the American Institute for Free Labor Development, the long-time CIA front.
b) The primary and expressed motivation for the aid was to strengthen the hands of the so-called moderate opposition and undercut the influence of socialist countries in Nicaragua .
c) All military aid was withheld despite repeated pleas from the Nicaraguan government about its need and right to such help-the defeated National Guardsmen and other Supporters of Somoza had not, after all, disappeared; they had regrouped as the "contras" and maintained primacy in the leadership of this force from then on.

In January 1981, Ronald Reagan took office under a Republican platform which asserted that it "deplores the Marxist Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua". The president moved quickly to cut off virtually all forms of assistance to the Sandinistas, the opening salvos of his war against their revolution. The American whale, yet again, felt threatened by a minnow in the Caribbean.

Among the many measures undertaken: Nicaragua was excluded from US government programs which promote American investment and trade; sugar imports from Nicaragua were slashed by 90 percent; and, without excessive subtlety but with notable success, Washington pressured the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, and the European Common Market to withhold loans to Nicaragua. The director of the IDB, Mr. Kevin O'Sullivan, later revealed that in 1983 the US had opposed a loan to aid Nicaraguan fishermen on the grounds that the country did not have adequate fuel for their boats. A week later, O'Sullivan pointed out, "saboteurs blew up a major Nicaraguan fuel depot in the port of Corinto", an act described by an American intelligence source as 'totally a CIA operation''.

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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Nicaragua_KH.html

Torture - as American as apple pie
excerpted from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum


"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect.''

The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in Montevideo.

Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover, although Mitrione was not one of them.

OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events during the past year, and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities, there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions, as well as in the military and police.

"Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups," the New York Times stated in 1970 "the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder." A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try him before a "People's Court". It was heady stuff to choose a public villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled the walls perhaps their most memorable slogan: "O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie -- Either everyone dances or no one dances."

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Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven

By 1975, President Mobutu Sese Seko (nee Joseph Mobutu), the Zairian strongman regarded by the CIA as one of its "successes" in Africa, had ruled over his hapless impoverished subjects for 10 long years. In the process, with a flair for conspicuous corruption that ranks amongst the best this century has to offer, Mobutu amassed a person fortune estimated to run into the billions of dollars sitting in the usual Swiss, Paris, and New York banks, while most of the population suffered from severe malnutrition.
It can reasonably be said that his corruption was matched only by his cruelty. Mobutu, One observer of Zaire has written, rules by decree with a grotesque impulsiveness that seems to shock even his former case officers. One recalled that in June 1971 Mobutu had forcibly enlisted in the armed forces the entire student body of Lovanium University. "He was put out by some student demonstrations," remembered the official Mobutu finally relented, but ten of the students were sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes of "public insult" to the Chief of State.... One intelligence source recalls a fervent Mobutu approach, eventually deflected, that either Zaire with CIA help or the Agency alone undertake an invasion against "those bastards across the river" in the Congo Republic (Brazzaville). He's a "real wild man," said one former official, "and we've had trouble keeping him under rein "

*****

... in April 1976, the CIA gave Mobutu close to $1.4 million to distribute to US-backed Angolan forces, thousands of whom were refugees in Zaire, desperate and hungry. Mobutu simply pocketed the money. The Agency had been aware of this possibility when they delivered the money to him but, in the words of CIA Africa specialist John Stockwell, "They rationalized that it would mollify him, bribe him not to retaliate against the CIA." Stockwell added this observation:

'It is an interesting paradox that the Securities and Exchange Commission has since 1971 investigated, and the Justice Department has prosecuted, several large U.S. corporations for using bribery to facilitate their overseas operations. At the same time, the U.S. government, through the CIA, disburses tens of millions of dollars each year in cash bribes. Bribery is a standard operating technique of the U.S. government, via the CIA, but it is a criminal offense for U.S. business.'

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