Now that began with the war that I organized as Commander of the Angola Task Force, working for a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Fifty thousand is the number that the Sandinistas and The New York Times pretty much agreed on were killed and wounded in Nicaragua in the ONE BILLION DOLLAR Contra de-stabilization in that country that we effected in the 1980s.Stockwell concludes that throughout what is called the 'Cold War' some twenty million people were murdered, '...the second or third bloodiest war in all of human history". Stockwell calls this the Third World War, a war waged by the CIA upon a 'third world'. Is there any question now about why the US is hated throughout the world? Any questions?--John Stockwell, The CIA and the Gulf War
Torture and death squads we do not run in England or Canada or Belgium or Sweden or Switzerland. They are, virtually all of them, done against countries of the Third World where the governments of those countries are not strong enough to prohibit us, to prevent us from brutalizing their people. The six million people killed are people of the Third World: people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of Nicaragua. And now, of course, the Middle Eastern deserts, in a new wrinkle on this system.By now, the CIA has become expert in waging wars by proxy, encouraging domestic terrorism, subverting elected governments.--John Stockwell, The CIA and the Gulf War
CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy).Pakistan is a case in point.--Steve Kangas, A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been propping up Musharraf's military regime with $3.6 billion in economic aid from the US and a US-sponsored consortium, not to mention $900 million in military aid and the postponement of overdue debt repayments totaling $13.5 billion. But now the administration is debating whether Musharraf has become too dependent on Islamic extremist political parties in Pakistan to further US interests, and whether he should be pressured to permit the return of two exiled former prime ministers, Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, who have formed an electoral alliance to challenge him in presidential elections scheduled for next year.The late Benazir Bhutto revealed the truth before she was brutally gunned down in the streets of Karachi: US policy causes world terrorism. She died before she could tell the rest of the story. See also: Terrorism is worse under GOP regimes.--Pakistan: Friend or Foe? The US shouldn't prop up President Musharraf's military regime, Selig S. Harrison
When the United States aligns with dictatorships and totalitarian regimes, it compromises the basic democratic principles of its foundation -- namely, life, liberty and justice for all. Dictatorships such as Musharraf's suppress individual rights and freedoms and empower the most extreme elements of society. Oppressed citizens, unable to represent themselves through other means, often turn to extremism and religious fundamentalism.Quoted above was a paragraph from A Timeline of CIA Atrocities by Steve Kangas, whose death under questionable circumstances raises still more questions given his encyclopedic knowledge of the CIA and the antipathy he inspired from Richard Mellon Scaife --the spider at the center of a malicious, right wing web, perhaps the "great right wing conspiracy" referred to by Hilary Clinton at the height of the GOP blow job jihad and scandal.Benazir Bhutto, A False Choice for Pakistan
In 1984 Kangas moved to Germany where he was involved in electronic eavesdropping on Soviet military units in Eastern Europe, analyzing the transcripts and reporting back to NATO. It was at this time he began to question his conservative political beliefs. Kangas left military intelligence in 1986 and became a student at the University of California in Santa Cruz. This experience moved him further to the left: "There, kindly professors pointed out to me the illogic of defending life by taking it, destroying the planet for a buck and shutting down schools to build more prisons. I am now thoroughly brainwashed to believe that kindness and human decency are positive traits to be emulated and encouraged." Kangas ran the Liberalism Resurgent website. This included several articles on the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. One of his online essays, The Origins of the Overclass, attempted to show "why the richest 1 percent have exploded ahead since 1975, with the help of the New Right, Corporate America and, surprisingly, the CIA." In the essay he argues that Richard Mellon Scaife ran "Forum World Features, a foreign news service used as a front to disseminate CIA propaganda around the world." Scaife was very unhappy with the attack made on him and employed private detective, Rex Armistead, to carry out an investigation into Kangas. It is believed that Kangas was working on a book about CIA covert activities when on 8th February, 1999, he was found dead in the bathroom of the offices of Richard Mellon Scaife, the owner of the Pittsburgh Tribune. He had been shot in the head. Officially he had committed suicide but some people believe he was murdered. In an article in Salon Magazine, (19th March, 1999) Andrew Leonard asked: "Why did the police report say the gun wound was to the left of his head, while the autopsy reported a wound on the roof of his mouth? Why had the hard drive on his computer been erased shortly after his death? Why had Scaife assigned his No. 1 private detective, Rex Armistead, to look into Kangas' past?"Violence against against America, often called 'blowback', is an inevitable reaction to CIA atrocities and interference. Concurrently, the US leads the world in the production of military hardware --tanks, missiles, nuclear weaponry, weapons of mass destruction. More recently, since the regime of Ronald Reagan specifically, the US has begun to trail the world in many other key industrial classification. Under GOP 'stewardship', the US is rapidly becoming a third world nation on steroids. As long as this is the case, no one living in the US, no citizen of the US abroad, is truly free. We are all reduced to mere units in a bigger, evil machine. Bush and his servile ilk serve Moloch willingly and visibly at Bohemian Grove. Slavery, however, is forced upon the rest of us, a process assisted ably by a corporate media. The most extreme example of this, of course, is Fox News, best described as political porn. If the Fox outfit did not deflect attention from more insidious designs, it would be laughable, even indulge for the low-class, beer drinking' entertainment that it might bring to certain demographics. In practice, however, it might as well be a state run organization reduced to merely dramatizing officially sanctioned news.--Spartacus International; See also: A Timeline of CIA Atrocities
Should you have doubts about press complicity with CIA/government lawlessness, I urge you to consider, as an example, revelations from Dan Rather about what CBS did to curry favor with the White House; or what can happen to a corporate, fully politicized, fourth estate: the Iraq war. Once called Yellow Journalism, it is now cleverly called "fair and balanced". In the worst cases, journalism become little more than a CIA 'front'.
After World War II, these psywar techniques continued. C.D. Jackson, a major figure in US psywar efforts before and after the war, was simultaneously a top executive at Time-Life. Psywar was also used with success during the 1950s by Edward Lansdale, first in the Philippines and then in South Vietnam. In Guatemala, the Dulles brothers worked with their friends at United Fruit, in particular the "father of public relations," Edward Bernays, who for years had been lobbying the press on behalf of United. When CIA puppets finally took over in 1954, only applause was heard from the media, commencing forty years of CIA-approved horrors in that unlucky country.[2] Bernays' achievement apparently impressed Allen Dulles, who immediately began using US public relations experts and front groups to promote the image of Ngo Dinh Diem as South Vietnam's savior.[3] The combined forces of unaccountable covert operations and corporate public relations, each able to tap massive resources, are sufficient to make the concept of "democracy" obsolete. Fortunately for the rest of us, unchallenged power can lose perspective. With research and analysis -- the capacity to see and understand the world around them -- entrenched power must constantly anticipate and contain potential threats. But even as power seems more secure, this capacity can be blinded by hubris and isolation.So it naturally follows that the robber barons and their fourth estate business partners should indeed benefit from the puppet they all worked so vigorously to enthrone.--Daniel Brandt, NameBase NewsLine, Journalism And The CIA
Corporate Interests merged with State Interests
The corporate interests of America are now almost entirely at one with the political interests of America. The people are either relegated to the outskirts as unimportant bystanders or are caught in the cross-fire as casualties of a hostile corporate takeover by American and even foreign corporations. We "the people" do not matter in a country where corporate profits are tied to state policy, which then uses those same corporations to tell us what is real and what is fabricated, what is true and what is false.The CIA is symptomatic of a militarized society, in which the CIA and the military play important roles in a circular self-justification. Much is made of the fact that the military provides opportunities for high school dropouts, the disadvantaged who might not otherwise get an education or a job. What is to be said of a society for which the export of death and destruction becomes essential to its economic well-being? As Gore Vidal argued persuavesively in his "The Decline and Fall of the American Empire", the military/industrial complex is a drag on the economy. The Pentagon budget, he argues, is an economic black hole. He sites, as an example, the construction of a 'tank'! Once built, the economic life of the tank if finished! From that point on, the tank becomes a net drag on the economy. It produces nothing, adds noting! Moreover, the Pentagon soaks up monies that might have been budgeted for truly productive programs like education and training. What is to be said about a society that finds it necessary to send young people off to die in immoral wars in order to get them employed and off the streets?--Laura Alexandrovna, Our Cold Civil War
