The secret wars of the CIA

ajtr

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THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA


How 6 Million People Were Killed In CIA Secret Wars Against Third World Countries

PART-1​

John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.

"I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done...

I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us....

What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.

What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national security syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so directly. I'm going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we'll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.

Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another, already in the public records. You can dig it all out for yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of the CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that we'll be talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative. We come from South Texas, East Texas....

I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my background, to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war, and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the struggle, to project American values and save the world for our brand of democracy. And I believed this. I went out and worked hard....

What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ... that nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests very much. We didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the point.

We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa division Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving me an explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make any sense, we're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S. look bad'.

And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, `you're trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.'

And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it on the American people, saying, `if you knew what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene.'

I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern. A formal study was done in the State Department and published internally, highly classified, called the Macomber [sp?] report, concluding that the CIA had no business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not justified, there were no national security interests that the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn't need to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that time.

I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.

I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house - when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The post was too important to close down. (2). They weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn't have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.'

But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber' to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn't get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against
my career.

So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.

They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.

What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what I found was that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army....

Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the communist forces - that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.

And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam....

I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976].... and what I figured out was that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the information about Angola, about the whole world, and I would finally understand national security. And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the question was where did the U.S. government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war....

I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly important, threatening information, threatening to our national security interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA, but I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national security complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And so I took the job.... Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I had found these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite frankly, was fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every one of these meetings....

You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you've got Nicaragua.... the basic structure, all the way through including the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't gone in first. We put arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And
they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests there that should have been defended that way.

There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one. The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work with whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the friendliest to the U.S.

We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and proceeded with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn't want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them, they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.

Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To just about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I put together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and military activities into Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every way they could to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over the world.

Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.

And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed this thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we'll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.

And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam - he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it's a felony to lie to the Congress.

He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were staying well away from them. They were concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African country, to help you impose your will on that black African country by killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might be involved in that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.

We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about that. They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said no, and we were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said `no, we had people going in to look at the situation and coming back out'. We had 24 people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons, installing communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody inside the country.

In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful, or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they went ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the country.

At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes of the world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified with them. And that's illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.
After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the MPLA had Gulf oil back in Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in Northern Angola.

You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians to install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn't buy [the Soviet Union's] Aeroflot.... David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press conferences, in which he says that we have no problem doing business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.

I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know what we'd done in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate - I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able to take my story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.

I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see what communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat babies for breakfast. And I found they don't. I went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.

I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see - these were all educated people, and experienced people - and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to do, they had rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly to hear them. And then of course I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things, these indicators, the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada in the near future.

I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book after book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I urge you to read. In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editors select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you'll see, the issues are very, very important.

I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have done studies, people who are leading different situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted longer and evolved to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the people, who have been shot, or hit, or blown up....

We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have been killed in these things.... Some of them are very, very bloody.

The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.

Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a covert action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many years, with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country, of the evils of communist China, and attacking them, as we're doing in Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched against them to parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country. And this led us directly into the Korean war.

U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years, with greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda, deceiving the American people about what was happening. Panicking people in Vietnam to create migrations to the south so they could photograph it and show how people were fleeing communism. And on and on, until they got us into the Vietnam war, and 2,000,000 people were killed.

There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you're killing 1 to 3 million communists, that's great. President Reagan has gone public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by our national security activities are not communists. They're not Russians, they're not KGB. In the field we used to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional football players - we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you're at a banquet together drinking toasts and talking.

The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world. That's the common denominator that you come up with. People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Metumba mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn't give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of capitalism.

Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If you want to get an easy-read of the history of our involvement in Central America, read Walter LaFeber's book, Inevitable Revolutions. [8] We have dominated the area since 1820. We've had a policy of dominion, of excluding other countries, other industrial powers from Europe, from competing with us in the area.

Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how military this has been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for a total of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican Republic 4 times. Haiti, we occupied it for 12 years. We put our troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6 times, Guatemala once, plus a CIA covert action to overthrow the democratic government there once. Honduras, 7 times. And by the way, we put 12,000 troops into the Soviet Union during that same period of time.

In the 1930's there was public and international pressure about our marines in Nicaragua....

The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the puppet, Colonel Armaz in a coup] died violent deaths, and Amnesty International tells us that the governments we've supported in power there since then, have killed 80,000 people. You can read about that one in the book Bitter Fruit, by Schlesinger and Kinzer. [5] Kinzer's a New York Times Journalist... or Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter, his book Endless Enemies [7] - all discuss this....

However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the rich, and not to the people of the countries involved. And while we were doing this, while we were trying, at least saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the CIA was doing its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With the leaders on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.

We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan Metrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.

They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID' written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.

Now how do you teach torture? Dan Metrione: `I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.'

.... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.

And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years - tortured in Brazil for 2 years - she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people....

There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it's people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it's ok because we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!

Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so. And it's a documented fact that the... 14 families there that own 60% of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars - it's called de-capitalization - and putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort Halper, in testifying to a committee of the Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing politically just by investing our money directly in the Miami banks in their names and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be better off.

Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It's a classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981, President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they're called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture and terror in Nicaragua that made the Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army of these people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked to the press - reported in the New York Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today, CIA covert actions going on around the world today.

You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua, the Central American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50 de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms....

The Victor Marquetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to prepublication censorship of books. They challenged 360 items in his 360 page book. He fought it in court, and eventually they deleted some 60 odd items in his book.

The Frank Snep ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to sue a government employee for damages. If s/he writes an unauthorized account of the government - which means the people who are involved in corruption in the government, who see it, who witness it, like Frank Snep did, like I did - if they try to go public they can now be punished in civil court. The government took $90,000 away from Frank Snep, his profits from his book, and they've seized the
profits from my own book....

[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it a felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret agents or to write about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities. Now, what does this mean? In a debate in Congress - this is very controversial - the supporters of this bill made it clear.... If agents Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance's head away with LSD, it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper saying, `watch out for these 2 turkeys, they're federal agents and they blew my loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a felony what they had done because that's national security and none of them were ever punished for those activities.

Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been banging away at this one ever since. Proposing that every government employee, for the rest of his or her life, would have to submit anything they wrote to 6 committees of the government for censorship, for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking out... to keep the American people from knowing what the government is really doing.

Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive Strikes' bill. President Reagan, working through the Secretary of State Shultz... almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide them with the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists can do their terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able to do this in this country as well as overseas. It provides that the secretary of state would put together a list of people that he considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers. And if your name, or your organization, is put on this list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due process of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with impunity.

Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from Hitler's "night in fog" program', where the government had the authority to haul people off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz has said, `Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that would never stand up in a court. And yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat of international terrorism'.

Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'? These things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that's terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples' death is not enough reason to take away the protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.

But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the defense department.

They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under the McLaren act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese people during World War II. They're building 10 more, and army camps, and the... executive memos about these things say it's for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency....

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius Guiffrida, a friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going about the country lobbying and demanding that he be given authority, in the times of national emergency, to declare martial law, and establish a curfew, and gun down people who violate the curfew... in the United States.

And then there's Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement officer in the land, President Reagan's closest friend, going around telling us that the constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press, and due process of the law, and assembly.

What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're determined to take us into a war if we'll permit it... is the Reagan revolution.... So he's getting himself some laws so when he puts in
the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their doors, and kill them if they don't like what he's doing....

The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our freedoms because they have a charming smile and they were nice movie stars one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our freedoms?' It's up to us - you and I can watch this history play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.
 

Oracle

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Dude, your posts are very good. Keep em' coming.
 

ajtr

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Part II



I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our censorship laws....

In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done....

When the world's gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game where everything's owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erased the board and started over has been to have big world wars, and erase countries and bomb cities and bomb banks and then start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now because of all these 52,000 nuclear weapons....

The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the world today....

By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public record. The 50 covert actions - these are secret, but that has been leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I urge you not to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don't do politics will be done'. If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out from the records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do....

Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua....

[When the U.S. doesn't like a government], they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the U.S.'s terms, or the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly textbook-ish. What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to school, where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the state department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it's to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.

To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until we allocated money. We've armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we've sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.

If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this, and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual', that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it won't work, things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.

Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is a technique that they're using to traumatize the society so that it can't function.

I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your government and its agents are doing. They go into villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to watch they castrate the father, they peel the skin off his face, they put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these
things to the children.

This is nobody's propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American witnesses for peace who have gone down there and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and children. These are the activities done by these contras. The contras are the people president Reagan calls `freedom fighters'. He says they're the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the whole world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.

Read Contra Terror by Reed Brodie [1], former assistant Attorney General of New York State. Read The Contras by Dieter Eich. [4] Read With the Contras by Christopher ****ey. [2] This is a main-line journalist, down there on a grant with the Council on Foreign Relations, a slightly to the right of the middle of the road organization. He writes a book that sets a pox on both your houses, and then he accounts about going in on patrol with the contras, and describes their activities. Read Witness for Peace: What We have Seen and Heard. Read the Lawyer's Commission on Human Rights. Read The Violations of War on Both Sides by the Americas Watch. [15] And there are many, many more documentations of details, of names, of the incidents that have happened.

Part of a de-stabilization is propaganda, to dis-credit the targeted government. This one actually began under Jimmy Carter. He authorized the CIA to go in and try to make the Sandinistas look to be evil. So in 1979 [when] they came in to power, immediately we were trying to cast them as totalitarian, evil, threatening Marxists. While they abolished the death sentence, while they released 8,000 national guardsmen that they had in their custody that they could have kept in prison, they said `no. Unless we have evidence of individual crimes, we're not going to hold someone in prison just because they were associated with the former administration.' While they set out to launch a literacy campaign to teach the people to read and write, which is something that the dictator Somoza, and us supporting him, had never bothered to get around to doing. While they set out to build 2,500 clinics to give the country something resembling a public health policy, and access to medicines, we began to label them as totalitarian dictators, and to attack them in the press, and to work with this newspaper `La Prensa', which - it's finally come out and been admitted, in Washington - the U.S. government is funding: a propaganda arm.

[Reagan and the State dept. have] been claiming they're building a war machine that threatens the stability of Central America. Now the truth is, this small, poor country has been attacked by the world's richest country under conditions of war, for the last 5 years. Us and our army - the death they have sustained, the action they have suffered - it makes it a larger war proportionally than the Vietnam war was to the U.S. In addition to the contra activities, we've had U.S. Navy ships supervising the mining of harbors, we've sent planes in and bombed the capital, we've had U.S. military planes flying wing-tip to wing-tip over the country, photographing it, aerial reconnaissance. They don't have any missiles or jets they can send up to chase us off. We are at war with them. They have not retaliated yet with any kind of war action against us, but we do not give them credit with having the right to defend themselves. So we claim that the force they built up, which is obviously purely defensive, is an aggressive force that threatens the stability of all of Central America.

We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity, there is no evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.

We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were fraudulent, they were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system. Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were models of democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then the truth came out about that one. And we learned that the CIA had spent 2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of candidates - Duarte - would win. They did everything, we're told, by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes....

I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse Helmes] calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn't like, he doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and embarrass the U.S.

We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to finance their revolution. This doesn't make sense. We're at war with them, we're dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union, flying things back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket ships watching everything that flies out of that country, and into it. How are they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans, on these bases in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training camps in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several times a week.

Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK. Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them - we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it's the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state department started waving this red herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain't true, the contras are smuggling drugs'.

We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism' we call it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television and says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training terrorists'. We blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today, and there is misery, because the world's richest nation has set out to create conditions of misery, and obviously we're bound to have some effect. The misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it's the result of our destabilization program. And despite that, and despite some grumbling in the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got a much higher percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who's supposed to be so popular in this country. And all observers are saying that people are still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.

Now it gets tricky. We're saying that the justification for more aid, possibly for an invasion of the country - and mind you, president Reagan has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense Weinberger began to say that it's inevitable - we claim that the justification is that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million dollars in arms in military to make it its big client state, the Soviet bastion in this hemisphere. And that's true. They do have a lot of arms in there now. But the question is, how did they get invited in? You have to ask yourself, what's the purpose of this destabilization program? For this I direct you back to the Newsweek article in Sept. 1981, where they announce the fact that the CIA was beginning to put together this force of Somoza's ex-guard. Newsweek described it as `the only truly evil, totally unacceptable factor in
the Nicaraguan equation'. They noted that neither the white house nor the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance of winning. So then they asked, rhetorically, `what's the point?' and they concluded that the point is that by attacking the country, you can force the Sandinistas into a more radical position, from which you have more ammunition to attack them.

And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet aid to defend themselves from the attack from the world's richest country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say, `see? they have all the Soviet aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's the game plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they have been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped by the will of the American people so far, but they're working harder than ever to engineer their war there.

Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice. Like the Church committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had run several hundred a year, and we'd been in the business of running covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions.

CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are not so bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a politician some money so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in other countries' affairs, raising the question of whether or not we are going to have a
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?

But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony by CIA directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case officers, documents gotten out of the government under the freedom of information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and read from these things, classic CIA operations that we know about, some of them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay - the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracies. Read the book Covert Action: 35 years of Deception by the journalist Godswood. [6]

Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was being grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador Allende had been killed. And he said, `The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves'.

We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're doing against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean war, where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in Vietnam, very much like the one that we're running in Nicaragua today, that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, The Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14] Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death
squads.

In El Salvador specifically, under the `Alliance for Progress' in the early 1960's, the CIA helped put together the treasury police. These are the people that haul people out at night today, and run trucks over their heads. These are the people that the Catholic church tells us, have killed something over 50,000 civilians in the last 5 years. And we have testimony before our Congress that as late as 1982, leaders of the treasury police were still on the CIA payroll.

Then you have the `Public Safety Program.' I have to take just a minute on this one because it's a very important principle involved that we must understand, if we're to understand ourselves and the world that we live in. In this one, the CIA was working with policeforces throughout Latin America for about 26 years, teaching them how to wrap up subversive networks by capturing someone and interrogating them, torturing them, and then getting names and arresting the others and going from there. Now, this was such a brutal and such a bloody operation, that Amnesty International began to complain and publish reports. Then there were United Nations hearings. Then eventually our Congress was forced to yield to international pressure and investigate it, and they found the horror that was being done, and by law they forced it to stop. You can read these reports -- the Amnesty International findings, and our own Congressional hearings.

These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according to CIA's estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the Angolan operation that I was sitting on in Washington, managing the task force. They add up. We'll never know how many people have been killed in them. Obviously a lot. Obviously at least a million. 800,000 in Indonesia alone. Undoubtedly the minimum figure has to be 3 million. Then you add in a million people killed in Korea, 2 million people killed in the Vietnam war, and you're obviously getting into gross millions of people...
We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families out at night and castrate the father with the children watching, because they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute teams right back into our country and do the same thing to us - they're not scared of us. For slightly different reasons, but also obvious reasons, we don't do these things in England, or France, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan. What comes out at you immediately is that these 1 to 3 million direct victims, the dead, and in these other wars, they're people of the third world. They're people of the Metumba mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now the hills of northern Nicaragua - 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian army advisors in Nicaragua. We are not killing Cuban advisors. We're not killing very many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in Nicaragua are peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA's chosen battlefield. Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far, far more Catholics than anything else.

Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua, they do not come back to the U.S. and click their heels and suddenly become responsible citizens. They see themselves - they have been functioning above the laws, of God, and the laws of man - they've come back to this country, and they've continued their operations as far as they can get by with them. And we have abundant documentation of that as well. The MH-Chaos program, exposed in the late 60's and shut down, re-activated by President Reagan to a degree - we don't have the details yet - in which they were spending a billion dollars to manipulate U.S. student, and labor organizations. The MK-ultra program. For 20 years, working through over 200 medical schools and mental hospitals, including Harvard medical school, Georgetown, some of the biggest places we've got, to experiment on American citizens with disease, and drugs.

They dragged a barge through San Francisco bay, leaking a virus, to measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the community if all the kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the 2 or 3 with weak constitutions that might die in the process. They put light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo - make people have double vision, so you couldn't see straight - and hid
cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when the trains are zipping past - if everybody has vertigo and they can't see straight and they're bumping into each other.

Colonel White - oh yes, and I can't not mention the disease experimentations - the use of deadly diseases. We launched - when we were destabilizing Cuba for 7 years - we launched the swine fever epidemic, in the hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs - a virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.

I'm not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence, that there is any truth or indication to the rumor that the CIA and its experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do have it documented that the CIA has been experimenting on people, with viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running around in society. And it has to make you wonder, and it has to make you worry.

Colonel White wrote from retirement - he was the man who was in charge of this macabre program - he wrote, `I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the blessings of the all highest?' Now that program, the MK-ultra program, was eventually exposed by the press in 1972, investigated by the Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You can dig up the Congressional record and read it for yourself.

There's one book called `In Search of the Manchurian Candidate'. It's written by John Marks, based on 14,000 documents gotten out of the government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for yourselves. The thing was shut down but not one CIA case officer who was involved was in any way punished. Not one case officer involved in these experimentations on the American public, lost a single paycheck for what they had done.

The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business. The latest flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a half ago. Lesley Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having
been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb.

The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its operations on campuses and build files on students.

And then we have evidence - now, which has been hard to collect in the past but we knew it was happening - of CIA agents participating, trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.' A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate our elections.

All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.

In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet take-over, we say. Another big operation in which we said the same thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing - Cubans and Soviets.

Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however - please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book you'll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!

If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt...

I don't know what the solution is when a society gets into censorship, government censorship, but that's what we're in now. Do the rules change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our censorship laws....

So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying to us, running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up for our next war, the Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it, President Reagan has a fixation on Nicaragua. He came into office saying that we shouldn't be afraid of war, saying we have to face and erase the scars of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, `We will do whatever is necessary to defeat the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRoque, at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, says this is the most elaborately prepared invasion that the U.S. has ever done. At least that he's witnessed in his 40 years of association with our military.

We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big Pine I, Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenada, Big Pine III. We have troops right now in Honduras preparing. We've built 12 bases, including 8 airstrips. Obviously we don't need 8 airstrips in Honduras for any purpose, except to support the invasion of Nicaragua. We've built radar stations around, to survey and watch. Some of these ventures have been huge ones. Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000 troops, rehearsing
the invasion of Nicaragua.

And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of these evil Communist dictators in Managua, just two days drive from Harlington, Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way). I saw an ad on TV just two days ago in which they said that it was just two hours from Managua to Texas. All of this getting us ready for the invasion of Nicaragua, for our next war.

Most of the people - 75% of the people - are polled as being against this action. However, President Eisenhower said, `The people of the world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them'. But to date, the leaders never have, they've always been able to outwit the people, us, and get us into the wars when they've chosen to do so.

People ask, how is this possible? I get this all the time.... Americans are decent people. They are nice people. And they're insulated in the worlds that they live in, and they don't understand
and we don't read our history. History is the history of war. Of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young men off to fight.

In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record. We have over 200 incidents in which we put our troops into other countries to force them to our will. Now we're being prepared to hate the Sandinistas. The leaders are doing exactly what they have done time and again throughout history. In the past we were taught to hate and fight the Seminole Indians, after the leaders decided to annex Florida. To hate and fight the Cherokee Indians after they found gold
in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.

In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got people worked up, they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people angry enough that we could go in and do....

We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the people resisted. But once again, we haven't read our history. Kate Richards-O'Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the U.S. are nothing but brutesalles, producing sons to be put in the army, to be made into fertilizer'. She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war talk.

The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic mistake.... 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in the Pacific basin.

You look around this society today to see if there's any evidence of our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face....

'Join the Army. Be all that you can be'. Now if there was truth in advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their intestines wrapped around their necks because that's what war is really all about.

If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of whom died violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting itself.

Then you have President Reagan.... He talks about the glory of war, but you have to ask yourself, where was he when wars were being fought that he was young enough to fight in them? World War II, and the Korean war. Where he was was in Hollywood, making films, where the blood was catsup, and you could wash it off and go out to dinner afterwards....

Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight in a war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running sloppy, illegal, un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you'll forgive my egotism, at that time I was running professional breaking and entering operations....

What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft deferment for a physical disability, and taught physical education in a girls' school in Switzerland during the war.

Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that `you can always call cruise missiles back'.... Now, you can call back a B-52, and you can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile is different.... When it lands, it goes boom!. And I would prefer that the man with the finger on the button could understand the difference. This is the man that calls the MX a peace-maker. This is the man who's gone on television and told us that nuclear war could be winnable. This is the man who's gone on television and proposed that we might want to drop demonstration [atom] bombs in Europe to show people that we're serious people. This is the man who likens the Contras to the moral equivalents of our own founding fathers. This is the man who says South Africa is making progress on racial equality. This is the man who says that the Sandinistas are hunting down and hounding and persecuting Jews in Nicaragua. And the Jewish leaders go on TV the next day in this country and say there are 5 Jewish families in Nicaragua, and they're not having any problems at all. This is the man who says that they're financing their revolution by smuggling drugs into the U.S. And the DEA says, `It ain't true, it's president Reagan's Contras that are doing it'....

[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said `If there has to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with'. Now you have to think about this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing a bloodbath of our own youth. There was an outcry of the press, so 3 days later he said it again to make sure no one had misunderstood him.

Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read The Book of Quotes [12]. Read On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency [3] by Ronnie Dugger. It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter that President Reagan has a fixation on Armageddon. The Village Voice 18 months ago published an article citing the 11 times that President Reagan publicly has talked about the fact that we are all living out Armageddon today....

[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man that preaches that we should get on our knees and beg for God to send the rapture down. Hell's fires on earth so the chosen can go up on high and all the other people can burn in hell's fires on earth. President Reagan sees himself as playing the role of the greatest leader of all times forever. Leading us into Armageddon. As he goes out at the end of his long life, we'll all go out with him....

Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we destabilizing a third of the countries in the world today when there's so much instability and misery already?

What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The easiest... buttons to punch are the buttons of macho, aggression, paranoia, hate, anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and that's just 2 hours from San Diego, CA. This gets people excited, they don't think. It's the pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor. When you get people worked up to hate, they'll let you spend huge amounts of money on arms.

Read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. [11] Read The Permanent War Complex by Seymour Melman. [10] CIA covert actions have the function of keeping the world hostile and unstable....

We can't take care of the poor, we can't take care of the old, but we can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize Nicaragua....

Why arms instead of schools? .... They can make gigantic profits off the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and the paranoia, and the secrecy. And that's why they're committed to building more and more and more weapons, is because they're committed to making a profit. And that's what the propaganda, and that's what the hysteria is all about. Now people say, `What can I do?'....

The youth did rise up and stop the Vietnam war....

We have to join hands with the people in England, and France, and Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and China, and India - the countries that have the bomb, and the others that are trying to get it. And give our leaders no choice. They have to find some other way to do business other than to motivate us through hate and paranoia and anger and killing, or we'll find other leaders to run the country.

Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I've heard her say, very effectively, `Tell people to get out and get to work on the problem.... You'll feel better'....

'What can I do?'.... If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see for yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for yourself. Go to Pantex on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there. The place where we make 10 nose-cones a day, 70 a week, year in and year out. He [Admiral LaRock] said, `I'd tell them, if they feel comfortable lying down in front of trucks with bombs on them, to lie down in front of trucks with bombs on them.' But he said, `I'd tell them that they can't wait. They've got to start tomorrow, today, and do it, what they can, every day of their lives'.
 

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John Stockwell - CIA's War on Humans

 
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During the 1980s the Reagan administration sponsored an anti-Sandinista guerilla movement known as the Contras (a proxy paramilitary based in Honduras and Costa Rica, largely consisting of northern highlanders known as the Milpas and led by former Somoza regime soldiers) against the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The resulting war killed over 50,000 people, mostly civilians.

Under the Carter Administration, the Sandinistas had received tacit U.S. support in their coup against the previously U.S.-backed right-wing military dictatorship of the Somoza dynasty, which had ruled the country for several decades. An interim coalition, Junta, took power in 1979 and in 1984 leader of the FSLN party, Daniel Ortega became Nicaragua's first elected President who ruled under the name of the Sandinista revolution. As the years progressed, the Ortega government was accused of becoming more authoritarian, with the more moderate factions of the coalition being expelled from government. Allegations of suppression of political dissent increased, as did accusations of state-sponsored human rights abuses. However, these accusations of human rights abuses were not accurate, according to Human Rights Watch: "Almost invariably, U.S. pronouncements on human rights exaggerated and distorted the real human rights violations of the Sandinista regime, and exculpated those of the U.S.-supported insurgents, known as the contras." As well, Ortega was a supporter of Fidel Castro's Cuba and many members of the Sandinista government sought to model Nicaragua along similar lines. Cuba sent doctors and technicians to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union shipped some military equipment, including some Hind helicopters.

The leftist nature of the Sandinista government and its support for Cuba distressed many in the Reagan administration, who viewed the country as a key Cold War battleground, in danger of becoming a Communist proxy state. As a result, covert support began to flow to the anti-Sandinista Contra rebels, whom Reagan had described as "the moral equal of our founding fathers."

Under the direction of the CIA, the largest Contra army, the FDN, attacked collective farms and other civilian targets, as well as murdered, tortured and mutilated civilians and committed other war crimes, as documented by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The Contras were also accused of being involved in illicit drug-trafficking. In 1986 a CIA-written training manual detailing methods of terrorism and assassination was discovered to have been issued to the Contras.

The proxy army followed Washington orders to attack "soft targets" such as farm cooperatives and health clinics instead of "trying to duke it out with the Sandinistas directly," and to "attack a lot of schools, health centers, and those sort of things" so that "the Nicaraguan government cannot provide social services for the peasants, cannot develop its project" as explained by General John Galvin, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, who added that with these tactics, aimed at civilians lacking means of defense against armed terrorist bands, prospects for the contras should improve.

When asked in the US Congress in April 1985 to define US policy in Nicaragua, former CIA Director Stansfield Turner responded state-sponsored terrorism.

The World Court would find that this constituted state sponsorship of terrorism and an attempt to overthrow an elected government. Nicaragua decided to take their case to the World Court in Nicaragua v. United States. In an unprecedented decision in the history of world justice, the World Court sanctioned the U.S. for "unlawful use of force" for "sponsoring paramilitary activity in and against Nicaragua", ordering the U.S. government to pay billions of U.S. dollars in compensation. The World Court ordered Reagan to terminate his campaign, but the Reagan White House dismissed the ruling and then vetoed two Security Council resolutions affirming the Court ruling and calling on all nations to observe international law. The FSLN then took its case to the General Assembly and the General Assembly ruled in its favor, with only the US, Israel, and El Salvador dissenting. Father Miguel D'Escoto, Foreign Minister under the Sandinista government, supposes that the U.S. owes his country between 20 and 30 billion U.S. dollars.
 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 2)

Many, who supported the Reaganite view, claim the Sandinista regime was neither democratic nor harmless, but rather a Communist dictatorship in the making, supported both militarily and economically by Cuba and the Soviet Union. The administration refused to participate in the World Court proceeding.

Due to the pressures of the covert Contra war, the Sandinista President of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, eventually held the country's second elections, which he and his party lost, thus ending Nicaragua's brief period of socialist rule. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, a former Junta member who led a 19-party "anti-Sandinista" alliance was elected in his place.

Through its desire to combat leftist governments and Marxist insurgencies in the region the Reagan administration was accused of sponsoring right-wing military dictatorships throughout Latin America. The CIA and U.S.-based School of the Americas, similarly were accused by some as having trained Honduran and other Latin American military officers and future death squad paramilitary members in torture and assassination techniques to fight insurgencies.

Reagan increased funding to many other Central and South American states throughout his two terms. Financial aid to Colombia's military and right-wing paramilitary groups skyrocketed in the eighties, even as Colombia compiled one of the worst human rights records in the hemisphere. A similar situation existed for El Salvador. Congress attempted to put constraints on aid to the government of El Salvador and make it contingent on human rights progress. Even as tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered by government and governmentally-allied forces in the early eighties Reagan stated that El Salvador was making "progress." Elliott Abrams, an administration official indicted in the Iran Contra Affair, also denied the existence of human rights violations and massacres in El Salvador like the El Mozote massacre. When congress tried to renew the human-rights stipulation to aid for El Salvador Reagan vetoed the bill.

This pattern of funding right-wing military and paramilitary groups would continue in Guatemala. In 1999 a report on the Guatemalan Civil War from the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification stated that the American training of the officer corps in counter-insurgency techniques was a key factor in the genocideEntire Mayan villages were attacked and burned and their inhabitants were slaughtered in an effort to deny the guerillas protection. According to the commission, between 1981 and 1983 the Guatemalan government—financed and trained by the US—destroyed four hundred Mayan villages and butchered 200,000 peasants.

In Panama this funding was more covert. Manuel Noriega, the dictator of Panama, was on the payroll of the CIA as of 1967. By 1971 his involvement in the drug trade was well known by the DEA but he was an important asset of the CIA and so was well-protected. CIA Director George H. W. Bush arranged to give Noriega a raise in 1976 to a six-figure salary. The Carter administration dropped the future dictator from its payroll but he was reinstated by the Reagan administration and his salary peaked in 1985 at $200,000. Noriega allowed CIA listening stations in his country, provided funding for the Contras, and protected covert U.S. and U.S.-funded air shipments of supplies to the Contras.

Reagan offered controversial support to the rightist El Salvador government throughout his term; he feared a takeover by the FMLN during the El Salvador Civil War which had begun in the late 1970s. The war left 75,000 people dead, 8,000 missing and one million homeless; some one million Salvadorans, fleeing the war and government backed right-wing death squads, immigrated to the United States. He backed attempts at introducing democratic elections with mixed success

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 3)

The Sandinista government, its supporters, and outside groups such as Americas Watch frequently accused the Contras of indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The Contras and their backers, especially those in the Reagan administration, dismissed these accusations as a propaganda campaign and accused the Sandinistas of the same crimes against humanity.

The Catholic Institute for International Relations (CIIR, now known as "Progressio"), a human rights organization which identifies itself with liberation theology, summarized Contra operating procedures in their 1987 human rights report: "The record of the contras in the field, as opposed to their official professions of democratic faith, is one of consistent and bloody abuse of human rights, of murder, torture, mutilation, rape, arson, destruction and kidnapping."

An influential report on Contra atrocities was issued by lawyer Reed Brody shortly before the 1985 U.S. Congressional vote on Contra aid. The report was soon published as a book. It charged that the Contras attacked purely civilian targets and that their tactics included murder, rape, beatings, kidnapping and disruption of harvests. Brody's report had been requested by the Sandinista government's Washington law firm Reichler & Applebaum and the Sandinista government had provided facilities in Nicaragua for him. In a letter to The New York Times, Brody asserted that this in no way affected his report, and added that the newspaper had confirmed the veracity of four randomly chosen incidents.

A Sandinista militiaman interviewed by The Guardian stated that Contra rebels committed these atrocities against Sandinista prisoners after a battle at a Sandinista rural outpost: Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off. They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit.

Americas Watch - which subsequently became part of Human Rights Watch - stated that "the Contras systematically engage in violent abuses... so prevalent that these may be said to be their principal means of waging war." It accused the Contras of: * targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination. * kidnapping civilians. * torturing civilians. * executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat. * raping women. * indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian houses. * seizing civilian property. * burning civilian houses in captured towns.

US news media published several articles accusing Americas Watch and other bodies of ideological bias and unreliable reporting. It alleged that Americas Watch gave too much credence to alleged Contra abuses and systematically tried to discredit Nicaraguan human rights groups such as the Permanent Commission on Human Rights, which blamed the major human rights abuses on the Sandinistas.

In 1985, the Wall Street Journal reported: Three weeks ago, Americas Watch issued a report on human rights abuses in Nicaragua. One member of the Permanent Commission for Human Rights commented on the Americas Watch report and its chief investigator Juan Mendez: "The Sandinistas are laying the groundwork for a totalitarian society here and yet all Mendez wanted to hear about were abuses by the contras. How can we get people in the U.S. to see what's happening here when so many of the groups who come down are pro-Sandinista?"

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 4)

The Chilean coup d'état of 1973 was a watershed event in the history of Chile and the Soviet-American Cold War. On 11 September 1973, the government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military in a coup détat.

The US-backed military junta took control of the government, composed of the heads of the Air Force, Navy, Carabineros (police force) and the Army led by General Augusto Pinochet. General Pinochet assumed power and ended Allende's democratically elected Popular Unity government.

During the air raids and ground attacks that preceded the coup, Allende gave his last speech where he vowed to stay in the presidential palace. The official cause of death was suicide. After the coup Pinochet established a military dictatorship that ruled Chile until 1990 and that was marked by severe human rights violations.

In order to provide covert funds for the Kuomintang (KMT) forces loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, who were fighting the Chinese communists under Mao, the CIA helped the KMT smuggle opium from China and Burma to Bangkok, Thailand by providing airplanes owned by one of their front businesses, Air America.

The Central Intelligence Agency was involved in smuggling opium produced in Western Vietnam and Eastern Cambodia to heroin producers in the United States. Agents of the U.S. Government used drug production and trafficking operations to fund covert military activities in Vietnam. Large amounts of this heroin were sold to U.S. soldiers in Vietnam.

The CIA worked in concert with the Corsican crime families, and Laotian drug lords, who assisted the CIA in their fight against communists. One of the CIA's primary contacts was Hmong leader Vang Pao, who was attempting to gain complete control of the local opium trade, and was using the income from this to fight against Laotian and Vietnamese communist forces.


 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 5)
The French Connection was a scheme through which heroin was smuggled from Turkey to France and then to the United States, culminating in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it provided the vast majority of the illicit heroin used in the United States. It was headed by the Corsican criminals François Spirito and Antoine Guérini, and also involved Auguste Ricord, Paul Mondoloni and Salvatore Greco, the French Connection dealt with Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Most of its starting capital came from Ricord's assets stolen during World War II when he worked for Henri Lafont, an agent of the Carlingue (French Gestapo).

The Golden Triangle is one of Asia's two main illicit opium-producing areas. It is an area of around 950,000 km2 that overlaps the mountains of four countries of Southeast Asia: Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Along with Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent and Pakistan, it has been one of the most extensive opium-producing areas of Asia and of the world since the 1920s. Most of the world's heroin came from the Golden Triangle until the early 21st century when Afghanistan became the world's largest producer.

The Golden Triangle also designates the confluence of the Ruak River and the Mekong river, since the term has been appropriated by the Thai tourist industry to describe the nearby junction of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.

The Golden Crescent is the name given to one of Asia's two principal areas of illicit opium production, located at the crossroads of Central, South, and Western Asia. This space overlaps three nations, Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan, whose mountainous peripheries define the crescent, though only Afghanistan and Pakistan produce opium, with Iran being a consumer and trans-shipment route for the smuggled opiates.

The Medellín Cartel was an organized network of "Drug Suppliers and Smugglers" originating in the city of Medellín, Colombia. The Cartel operated in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Central America, the United States, as well as Canada and even Europe throughout the 1970s and 1980s. It was founded and run by Pablo Escobar together with the Ochoa Vázquez brothers Jorge Luis, Juan David, and Fabio.

Most Colombians targeted, as well as those named in such indictments, lived and stayed in Colombia, or fled before indictments were unsealed. However, by 1993 most, if not all, Cartel fugitives had been imprisoned or hunted and gunned down by the Colombian National Police trained and assisted by U.S. Delta Force units and the CIA.

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 6)

Manuel Antonio Noriega Moreno (born February 11, 1934) is a former general and the military dictator of Panama from 1983 to 1989.

The 1989 invasion of Panama by the United States removed him from power; he was captured, detained as a prisoner of war, and flown to the U.S. Noriega was tried on eight counts of drug trafficking, racketeering, and money laundering in April 1992. Noriega's US prison sentence ended in September 2007; pending the outcome of extradition requests by both Panama and France, he remains in prison as of 2010.

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (April 13, 1932 - September 21, 1976) was a Chilean economist, political figure, diplomat and, later, US-based activist. He was assassinated in Washington, DC by Chilean DINA agents.

The CIA, DEA, State Department, and several other U.S. government agencies have been implicated in various drug trafficking enterprises, which were used to fund illegal covert activities in several nations.

A lawsuit filed in 1986 by two journalists represented by the Christic Institute showed that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other parties were engaged in criminal acts, including financing the purchase of arms with the proceeds of cocaine sales.

Senator John Kerry's 1988 U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations report on Contra drug links concludes that members of the U.S. State Department "who provided support for the Contras are involved in drug trafficking...and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly receive financial and material assistance from drug traffickers." The report further states that "the Contra drug links include...payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."

In 1996, journalist Gary Webb published reports in the San Jose Mercury News, and later in his book Dark Alliance, detailing how Contras, with the assistance of the U.S. government have distributed crack cocaine into Los Angeles to fund weapons purchases. Webb's premise regarding the US Government connection was widely debunked with the Mercury News editor admitting that the series was " poorly written and edited and misleadingly packaged."

In 1998, CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz published a two-volume report that refutes nearly all of Webb's claims. A report later that same year by the Justice Department Inspector General also arrives at similar conclusions.

During World War II, the United States Navy was worried about strikes and labor disputes in eastern shipping ports interfering with their wartime logistics. So they released the mobster Lucky Luciano from prison, and collaborated with him to help the mafia take control of the ports and murder and terrorize labor union members to prevent labor unrest and ensure smooth shipping of supplies to Europe.

In order to prevent a Communist party from being elected in Italy following World War II, the CIA worked closely with the Sicilian Mafia, protecting them and assisting in their worldwide heroin smuggling operations, in exchange for the mafia's assistance with assassinating, torturing, and beating leftist political organizers.

In order to provide covert funds for the Kuomintang (KMT) forces loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, who were fighting the Chinese communists under Mao, the CIA helped the KMT smuggle opium from China and Burma to Bangkok, Thailand by providing airplanes owned by one of their front businesses, Air America.

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 7)

Military-industrial complex (MIC) is a concept commonly used to refer to policy relationships between governments, national armed forces, and the industrial sector that supports them. These relationships include political approval for research, development, production, use, and support for military training, weapons, equipment, and facilities within the national defense and security policy. It is a type of iron triangle.

The term is most often played in reference to the military of the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address speech of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, though the term is applicable to any country with a similarly developed infrastructure.

It is sometimes used more broadly to include the entire network of contracts and flows of money and resources among individuals as well as institutions of the defense contractors, The Pentagon, and the Congress and executive branch. This sector is intrinsically prone to principal-agent problem, moral hazard, and rent seeking. Cases of political corruption have also surfaced with regularity.

A similar thesis was originally expressed by Daniel Guérin, in his 1936 book Fascism and Big Business, about the fascist government support to heavy industry. It can be defined as, an informal and changing coalition of groups with vested psychological, moral, and material interests in the continuous development and maintenance of high levels of weaponry, in preservation of colonial markets and in military-strategic conceptions of internal affairs.

Red Dawn is a 1984 American war film directed by John Milius and co-written by Milius and Kevin Reynolds. The film is set in an alternate 1980s in which the United States is invaded by the Soviet Union and its Central American allies. However, the onset of World War III is merely in the background and not fully elaborated. The story follows a group of American high school students who resist the occupation with guerrilla warfare, calling themselves Wolverines, after their high school mascot.

Cast * Patrick Swayze as Jed Eckert * Charlie Sheen as Matt Eckert * C. Thomas Howell as Robert Morris * Lea Thompson as Erica Mason * Jennifer Grey as Toni Mason * Brad Savage as Danny * Powers Boothe as Lt. Col. Andrew Tanner * Harry Dean Stanton as Tom Eckert * Darren Dalton as Daryl Bates * Pepe Serna as Mr. Mondragon * Doug Toby as Arturo "Aardvark" Mondragon * Ben Johnson as George Mason * Lane Smith as Mayor Bates * William Smith as Col. Strelnikov (The Hunter) * Vladek Sheybal as Gen. Bratchenko * Ron O'Neal as Col. Ernesto Bella * Roy Jenson as Mr. Morris * Greg Miller as Albert Franklin



 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 8)

The Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit (also known as the Stealth Bomber) is an American heavy bomber with "low observable" stealth technology designed to penetrate dense anti-aircraft defenses and deploy both conventional and nuclear weapons. Because of its considerable capital and operations costs, the project was controversial in Congress and among Pentagon brass. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Congress slashed initial plans to purchase 132 bombers to just 21.

The cost of each aircraft averaged US$737 million in 1997 dollars. Total procurement costs averaged US$929 million per aircraft, which includes spare parts, equipment, retrofitting, and software support. The total program cost, which includes development, engineering and testing, averaged US$2.1 billion per aircraft (in 1997 dollars).

Twenty B-2s are operated by the United States Air Force. Though originally designed in the 1980s for Cold War operations scenarios, B-2s were first used in combat to drop bombs on Serbia during the Kosovo War in 1999, and saw continued use during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One aircraft was lost when it crashed on takeoff in 2008.

The bomber has a crew of two and can drop up to 80 x 500 lb (230 kg)-class JDAM GPS-guided bombs, or 16 x 2,400 lb (1,100 kg) B83 nuclear bombs in a single pass through extremely dense anti-aircraft defenses. The B-2 is the only aircraft that can carry large air to surface standoff weapons in a stealth configuration. The program has been the subject of espionage and counter-espionage activity and the B-2 has provided prominent public spectacles at air shows since the 1990s.

Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996) was an American astronomer, astrophysicist, author, cosmologist, and highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics and other natural sciences. During his lifetime, he published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he advocated skeptical inquiry and the scientific method. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI).

Sagan became world-famous for his popular science books and for the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which he narrated and co-wrote. A book to accompany the program was also published. Sagan also wrote the novel, Contact, the basis for the 1997 film of the same name.

Helen Caldicott (born 1938) is an Australian physician, author, and anti-nuclear advocate who has founded several associations dedicated to opposing the use of depleted uranium munitions, nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation, war and military action in general. She hosts a weekly radio program, If You Love This Planet.

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 10)

In American political jargon, an October surprise is a news event with the potential to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the U.S. presidency. The reference to the month of October is because the Tuesday after the first Monday in November is the date for national elections (as well as many state and local elections), and therefore events that take place in late October have greater potential to influence the decisions of prospective voters.

The term came into use shortly after the 1972 presidential election between Republican incumbent Richard Nixon and Democrat George McGovern, when the United States was in the fourth year of negotiations to end the very long and domestically divisive Vietnam War. Twelve days before the election day of November 7, on October 26, 1972, the United States' chief negotiator, the presidential National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, appeared at a press conference held at the White House and announced, "We believe that peace is at hand." Nixon, despite having vowed to end the unpopular war during his presidential election campaign four years earlier, had failed to either cease hostilities or gradually bring about an end to the war. Nixon was nevertheless already widely considered to be assured of an easy reelection victory against McGovern, but Kissinger's "peace is at hand" declaration may have increased Nixon's already high standing with the electorate. In the event, Nixon outpolled McGovern in every state except Massachusetts and achieved a 20 point lead in the nationwide popular vote. The fighting ended in 1973, but the last soldiers didn't leave Vietnam until 1975.

Since that election, the term "October surprise" has been used preemptively during campaign season by partisans of one side to discredit late-campaign news by the other side.

The phrase "October Surprise conspiracy" refers to an alleged plot to influence the outcome of the 1980 United States presidential election between incumbent Jimmy Carter (DGA) and opponent Ronald Reagan (RCA).

One of the leading, national issues during that year was the release of 52 Americans being held hostage in Iran since November 4, 1979. Reagan won the election. On the day of his inauguration—in fact, twenty minutes after he concluded his inaugural address—the Islamic Republic of Iran announced the release of the hostages. The timing gave rise to an allegation that representatives of Reagan's presidential campaign had conspired with Iran to delay the release until after the election in order to thwart President Carter from pulling off an "October surprise."

According to the allegation, the Reagan Administration rewarded Iran for its participation in the plot by supplying Iran with weapons via Israel and by unblocking Iranian government monetary assets in US banks.

After twelve years of mixed media attention, both houses of the US Congress held separate inquiries and concluded that the allegations lacked supporting documentation.

Nevertheless, several individuals - most notably former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, former Naval intelligence officer and National Security Council member, Gary Sick; and former Reagan/Bush campaign and White House staffer, Barbara Honegger—have stood by the allegation.

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 11)

The United States public debt is the sum of all securities issued by the United States Treasury and is also referred to as the national debt. State and Local Government Series securities are issued by state and local governments and are not part of the United States government debt.

The national debt is presented by the United States Treasury as "Debt Held by the Public" which includes all debt instruments issued by the United States Treasury that are held by institutions outside the United States Government itself (specifically excluding intra-governmental obligations such as the Social Security Trust fund), and then the "Gross Debt" which is the sum of all securities issued by the United States Treasury including the intra-government obligations.

At the end of first quarter of 2010, the gross debt was 87.3% of GDP (a measure of the size of the economy), composed of debt held by the public (56.6%) and of intra-governmental debt (44.4%). Within the remainder of this article the phrase "Public Debt" is employed as a shorthand for "Debt Held by the Public".

The annual government deficit or surplus refers to the cash difference between government receipts and spending ignoring intra-governmental transfers. The gross debt increases or decreases as a result of this unified budget deficit or surplus. However, there is certain spending (supplemental appropriations) that add to the gross debt but are excluded from the deficit. The total debt has increased over $500 billion each year since FY 2003, with increases of $1 trillion in FY2008 and $1.9 trillion in FY2009.

The US debt in the hands of foreign governments was 25% of the total in 2007, virtually double the 1988 figure of 13%. Despite the declining willingness of foreign investors to continue investing in US dollar denominated instruments as the US dollar fell in 2007, the U.S. Treasury statistics indicate that, at the end of 2006, non-US citizens and institutions held 44% of federal debt held by the public. About 66% of that 44% was held by the central banks of other countries, in particular the central banks of Japan and China. In May 2009, the US owed China $772 billion.

In total, lenders from Japan and China held 44% of the foreign-owned debt. This exposure to potential financial or political risk should foreign banks stop buying Treasury securities or start selling them heavily was addressed in a recent report issued by the Bank of International Settlements which stated, "'Foreign investors in U.S. dollar assets have seen big losses measured in dollars, and still bigger ones measured in their own currency. While unlikely, indeed highly improbable for public sector investors, a sudden rush for the exits cannot be ruled out completely."

On May 20, 2007, Kuwait discontinued pegging its currency exclusively to the dollar, preferring to use the dollar in a basket of currencies. Syria made a similar announcement on June 4, 2007. In September 2009 China, India and Russia said they were interested in buying IMF gold to diversify their dollar-denominated securities.


 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 12)

The civil war in Afghanistan (1978-present), also known as the Afghan Civil War and several other names, is a civil war in Afghanistan. The civil war started when an insurgency broke out against the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which had taken power in the Saur Revolution on 27 April 1978. This event led indirectly to the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

The new government was met with hostility, which led to the Soviet war in Afghanistan. Afghanistan's anti-government rebels, known as the mujahideen (those engaged in Jihad), found support from a variety of countries including the United States, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other Muslim nations.

The final Soviet troop withdrawal began on May 15, 1988, and ended on February 15, 1989. Three years after the withdraw, the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan collapsed to the mujahideen resistance. Several years later, the Taliban rose to power after the fall of Kabul in 1996.

In 2001, following the 9/11 attacks blamed on Taliban-backed al-Qaeda militants, NATO led by American and British forces invaded Afghanistan in Operation Enduring Freedom, part of the newly-declared War on Terror.

The stated purpose of the invasion was to capture Osama bin Laden, destroy al-Qaeda, and remove the Taliban regime which had provided support and safe harbor to al-Qaeda. The United States' Bush Doctrine stated that, as policy, it would not distinguish between al-Qaeda and nations that give them safe harbor.

The FIM-92 Stinger is a personal portable infrared homing surface-to-air missile(SAM) developed in the United States and entered into service in 1981. Used by the militaries of the U.S. and by 29 other countries, the basic Stinger missile has to-date been responsible for 270 confirmed aircraft kills. It is manufactured by Raytheon Missile Systems and under license by EADS in Germany, with 70,000 missiles produced. It is classified as a Man-Portable Air-Defense System (MANPADS).

 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 13)

The 1997 movie Contact, based on Sagan's novel of the same name and finished after his death, ends with the dedication "For Carl".

After landing, the unmanned Mars Pathfinder spacecraft was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station on July 5, 1997.

Sagan's son, Nick Sagan, wrote several episodes in the Star Trek franchise. In an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise entitled "Terra Prime", a quick shot is shown of the relic rover Sojourner, part of the Mars Pathfinder mission, placed by a historical marker at Carl Sagan Memorial Station on the Martian surface. The marker displays a quote from Sagan: "Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you." Sagan's student Steve Squyres led the team that landed the Spirit Rover and Opportunity Rover successfully on Mars in 2004.

Asteroid 2709 Sagan is also named in his honor.

On November 9, 2001, on what would have been Sagan's 67th birthday, the NASA Ames Research Center dedicated the site for the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Cosmos. "Carl was an incredible visionary, and now his legacy can be preserved and advanced by a 21st century research and education laboratory committed to enhancing our understanding of life in the universe and furthering the cause of space exploration for all time", said NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin. Ann Druyan was at the Center as it opened its doors on October 22, 2006.

Sagan has at least three awards named in his honor: * The Carl Sagan Memorial Award presented jointly since 1997 by the American Astronautical Society (AAS) and the Planetary Society, * The Carl Sagan Medal for Excellence in Public Communication in Planetary Science presented since 1998 by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences (AAS/DPS) for outstanding communication by an active planetary scientist to the general public — Carl Sagan was one of the original organizing committee members of the DPS, and * The Carl Sagan Award for Public Understanding of Science presented by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP) — Sagan himself was the first recipient of the CSSP award in 1993.

In 2006, the Carl Sagan Medal was awarded to astrobiologist and author David Grinspoon, the son of Sagan's friend Lester Grinspoon.

On December 20, 2006, the tenth anniversary of Sagan's death, a blogger, Joel Schlosberg, organized a Carl Sagan "blog-a-thon" to commemorate Sagan's death, and the idea was supported by Nick Sagan. Many members of the blogging community participated.

In 2008, Benn Jordan, also known as "The Flashbulb", released the album Pale Blue Dot: A Tribute to Carl Sagan.

In 2009, clips from Carl Sagan's Cosmos were used as the basis for A Glorious Dawn, the first video produced for the Symphony of Science, an educational music video production by composer John Boswell. Musician Jack White later released this song as a vinyl single under his record label Third Man Records. Additional clips were used in several followup videos which featured Sagan alongside other noted scientists and proponents of rational thinking, such as Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, Brian Greene, Lawrence M. Krauss, Bill Nye, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. So far, Sagan is the only scientist featured in every Symphony of Science video.

Also in 2009, the 75th anniversary of Carl Sagan's birth, the first "Carl Sagan Day" was celebrated on November 7.


 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 14)

George Gordon Battle Liddy (born November 30, 1930) was the chief operative for the White House Plumbers unit that existed during several years of Richard Nixon's Presidency. Along with E. Howard Hunt, Liddy masterminded the first break-in of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in 1972. The subsequent cover-up of the Watergate scandal led to Nixon's resignation in 1974; Liddy served four and a half years in prison for his role in the burglary.

Liddy later joined with Timothy Leary for a series of comedic debates on various college campuses, and also similarly worked with Al Franken in the late 1990s. Liddy is currently a radio talk show host. His radio show as of 2009 is syndicated in 160 markets by Radio America and on both Sirius Satellite Radio and XM Satellite Radio stations in the United States. He has also been a guest panelist for Fox News Channel in addition to appearing in a cameo role or as a guest celebrity talent in several television shows.

Prior to the formation of the OSS (the counterpart of the British Secret Intelligence Service and Special Operations Executive), American intelligence had been conducted on an ad-hoc basis by the various departments of the executive branch, including the State, Treasury, Navy, and War Departments. They had no overall direction, coordination, or control. The US Army and US Navy had separate code-breaking departments (Signals Intelligence Service and OP-20-G). Also, the original code-breaking operation of the State Department, MI-8, run by Herbert Yardley, had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson, deeming it an inappropriate function for the diplomatic arm, because "gentlemen don't read each other's mail." President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. On the suggestion of Canadian/British spymaster William Stephenson, the senior British intelligence officer in the western hemisphere, Roosevelt requested that William J. Donovan draft a plan for an intelligence service. Colonel Donovan was employed to evaluate the global military position in order to offer suggestions concerning American intelligence requirements because the US did not have a central intelligence agency. After submitting his work, "Memorandum of Establishment of Service of Strategic Information," Colonel Donovan was appointed as the "Co-ordinator of Information" in July 1941.

The Office of Strategic Services was established by a Presidential military order issued by President Roosevelt on 13 June 1942, to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies. During the War, the OSS supplied policy makers with facts and estimates, but the OSS never had jurisdiction over all foreign intelligence activities. The FBI was responsible for intelligence work in Latin America, and the Army and Navy guarded their areas of responsibility.

From 1943-1945, the OSS played a major role in training Kuomintang troops in China and Burma, and recruited Kachin, and other indigenous irregular forces for sabotage as well as guides for Allied forces in Burma fighting the Japanese Army. Among other activities, the OSS helped arm, train and supply resistance movements, including Mao Zedong's Red Army in China and the Viet Minh in French Indochina, in areas occupied by the Axis powers during the Second World War. The OSS also recruited and ran one of the war's most important spies, the German diplomat Fritz Kolbe. Other functions of the OSS included the use of propaganda, espionage, subversion, and post-war planning.

The OSS purchased Soviet code and cipher material (or Finnish information on them) from émigré Finnish army officers in late 1944. Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Jr., protested that this violated an agreement President Roosevelt made with the Soviet Union not to interfere with Soviet cipher traffic from the US. Gen. Donovan might have copied the papers before returning them the following January, but there is no record of Arlington Hall's receiving them, and CIA and NSA archives have no surviving copies. This codebook was in fact used as part of the Venona decryption effort, which helped uncover large-scale Soviet espionage in North America.

One of the greatest accomplishments of the OSS during World War II was its penetration of Nazi Germany by OSS operatives. The OSS was responsible for training German and Austrian individuals for missions inside Germany. Some of these agents included exiled communists and Socialist party members, labor activists, anti-Nazi prisoners-of-war, and German and Jewish refugees. At the height of its influence during World War II, the OSS employed almost 24,000 people.


 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 15)

Honduras is an ally of the United States and generally supports U.S. initiatives in international fora. There is close cooperation with Honduras in the areas of counter-narcotics and counter-terrorism. Honduras was among the first countries to sign an International Criminal Court (ICC) Article 98 Agreement with the U.S., and the Honduran port of Puerto Cortés is part of the U.S. Container Security Initiative (CSI).

During the 1980s, Honduras supported U.S. policy opposing a revolutionary Marxist government in Nicaragua and an active leftist insurgency in El Salvador. The Honduran government also played a key role in negotiations that culminated in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. Honduras continues to participate in the UN observer mission in the Western Sahara, contributed 370 troops for stabilization in Iraq, and remains interested in participating in other UN peacekeeping missions.

The United States is Honduras' chief trading partner, with two-way trade in goods increasing to over $7 billion in 2006. U.S.-Honduran trade is dominated by the Honduran maquila industry, which imports yarn and textiles from the United States and exports finished articles of clothing. Other leading Honduran exports to the United States include coffee, bananas, seafood (particularly shrimp), minerals (including zinc, lead, gold, and silver), and other fruits and vegetables. Two-way trade with Honduras in 2006 was $7.4 billion, up from $7.0 billion in 2005. For 2007 through October, Honduran exports to the United States increased 6%, and U.S. exports to Honduras increased 18% when compared to the same period in 2006.

U.S. investors account for nearly two-thirds of the foreign direct investment (FDI) in Honduras. The stock of U.S. direct investment in Honduras in 2005 was $402 million, up from $339 million in 2004. The overall flow of FDI into Honduras in 2005 totaled $568 million, $196 million of which was spent in the maquila sector. The United States continued as the largest contributor of FDI. The most substantial U.S. investments in Honduras are in the maquila sector, fruit production (particularly bananas, melons, and pineapple), tourism, energy generation, shrimp aquaculture, animal feed production, telecommunications, fuel distribution, cigar manufacturing, insurance, brewing, leasing, food processing, and furniture manufacturing. Many U.S. franchises, particularly in the restaurant sector, operate in Honduras.

In 2004, the United States signed the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) with Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic. The legislatures of all signatories except Costa Rica ratified CAFTA in 2005, and the agreement entered into force in the first half of 2006. CAFTA eliminates tariffs and other barriers to trade in goods, services, agricultural products, and investments. Additionally, CAFTA is expected to solidify democracy, encourage greater regional integration, and provide safeguards for environmental protection and labor rights.

In June 2005, Honduras became the first country in the hemisphere to sign a Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) compact with the US Government. Under the compact, the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation will invest $215 million over five years to help Honduras improve its road infrastructure, diversify its agriculture, and get its products to market. Honduras failed the corruption indicator required for continued funding into 2008. MCC will closely follow Honduras's progress on reducing corruption under an approved "remediation plan."

The United States maintains a small presence at a Honduran military base; the two countries conduct joint peacekeeping, counter-narcotics, humanitarian, disaster relief, and civic action exercises. U.S. troops conduct and provide logistics support for a variety of bilateral and multilateral exercises—medical, engineering, peacekeeping, counter-narcotics, and disaster relief—for the benefit of the Honduran people and their Central American neighbors. U.S. forces—regular, reserve, and National Guard—benefit greatly from these exercises.


 
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Secret Wars of the CIA: John Stockwell Lecture (Part 16)

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

This condition progressively reduces the effectiveness of the immune system and leaves individuals susceptible to opportunistic infections and tumors. HIV is transmitted through direct contact of a mucous membrane or the bloodstream with a bodily fluid containing HIV, such as blood, semen, vaginal fluid, preseminal fluid, and breast milk.

This transmission can involve anal, vaginal or oral sex, blood transfusion, contaminated hypodermic needles, exchange between mother and baby during pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding or other exposure to one of the above bodily fluids.

AIDS is now a pandemic. In 2007, it was estimated that 33.2 million people lived with the disease worldwide, and that AIDS killed an estimated 2.1 million people, including 330,000 children. Over three-quarters of these deaths occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, retarding economic growth and destroying human capital.

Genetic research indicates that HIV originated in west-central Africa during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. AIDS was first recognized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1981 and its cause, HIV, identified in the early 1980s.

Although treatments for AIDS and HIV can slow the course of the disease, there is currently no vaccine or cure. Antiretroviral treatment reduces both the mortality and the morbidity of HIV infection, but these drugs are expensive and routine access to antiretroviral medication is not available in all countries. Due to the difficulty in treating HIV infection, preventing infection is a key aim in controlling the AIDS pandemic, with health organizations promoting safe sex and needle-exchange programmes in attempts to slow the spread of the virus.

 
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The Secret War in Laos (Part 1)

The Laotian Civil War (1953-1979) was an internal fight between the Communist Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao Government in which both the political rightists and leftists received heavy external support for a proxy war from the global Cold War superpowers.

The Kingdom of Laos was a covert theater of battle for the other belligerents during the Vietnam War. The Franco-Lao Treaty of 1953 gave Laos full independence but the following years were marked by a rivalry between the neutralists under Prince Souvanna Phouma, the right wing under Prince Boun Oum of Champassak, and the left-wing Lao Patriotic Front under Prince Souphanouvong and future Prime Minister Kaysone Phomvihane. A number of attempts were made to establish coalition governments, and a "tri-coalition" government was finally seated in Vientiane.

The fighting in Laos involved the North Vietnamese Army, American, Thai, and South Vietnamese forces directly and through irregular proxies in a battle for control over the Laotian Panhandle. The North Vietnamese Army occupied the area for use as the Ho Chi Minh Trail supply corridor and staging area for offensives into South Vietnam. There was a second major theater of action on and near the northern Plaine des Jarres.

The North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao emerged victorious in 1975, as part of the general communist victory in Indochina that year.

On 23 March 1969, the Royal Lao Army launched a large attack (Cu Kiet Campaign) against the communists in the Plain of Jars/Xieng Khoang areas, supported by its own air units and the U.S. Air Force. In June, the enemy launched an attack of its own and gained ground, but by August, Laotian forces attacked again and regained what had been lost. In all these operations, the U.S. Air Force flew hundreds of Barrel Roll missions; however, many were canceled because of poor weather.

Pathet Lao forces were supported by PAVN's 174th Vietnamese Volunteer Regiment. By September, the 174th had to fall back to regroup. In mid-September, they launched a counterattack and recovered the Plain of Jars. Forces participating in the campaign included the 316th and 312th Infantry Divisions, the 866th Infantry Regiment, the 16th Artillery Regiment, one tank company, six sapper and engineer battalions, one Nghe An Province local force battalion, and ten PL battalions.

On 11 February, the offensive (Campaign 139) opened. By the 20th, control of the Plain of Jars was secure. RLG forces withdrew to Muong Xui. On 25 February, the RLG abandoned Xieng Khoang city. Xam Thong fell on 18 March and Long Thieng was threatened. On 25 April, the campaign ended. After the end of the campaign, the "316th Division, the 866th Regiment, and a number of specialty branch units were ordered to stay behind to work with our Lao friends."

 
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