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"I think there is no real argument that the historical lesson for the United States in the 20th Century has been the need for continued strong American involvement. I'm one of those individuals who is looking at the emerging debate as to the direction of American foreign policy, and I'm thinking about three writers in particular: Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan's article called for continued American benevolent hegemony as the pole star of American policy - this is the article in Foreign Affairs magazine setting forth a Republican foreign policy on the one hand, and Richard Haass' latest work analyzing the various strands in the foreign policy debate, dismissing the hegemony call, and arguing for the sheriff, the tough sheriff on the beat. Parenthetically, there is a bit of confusion there, because I think he's actually calling for hegemony, and I asked him the question why he dismissed the hegemony argument so readily, and I wasn't particularly convinced by his answer." "It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening, it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."
The US maintains to this day over a dozen direct dependencies, the largest of which is Puerto Rico. Its military forces are active over most of the globe: at last audit about 226 countries have US military troops, 63 of which host American bases, while only 46 countries in the world have no US military presence - a projection of military power that makes the Roman, British, and Soviet empires pale in comparison. This document outlines American policies and interventions that promote what is alternatively referred to as "neo-colonialism", "hegemony", "proxy rule", or "informal empire": roughly, a system of "dual elite" political rule, in which domestic elites (the proxy) recieve backing from (are dependent on - to varying degrees) a foreign elite, and in return protect (to varying degrees) the foreign power's interests in the country (security, economic, or domestic political interests). This is, at least, the framework within which I use the terms - as it is generally accepted by students of history. To take an explanation cited by Ariel Cohen as "One of the more successful attempts made to create a coherent theory of empires" in Russian Imperialism: "Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire." The United States was born of a colonial project, a direct heir of the British Empire it once belongs to, and its rapacious expansion across the continent was fueled by the genocide of the native population, African and Native-American slavery, rapid and continuous expansion of the national borders through war, rapid and continuous expansion of mercantilism through war and the threat of war, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, some 100 uninhabited islands of bat shit, and a mid 1800s mercantilist state established in Nicaragua that foreshadowed an impending empire abroad, with the aquisitions of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. It's a good point to remember how that war started: part hoax, part sensationalized, war mongering "journalism", and of course much talk about the brutality of the enemy and the necessity of our intervention on behalf of suffering natives - in this case on behalf of the Cubans and their savage treatment at the hands of the tyrannical Spaniards: much better for them to suffer at our hands. That was followed by wars during the 1890s by the United States Government ("USG", it's not like it's your or somebody else's fault -- it's an institution with its own prerogatives which rarely accord with the public it claims to represent) in Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Hawaii, Nicaragua, China, Korea, Panama, Samoa, in extremely brutal labour conflicts within the nation, and something akin to a war on working Americans waged by the National Association of Manufacturers that will otherwise go undiscussed. The Phillipines makes a decent representative example of the US' first official exercise in colonial imperialism, formal empire [*], and "civilizational imperialism" - a project we're presently repeating. "Lest this seem to be the bellicose pipedream of some dyspeptic desk soldier, let us remember that the military deal of our country has never been defensive warfare. Since the Revolution, only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country has ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war. And at the rate our armed forces are being implemented at present, the odds are against our fighting one in the near future." U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States." The "Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation" of the McKinley presidency in 1899 annouced America's intention to be the benevolent dictator over various foreign nations that just happened to all be filled with ruthless, pagan savages. In a savage conflict America repressed the Filipino independence movement. As in most cases of massacre on the part of the US the number of casualties remains a matter of debate; in this instance 5,000 (of some 120,000 involved) Americans killed with additional casualties later due to disease contracted in the Phillipines, but anywhere between 16,000-20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000-600,000 civilian Filipino deaths resulted due to the war, war induced famine, disease, and multiple atrocities, but one would be mistaken to describe the conflict as characterized by brutality. The US continued occupying the Phillipines for another 48 years. US military involvement in the Phillipines continues to this day, much to the advantage of foreign investors, who continue to maintain economic hegemony. US troops may not enjoy their stay quite as much as the last time, nor as the first time. US indirectly runs Panama through a surrogate after managing its seccession from Columbia. In 1904 the USG takes control of Dominican customs houses by force to collect on international debts, shortly thereafter signing a treaty, with the DR at gun point, ratifying their subservience to US financial interests. Between 1916 and 1924 the US occupies and rules the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter General Rafael Trujillo takes control of the country with the National Guard that was created and put under his control by the USG before its exit. During the 30s Trujillo wiped out some 30,000 Dominicans and Haitians in an effort to make his side of the island 'more white'. Trujillo recieved US backing until the mid 1950s, when he was finally placed under economic sanctions for attempting to assassinate the president of Venezuela. A few years later the USG began supporting the conservative opposition to overthrow him, successfully assassinating him in 1961, out of fear that the liberal Constitutionalist opposition would get to it first. Trujillo's son Ramfi was escorted out of the country by the US military. In 1963 the US intervenes again, backing militants who remove the recently elected president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch - a centrist liberal - to "prevent another Cuba". Two years later Lyndon Johnson sent 22,000 US Marines to land on the island and take control of the country for 17 months after falling sugar prices and political conflict stirred an uprising against the new regime of Donald Reid Cabral. The Marines assist in supressing the rebellion, killing over 4,000 Dominicans and solidifying conservative control over the country, leading to the reinstatement of Trujillo-frontman turned Washington-frontman Joaquin Balaguer, who dragged the country into a nightmare of political violence, electoral fraud, and death squad activity that, by and large, eliminated any possible political opposition to the regime - minus one or two times when Balaguer's masters in Washington yanked his leash for the cameras. The USG continued lavishing military support onto the regime throughout the waves of terror. US occupies and administers Haiti for 19 years. A sort of defacto American colonial holding during the mid 19th century - per the East India Company model of a private corporation taking control of a foreign nation with state assistance - US Marines occupy Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933. In 1927 US Marines enter into a protacted struggle with the guerilla forces of Augusto Sandino, eventually suffering their first defeat against a third world insurgency. Afterwards, the USG arms, trains, and otherwise props up the barbarous, nepotistic Somoza dictatorship and the National Guard, which holds on to dictatorial power until the Sandinista revolution of 1979. The "cold" war begins with the Allied intervention in Russia and backing of the White armies. 399 african american sharecroppers are denied treatment for syphilis as part of a US government medical experiment that began in 1932. Exposed by the press in 1972, the government finally shuts down the experiment over 30 years after a cure was discovered. The US and its allies react to a fascist insurrection against the Second Spanish Republic by imposing on arms embargo on Spain, while German and Italian fascists generously support General Francisco Franco's uprising with munitions, troops, and air support, leading to the first uses of air power to carpet bomb cities in attacks on Guernica and Barcelona, an indiscriminate tactic that soon becomes an institutionalized norm. The Federal Housing Administration - a mortage insurance program that helped millions of American families to develop their own property, accumulate capital, and lift them into the middle-class - became an effective state-mandated ghettoization program under blankly racist standards that prevented black neighborhoods and families from recieving the development assistance that their taxes otherwise helped pay for. Likewise, housing deeds included 'restrictive covenants' that prohibited blacks from occupying homes in white neighborhoods, until a 1948 Supreme Court ruling was implemented in 1950 that ruled such contracts unconsistutional. Similar policies excluded most black workers from Social Security coverage and agricultural assistance programs. These policies re-inforced the status quo on the ground - the racist municipal and business practices of the dominate culture - lifting white America further above its black counterpart while encouraging urban decay and racial segregation. In terms of home ownership the gap between white and black home ownership jumped by 5.5% during the life of the program and left cities highly polarized between underdeveloped inner-city black neighborhoods and highly developed white suburbs. The black home ownership rate doesn't reach the white rate of 1900 until 1970. Fair housing legislation was passed in 1968 but subsequent court rulings show that individual acts of similar discrimination continued well into the present. In which, arguably, President Roosevelt's plan to provoke a Japanese attack is outlined.
The USG creates the Greek secret police (KYP) and backs military coups in 1949, 1967 and 1973. Dictatorships ruled with US backing during the periods of 1949-1952 and 1967-1974. Under the ostensible rubric of defending Greece from Soviet aggression the US takes over British efforts to destroy the Greek left, establishing a brutal rightwing dictatorship. Since the original intervention of the Truman Doctrine the USG continued attacking Greece, overthrowing the elected government twice more when Greeks had the terminity to elect governments without Washington's approval. One apology for this brand of imperialistic hubris is that the 1948 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia fueled fears in the US government of various nefarious Soviet plots seen and unseen, demanding action. We defer to the US government as to the reality of such fears:
Whether US leaders believed their own delusions about the Kremlin or not, it's difficult to lend such pretentions much credit by the time of 1967 coup. As Kennan comments in the Moscow Embassy report, "The attempt to portray the outside world as menacing, whether or nor it actually was so at any given moment, has been part of the stock in trade of Soviet rule." He does not shrink from making the same observation about the West. But perhaps the easiest question to answer is whether a defense against Communist dictatorships required uncritical moral, political and material support for proto-fascist dictatorships - a highly dubious assumption, and an expensive one in this instance, costing some 150,000 lives. Alternatively one could - for instance - try promoting democracy and human rights. With their capacity to defend themselves in part defining them as the "second world" the USSR and communist China benefit from little direct Western intervention in the post-war period. Mao, like other Communist leaders, was a close ally during the WWII, and was more effective in organizing resistance to the Japanese Empire than Chiang Kai-Shek because - to paint with a broad brush - Marxist euphimisms played better with peasant serfs long repressed by Chiang's army than reactionary feudal-nationalist doctrines. During the post-war assemblage of the United Nations China was officially inducted, but the USG officially recognized Kai-Shek's exiled dictatorship in Taiwan as the legitemate government of China (US sponsorship of Kai-Shek lasted for decades, and it was he who cast China's vote in favor of the Korean war on the United Nations Security Council), as compared to Mao's insane dictatorship in China. By at least one count Kai-Shek's US-supported efforts to remain in power cost some 18 million lives, on par with Mao's campaigns to retain power after the revolution, excluding the horrendous famines he unknowingly presided over. In an attempt to discredit Mao's China the US funnels covert economic aid and directs reforms in Taiwan, working with Kai-Shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo, instituting land reform and providing guidance in modern farming techniques and technology while heralding it as an example of the "free market". The successful development program, which lasted for about ten years, was then used as propaganda, absurdly, for market liberalization elsewhere in the third world - though the US continued to overthrow governments that attempted to institute similar land reforms, as they were indicative of "Communist sympathies" and "Soviet direction". Amid this diplomatic rivalry between Taiwan and China the US and China were vying over Tibet, with the Chinese-incited Marxist rebellion stirring under the Tibetian aristocratic religious order and the CIA organizing and funding counter-revolutionary groups to compete with competing Red groups, having no better idea to sell, let alone any idea how to intervene productively in the madness swallowing China and, through it, Tibet. It doesn't seem unlikely that the USG would have happily supported the 1950 invasion of Tibet had Chinese Nationalists - who had already made failed efforts to re-aquire Tibet - won the civil war. No stone among the remaining empires to be left unturned or uncontested. So it goes. "If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot" The USG, with Japanese and South Korean collaborators (under Syngman Rhee - a Korean-American chosen by Chiang Kai Shek to preside over South Korea - curtesy Washington DC), slaughtered one third of the population of Cheju Island in anti-communist purges during the occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1949. The repression of the population by US, ROK, and Japanese forces purged anywhere between 100,000 and 800,000 'suspected leftists' in the civillian population. Among other things the anti-communist policy of the USG and the cooperation against the formation of an independent, unified Korea by both Soviets and Americans lead to the North Korean invasion on June 25th, 1950. During the war the USG deliberately targetted civillians caught in the war path, and with some 4 million casualties between all players in the war well over half were civillian casualties. After the war the anti-Communist doctrine of the USG and Taiwanese governments lead to forced "voluntary" repatriation, where Chinese POWs were terrorized and tortured if they volunteered to be repatriated to China to rejoin their families and loved ones. "Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. ... The historical record suggests that Kennan - for all his somewhat more sound advice on East Asia: the warning of overextension and admittal of US political failure (meaning the simple inability to offer an alternative to Communism that had any popular appeal, despite the existence of numerous alternatives that would undermine Soviet influence but not, per the stated goal, maintain economic disparities) - was largely ignored except on this particular point, as "our unsound commitments" to China continued in Taiwan for many decades. At least until 1979 when the Chinese government was finally formally recognized and given - in what I suppose would be considered sound commitment - backing in the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The USG has continued "interfering in the internal affairs" of the Phillipines up to the present by propping up one cooperative despot after another, and directly assisting in the repression of internal rebellions. Nevermind that the US more than overstretched itself in Vietnam. The USG did, however, manage dealing in "straight power concepts" to a surreal and terrible degree, and has had little discernable trouble maintaining its "position of disparity". That's such a strange phrase. I would have thought the objective would have been expanding American prosperity, even if it was, as you might imagine it would necessarily be, to the benefit of others. "nobody ever told us they were human" We might begin with the CIA's orchestration in 1952 of a dramatic terrorist bombing in the center of Saigon that was blamed on communist forces to stir American rage against Agent 19, creating political support for the US to become the primary financer of the French war in Indochina until the US takes the entire project over in 1961, when Kennedy sends in the first US ground advisers, who almost immediately begin taking over the fighting for a corrupt Diem regime. Similar incidents, such as the Gulf of Tonkin, are repeated to generate support for ramping up the scale of American intervention. In a campaign that is probably best described as institutionalized genocide some 1 million Vietnamese combatants and 2-4,000,000 South East Asian civillians (DRV statistics, including Laos and Cambodia) were killed during this US stage of the war (estimated anywhere between 10-20% of the population), with over half the Vietnamese casualties inflicted in South Vietnam, the ostensible protectorate of the United States. Likewise the US managed to kill some 17,000 US troops - one third of all US casualties were reportedly caused by American-deployed landmines and unexploded cluster ordinace. The CIA's Phoenix program lead to the extra-judicial assassinations of some 20-40,000 civillians alone - or "suspected Communists", nevermind the hundreds of thousands that were subjected to brutal interrogations and internment in American re-education camps. Military intelligence programs differed little in their essential brutality, including torture by field telephone. In violation of international law, among other things, the US utilized chemical warfare (sarin per operation Tailwind is largely discredited, VX perhaps remains a possibility, and massive amounts of toxins - the carcinogen Agent Orange comes to mind - were dumped into the Vietnamese ecosystem, defoliating vast swathes of the country) and scorched earth policies which afflicted not only US and Vietnamese soliders, the former of whom were awarded damages for the exposure, but caused massive civilian casualties and harm that continue to this day, as unexploded ordance and damage to the gene pool caused by chemical agents take their slow toll: The Vietnamese government estimates 500,000 children have been born with birth defects caused by contamination with Agent Orange and two million suffered cancers and other ill effects - innocent victims of a chemical intended to harm plant life, not humans. But unlike the American soldiers who sprayed the defoliant, they have never received compensation. The main thrust of this violence was directed towards South Vietnam, who we were purportedly there to protect, or whatever it is we were purpotedly doing; protecting America from Vietnam, I suppose, against their plan to sail over in rafts and crush us with sheer numbers. To have Michael Lind tell it I'm supposed to believe that the NLF's refusal to surrender makes them responsible for the victims of US invasion. So far as Soviet involvement is concerned Ilya Gaiduk argues that Russia was partly responsible for the war due to their lack of actual involvement, however that works. US involvement in Vietnam increased neighboring alliances with the Soviets and forced the Vietnamese into a position of dependency on China and the USSR (they had, after WWII, sought alliances and support from the US to preserve their independence from the French and the Chinese - the latter position eventually lead to their alliances with the Soviets). The Sino-Soviet split in 1960 resulted in China becoming a US ally after the end of the war in 1975, at which point Vietnam turned even further to the Soviets for support against China's history of hegemony over the region. The US paid for the French campaign between 1945 to 1954 before taking it over directly, beginning a US phase in the Vietnam wars that lasted until 1975. After the end of direct US involvement in Vietnam the US continued waging the conflict for almost two decades afterward. In 1979 China invaded Vietnam with US backing when the USG deployed the carrier Constellation to the Gulf of Tonkin to deter a Soviet response, and gave diplomatic and political backing for the Chinese action - to "teach the ex-colony a lesson" for deposing the pro-Chinese, genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. During the invasion the Chinese destroyed the dikes and canals that were the fundamental basis of agrarian production in Vietnam, and with them much of the country's rice reserves, inducing food shortages exacerbated at the same time by the US-led blockade on the country that, incidentally, lasted until 1994. In 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, former leader of the NLF, took control of Vietnam's communist party and persued market policies and attempted to re-integrated Vietnam into the global economy. The latter was prevented by successive administrations, which continued the embargo and blocked Western access to - to quote Eisenhower - "the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs": tin, tungsten, rubber plantations, "and so on". This curious justification for the war was self-fulfilling: when a population elected a communist (Ho Chi Mihn) with 90% of the vote (an early result that was never called into question) who was extremely friendly towards - and a former operative of - the US, the response was to wage an invasion until, against impossible odds, the population expelled the invader. After the war, which was - by Eisenhower's own lame admission - in part to secure access to raw materials, the response of the invaders was to turn around and block access to those materials with no discernable, rational goal (to "teach Vietnam a lesson"?) for 25 years. The pathology of blind anti-Communism prevented a Western response that quite easily could have curbed a Communist regime's worst excesses and defects by working with a country and its elected leaders that were considerably pro-American, and surprisingly still are. To prevent Communist atrocities - as the justification for the war was argued even as it was waged - was clearly no long term committment. During the normalization process of the early 1990s the subject of human rights was conspiciously absent, as before and as after. The familiar justifications of spreading humane values such as liberty, justice, and life with military force were entirely absent from post-war relations, when they might have been persued in a nonviolent manner. Thusly there is the generally acknowledged fact that "In the years since we lost the war, we have won it." In consideration that the French had already bailed on the war as a hopeless enterprise in the mid 50s, that the British told Washington in 1954 that "None of us in London believe that intervention in Indonchina can do anything" (Eden to Dulles, April 25th, refusing Eisenhower's request for British support of the US-French war) and made further efforts to end the war in 1967. Our allies were by and large opposed to the war. The only realistic conclusion is that the war, the deaths of millions upon millions of innocents and the ensuing rise of repressive security states throughout the region due to meaningless destructive games amongst imperial powers, was never in any way justified. Whoever can sort out the logic behind this insanity wins a cookie. The US never paid reparations to Vietnam - let alone Cambodia or Laos - although the Paris Agreement Nixon signed in 1973 specified in Article 21 $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid for the DRV. As Gabriel Kolko described the post-war relationship in 1982: To state ... that Vietnam wishes to be dependent on Soviet aid ignores entirely its intensive efforts during 1976-1978 to establish economic ties with the West via loans, aid, and investments - efforts it has not abandoned. Its present dependence on the USSR is the consequence of a conscious US and Chinese policy which Assistant Secretary of State John H. Holdridge summed up last June 8: "It is important to keep the Vietnamese isolated politically and economically, and there is agreement on that score." Agent 19 has yet to receive commendations from the US for his resistance against the Japanese during World War II. "About the war in Vietnam, all I have to say is [...inaudible...] and that's all I have to say about the war in Vietnam." After taking control of the Phillipines during WWII the US disarms the largest Filipino anti-Japanese guerilla movement, the Hukbalahap, and installs Manuel Roxas, a Japanese collaborator that General MacArthur pardoned, to run the new government. Roxas' government issues an amnesty for collaborators, bans peasant political organizing, refuses to seat opposition congressmen, and directs a campaign of repression throughout the country. Formal independence is granted to the Phillipines shortly thereafter, with provisions for a large and perpetual American military presence and special privelidges for American business. Roxa's failed policies, however, lead to the resurgence of the Huk movement. Roxas and his successor Quirino continue those same policies, using US aid primarily to enrich themselves and wage US supported violence to suppress the Huks. The USG begins supporting Ramon Magsaysay by 1950, who, assisted to power by American Colonel Lansdale, manages to use large quantities of economic aid and political reforms, including land reform, to undermine the primary grievances of the Huk movement, which eventually subsides. However, Magsaysay and his successors fail to implement long term reforms that could resolve the country's problems and extreme poverty, leading later to further popular unrest, a new insurgency, and another US supported strongman and kleptocrat by the name of Ferdinand Marcos. Nuclear testing during Operations Crossroads, Sandstone, Greenhouse, Ivy, Castle, Redwing, and Hardtack involved over 60 known atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Enewetak and Bikini. The testing involved USG imposed exile for thousands of islanders to neighboring atolls, hundreds of whom suffered from radiation poisoning and other exposure related diseases, and dozens committed suicide admidst the derilect conditions of their displacement. The USG could have decided to do anything to avoid this constant string of fiascos at little relative expense (how's an army-engineered ocean-side community in SoCal on a cushy government stipend sound, while we nuke your motherland?): it chose to do nothing. Also affected by radiation poisoning were Japanese fishermen on a boat called the Lucky Dragon - in part inspiring the Non-Proliferation Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union six years later - and a number of US military personel. The IEER has apparently estimated the excess deaths from atmospheric testing on all sides and related fallout between 1940-2000 to be 430,000. General Li Mi retreats with his army of Chinese nationalists into Burma during the Chinese civil war. The US, supporting retreating KMT forces elsewhere, also backs Li Mi's army, which continues to make incursions into China for over a decade. The Congressional Pike Report, as leaked uncensored to the Village Voice and thusly abandoned by the House in embarassment (the Church Committee was the parallel intelligence review in the Senate), revealed that the since 1948 the USG spent over $65 million dollars (including some Marshall Plan aid) interfering in Italian elections, joining Moscow in support of European anti-communism, by way of neo-fascists and known terrorists. According to Tim Weiner [Legacy of Ashes, p.298] "every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in Italy" was backed by the CIA. Interference in Italy included buying every election from 1948 to 1972 and destroying [search for "Federico Romero", also discussed here] the anti-fascist resistance that had organized powerful unions and worker committees in its fight against Germany, coming to dominate northern Italy shortly after WWII, threatening the old order, and so the USG reaction. Anti-left violence continued well beyond world war two, into the 70s, with CIA backing for the Gladio [*]. Gladio operations were formed throughout Western Europe, for example in Norway (exposed in '78 when an associated arms cache was discovered), which included the operation to track suspected communists as part of the intelligence service. Similar actions were taken against anti-nazi resistance groups in other liberated territories, for example in Germany, where an average of $6 million was spent supporting the Nazi intelligence network of General Reinhard Gehlen until he was replaced by the CIA in 1954. Related support for Nazis, including giving them safe harbor in the US, was the basis for Operation Paperclip. Elected APRA government overthrown by Legion of Merit award winner and "CIA pawn" Manuel Odria. US military attache to the CIA, Stephen Meade, with CIA agent Miles Copeland, help coordinate a military coup against the elected government of Syria, establishing Colonel Al-Zaim's military dictatorship, who was promised de facto recognition by the USG in exchange for Syrian ratification of the Trans Arabian Pipeline project. Four and a half months later he is deposed and executed by his co-plotters, leading to a rapid succession of military regimes amid continued US meddling until the present Ba'athist regime took power in 1963. Organizational and material support for Ukrainian anti-communist resistance movement, cooperation with the war criminal Mykola Lebed and support for the Prolog Research Corporation extends to the end of the Cold War. After the war in Thailand - the only state in Southeast Asia to support the Japanese war against the allies - the US supports the Thai military (some $2 billion from 1949-1969), leading to Phibun Songkhram reaquiring dictatorial control after a brief exile to Japan in 1949. With a cooperative military junta in total control of Thailand the US was able to use it as a major base of operations from which to mount its attacks on neighboring Southeast Asian countries throughout its involvement in the Vietnam wars. USG later supports a military coup in 1976, precipitated by the Thammasat Massacre (carried out by forces that had previously been trained by the CIA) and followed by arrests of over 10,000 students, academics, politicians, and labor activists. The US role in Thailand has been described in detail by the CIA agent that lead the Thailand counter-insurgency program to new heights, The locus for a broad cultural black-op, the CIA founds the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 under project QKOPERA, and with support from various foundations and through relationships within the AFL-CIO and media, use it to organize and disseminate propaganda supporting American foreign policy goals. One of the less trivial offenses committed against humanity in this octopus of inanity was a vast criminal conspiracy to impose Abstract Expressionist painting on a distracted world that had enough problems without it. A US colony since the Spanish-American war, the US repeatedly crushed Puerto Rican independence rebellions during the 1950s. For many decades afterward - the last attack was in 1999 - the Puerto Rican independence movement is the primary source of terrorist attacks in the United States. Puerto Rico remains under colonial rule. The US and UK send teams of "free Albanians" to infilitrate and establish paramilitary organizations within Albania to topple Enver Hoxha. The missions are compromised by Kim Philby, a Soviet assett at the head of the British operation [*]. Backing for Polish Freedom and Independence Movement. After reimposing the old leadership and imposing a new constitution on defeated Japan the US continues to interfere in this new "democracy": In Japan, in order to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls, which seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party. We helped bring wartime Minister of Munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and financing a rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty. USG performs chemical and biological weapons tests on US citizens in over 230 US cities and use "hundreds of thousands of military personnel" as human guinea pigs, often without their knowledge or consent. US suppports Franco's fascist, anti-semitic dictatorship in Spain which had been responsible for executing some 40,000 political prisoners after defeating Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, during which he executed another 100,000. President Truman begrudgingly begins dealing with Franco in 1950, sending him some $62 million in aid. Eisenhower sends him $1.5 billion. Successive US administrations are openly supportive of Franco's regime until his death in 1975. Despite the often-cited but unreliable narrative of CIA officer Miles Copeland there is little evidence that the United States had the foreknowledge of the Free Officers Movement coup against King Farouk in July of 1952. Declassified State Department cables uniformly register surprise at the events and confusion about who was in charge (not that it would be completely unheard of for the CIA to keep secrets), and no other party involved in US-Egypt relations corroborates Copeland's account, which is nevertheles recycled endlessly in histories of the coup. What is well corroborated is that Kermit Roosevelt advised Farouk to form a personal army when they met in February, that Acheson and the Pentagon approved the subsequent $1M military sale to Farouk in April, and that the aid was not shipped in time to make a difference: the officers staged the coup only three months later. The US supported the monarchy to the end. By 1955 the CIA was actively plotting to remove Nasser. Coup overthrows elected government of Carlos Prio Socorras. Fulgencio Batista's ruthless regime and his secret police force, the Buro de Represion Actividades Communistas (BRAC) - created by the CIA in 1956 - tortures and kills thousands with US assistance. Before January 1959, Cuba's economy was dominated by US interests, which owned 40% of the sugar production, including seven of the ten largest estates, 90% of the telephone and electricity utilities, the oil refineries, most of the mining industry, and some of the banks. After the Korean war the USG re-installs and backs the autocracy of Syngman Rhee until 1960, when the CIA flies Rhee and $20 million in government funds to Hawaii to protect him from the population. Chang Myong is then elected for an unnaturally brief nine-month term, when in 1961 further unrest and the USG supported military coup and dictatorship of Japanese collaborator and suspected commie General Park Chung He overthrows Chang's Second Republic. Elected to office in 1963, Park later declares martial law in 1972, suspending democracy indefinitely. He also creates the KCIA, an organization 370,000 strong by its third year of existence, the head of which shot Park in the head in 1979. See: Koreagate. With Chung He's timely passing the South Korean government nevertheless remains on Washington's leash, with another military coup in 1980 by General Chun Doo Hwan, and in 1980 the USG - under Carter - authorized his massacre at Kwangju of pro-democracy activists [2]. The following year Reagan was honoring Doo Hwan for his "commitment to freedom". South Korean democracy finally takes on some semblance of reality in 1992. General Doo Hwan and his successor Roe Tae Woo were later convicted for mutiny and high treason. Attempted overthrow of Jose Figueres. The Iranian parliament nationalizes British oil concessions that were reaping 88% of the profits from the Iranian oil industry. They had offered the British 25% of the profits, rather than 88%, and the British responded by imposing a blockade on Iran and freezing Iranian assets. British embassies are closed, and so the British make proposals to Truman to intervene. Truman, whose administration considered Prime Minister and Time 'Man of the Year' Mohammed Mossadegh a nationalist and an anti-communist, rejects the proposal, believing the enlargement of the middle-class made possible by the oil nationalization would protect Iran from communism. When Eisenhower takes office the British repeat the proposal, but Ike's Sec. of State John Foster Dulles and the Director of Plans in the CIA Allen Dulles happen to be partners in the lawfirm Sullivan and Cromwell, which coincidentally is the legal counsel for Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Eisenhower is sold a trumped up anti-communist story (also trumped up in the press by the CIA, as was common: see MOCKINGBIRD) and sends Kermit Roosevelt to the American Embassy in Iran to foment a coup as part of Operation AJAX, overthrowing Iran's Prime Minister and liquidating the elected Iranian parliament. The underlying Cold War justification was that because Mossadegh was supported by, among others, the communist Tudeh Party, which had supported Mossadegh's social reforms when resisted by conservative clerics, and so Mossadegh must therefore be Communust: this 'logic', of course, wasn't. The declassified CIA records suggest the opposite: it's apparent that Mossadegh preconditioned a spring 1953 contract with Count Della Zonca (an Italian hauling Iranian oil) on a guarantee that no oil be sold to the Eastern bloc, and with most of the oil continuing to be sold through AIOC the British would effectively have control over the rest of it - essentially an anti-communist contract. The CIA cable on March 31st, 1953 says quite plainly that the "Communists did not create the crisis nor are they playing a significant role in its outcome". Hence a CIA directed plot was necessary to deepen the crisis, improving the insignificant Communist position, and thus make it appear necessary to disband all democratic institutions in favor of years of state violence and terror against anyone who would resist the Shah. The Shah's dictatorship introduces one of the more totalitarian regimes of the third world, but the British oil concessions became a largely American oil consortium and the day was won for Democracy: the Shah's SAVAK police (organized by US intelligence) proceeded to brutalize, repress, divide, isolate, and torture the Iranian population for a quarter of a century until he was exiled in 1979 by Khomeini's Islamic Republic, which did more of the same, supported in turn by tons of US arms, initially funnelled through Israel, via Carter and Reagans' "illegal-arms-for-CIA-operatives" and "illegal-arms-for-an-illegal-war-in-Nicaragua" deals. This is a suitable place to interject a discussion on why oil matters, and why, if we want the oil, we don't just go and take it. With varying degress of success liberalization programs are undertaken in Soviet Russia and its satellites to undo the worst of the persisting crimes of Stalin's regime. Most, but not all, political prisoners are rehabilitated, religious freedoms expand, and the use of torture reduced. In 1956 Krushchev delivers a limited but accurate enough condemnation of Stalin and Lysenko to the Party. Military suppression of protests against the state and people's movements, vast state censorship, partocracy, militarism, Soviet economic hegemony, and other forms of control for the most part continue - ie. the political life of citizens begins to bear - lacking in violent purges and religious intolerance, torture, famine, and personality cults - more resemblance to that in the US than in China. After 1964 and Brezhnev's rise to power the decline in repression reverses somewhat, and cultural and political dissidence meets with forceful "damage control". Around the same time in the United States a concerted propaganda campaign is waged to whip up anti-communist hysteria, causing a purge of much of the State Department as numerous diplomats and experts are accused baselessly of 'communist sympathies', to be replaced by comparatively uninformed, ideological wingbats who go on a rampage across the globe in search of enemies to destroy. The effects of McCarthyism on foreign policy makers prolonged a relatively quick and painless three month war on the Korean penninsula, when accepting an armistice would have been seen as "soft on communism", and turned it into a three year long massacre that killed millions. Similarly discussion of Vietnam turns from one of French colonialism to one of "communist expansionism", leading to the deaths of millions upon millions, one massacre after another. "We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent." United Fruit Co., aka Chiquita Banana, and the CIA lobby the Eisenhower administration to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz, who attempted to institute land reforms that threatened United Fruit's extortion of Guatemalan agriculture, and expanded on the ideal of democracy to end disenfranchizement of communist sympathizers at the table of government. The Eisenhower administration and CIA, apparently in confusion about what democracy means, prompty organized a botched assassination attempt on Arbenz, trained and armed a military regime to take over, and lent military assistance to the counter-revolution. The ensuing civil war lasted 40 years and left some 160,000 dead and 40,000 "disappeared" (in 1999 there was some light cast on the fate of the disappeared). "The social and economic programs of the elected government met the aspirations" of labor and the peasantry, and "inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self-interest of most politically conscious Guatemalans. Worse still, the government of Guatemala had "become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail." CIA veteran Ralph McGee has compiled a list of non-classified reports of CIA activities in Guatemala, with the CIA Seal of Approval. A talk of his is available at montclair.edu in which he discusses briefly the CIA's recruitment of rejects from the NFL. John Stockwell has given the same sort of testimony about Angola. In addition to death squad activity, executions, rape, and torture, US government suppression of the murder of an American, etc., US backed goons engaged in scorched earth campaigns. While US military aid was halted in 1990, the CIA continued its own funding for another 5 years until reports in the US press made the funding public. Guatemalan suffering continues to this day: US military aid to Pakistan helps reinforce the military's position in society and assists it in seizing power in 1958. Overconfident in the strength of its US backing, Pakistan blunders into a war with India in the mid 60s. This and shifts in alignment towards China result in LBJ issuing an arms embargo on Pak and India in 1965, producing a cease-fire. The embargo weakens shortly there-after, and under Nixon military aid resumes, to genocidal effect. "No wonder Sukarno doesn't like us very much. He has to sit down with people who tried to overthrow him." - President Kennedy, 1961 The CIA interfers in Indonesia's first parliamentary elections since it acquired independence from the Netherlands in 1945 by providing $1 million to the Masjumi Party against Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta's Nationalist Party. Sukarno, who had lead the independence movement, wins the elections. Enraged by Sukarno's "unity through diversity" policy, which allowed the communist PKI to run (and consistently lose) in elections, the CIA advocates for a military coup, culminating in President Eisenhower issuing an order on September 25th, 1957 for Sukarno's overthrow. By early 1958 the CIA established a revolutionary government on Sumatra and Sulawesi that calls for uprisings against the government. The US-trained and armed Indonesia military destroys the rebel base a week later, even recieving maps of the islands from the US military attache in Jakarta, who was unaware of the CIA operation. In March the US State Department, under John Foster Dulles, publically echoes the calls for uprisings against Sukarno, declaring that "all-out Communist despotism is taking over". Overrun, the CIA assets are evacuated to saftey by the US navy in April. In late April the CIA started sending warplanes to strike military and civilian targets. These sorties killed hundreds. When the Indonesian military downed one of the craft and captured the pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, revealing the direct American involvement in the war, the CIA was forced to shut down the operation. Al Pope was sentenced to death (released in August 1962) and his capture demonstrated that rumors of American involvement in the attempted overthrow were true, making the dire predictions about Sukarno's loyalties entirely self-fulfilling, leading eventually to further US intervention and the massacres of 1965. COINTELPRO; Operation CHAOS, MOCKINGBIRD, House Pike Report, Senate Church Committee Report.
Of roughly 20,000 people investigated by the FBI solely on the basis of their political views between 1956-1971, about 10 to 15% were the targets of active counterintelligence measures per se. Taking counterintelligence in its broadest sense, to include spreading false information, it's estimated that about two-thirds were COINTELPRO targets. Most targets were never suspected of committing any crime. Harkening back to the first red scare and the Palmer raids after World War I, the US government moves to target its real enemies: US citizens. The FBI assisted right-wing hate groups in carrying out bombings, shootings, murder, and other assorted manifestations of violence against activist groups, as exemplified by the siege at Pine Ridge, South Dakota (1973-76) and the Greensboro Massacre (1979). The CIA was utilized for the same ends, spying on the student movement, collecting information on some 300,000 Americans, distributing LSD to unwitting participants, American and foreign, as part of MKULTRA (leading in one case to the 1953 death of Dr. Frank Olson). It included enticing heroin addicts to use the drug in return for heroin (part of the long history of CIA involvement with the drug trade) and testing it on "unwitting subjects in social situations". All records pertaining to MKULTRA were destroyed by the order of CIA director Richard Helms in 1973, so what these findings from the Church Committee entail exactly we'll never fully know. Operation MOCKINGBIRD is a well documented program in which the CIA made (and continues to make) infiltrations into domestic media organizations, as well as creating front organizations poising as media groups, giving the intelligence community a high level of influence and occasional instances of direct control in the "free press". This is what democracies do in lieu of having direct state control over media, and one can readily observe that it's a far more effective policy in guiding public opinion and covering up state secrets, since the citizen is left unaware that any influence is being exerted, or if he is he is left unaware of when. Of course, since these activities are never verified by the government until decades after they happen anybody claiming that such activities continue are easily labelled as cranks, as was the case for most instances of covert activity listed in this document. Likewise, the CIA has entered into a similar relationship with academics. Government intelligence services in general often being conspicious, rotten fucks, leading rational, sane people into the bowels of paranoia when government secrecy prevents the public from knowing the full extent and details of operations that targetted US citizens, leaving fear, manufactured or not, to fully disembowel the credibility of people who have reasonable questions but choose instead to fill the gaps in themselves with mindwasting conjecture. A related segue to this discussion is to address the chamber of horrors that can be the US prison system, just consider George Hansen and "diesel thereapy", who blames the abuse on "government tyranny and liberal treachery". It's almost enough to suggest that the US government has been involved in a conspiracy to promote the spread of conspiracy theory. Average of $750,000/year paid personally to King Hussein. After disclosure of payments in 1976 USG claims payments ostensibly ceased. CIA organizes one coup a year between 57 and 65. Then it bombs the fuck out of Laos for the next decade. Left behind were some 500,000 corpses, and unexploded bomblets from cluster bombing that kill or maim hundreds to thousands a year. Over 87,000 square miles of Laos countryside remains infested by unexploded ordinance and landmines as of 2002, : Laos is mainly affected by unexploded ordnance (UXO) dating back to the Indochina War, especially the period from 1964 to 1973, when it is estimated that more than two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos. Fifteen of the country.s eighteen provinces are significantly affected by UXO; the most heavily contaminated provinces are Savannakhet, Xieng Khouang, Saravane and Khammouane.[7] Over 85 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and UXO seriously constrains the livelihood and food security of large sections of the population. The US government made little or no effort to help with ordnance clearing projects until 1996. US supports 30 years of rule by the Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti. Rule was transferred from Francois Duvalier to his son Jean-Claude in 1971, who now resides comfortably in France. Our nepotistic friends massacre some 40-60,000 political opponents and torture countless more. The relationship was not without its early complexities. Used as a base for attacks against Cuba in the early 60s, the Kennedy administration reduces some aid and has the CIA make wavering attempts towards overthrowing the regime between 1962 and 1968. The CIA - observing that the regime had "crushed all opposition and destroyed almost all Haitian institutions" - concludes in the end that Duvalier must be propped up against the threat of a devastated and demoralized general population. Even while supporting coup attempts by Haitian exiles in the US they assist the regime against coup attempts by non-exiled Haitians. The UK and US governments approve a plan to stage fake incidents to excuse invasions by neighboring pro-Western Arab countries, in an effort to install a government that "would probably need to rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power". The plan is abandoned after Syria's neighbors refuse to go along with the project. The Khmer Serei movement is not a genuine part of the Cambodian political life. It is an external organization covertly supported by the Thai and South Vietnamese governments with the object of overthrowing the Sihanouk regime. Its chief methods are subversion and terrorism. Cambodian minorities from southwestern Vietnam and Thailand's Surin province making up Son Ngoc Thanh's Khmer Serei movement are supported by the CIA and used to wage cross-border attacks against the Cambodian army in order to pressure Prince Sihanouk into a stronger pro-Western alliance through SEATO. The operation fails, making Sihanouk more popular and more resolute in his determination to maintain neutrality. The attacks also bog down the small Cambodian army along the Thai border, forcing Shihanouk to seek assistance from China, which is then used by the CIA to justify continuing support for the Khmer Serei's attempts to undermine the government. By 1964 US Special Forces, on loan to the CIA, are joining in the cross-border raids from South Vietnam as "advisors" along with South Vietnamese Army units. On top of the initiation of US bombing raids on Cambodia, Shihanouk breaks off relations with the US in the spring of 1965. The steady escalation of US bombing, ostensibly to target communist Vietnamese forces, leads to one of the largest and most destructive bombing campaigns in history, as the order came down for an escalation of the attacks by Henry Kissinger, "Anything that flies on anything that moves". "The fact is that the United States dropped three times the quantity of explosives on Cambodia between 1970 and 1973 than it had dropped on Japan for the duration of World War II. Between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of high explosives rained down on Cambodia; that is more than one billion pounds. This is equivalent to some 15,400 pounds of explosives for every square mile of Cambodian territory. Considering that probably less than 25 percent of the total area of Cambodia was bombed at one time or another, the actual explosive force per area would be at least four times this level." American support for the ouster of Sihanouk (viewed by the rural populace as the father of the country), in a coup by General Lon Nol and the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops in April 1970 prompted a backlash that strengthened support for the insurgent Khmer Rouge (KR) guerrillas. The data released by Clinton shows the total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history. The CIA estimated that the US bombing campaign killed some 600,000 Cambodians, but between four years of US bombing, the Khmer Rouge's self-immolation of the country from 1975-1979, the 1979 Vietnam invasion, and a mass famine induced by the destruction of farm land, cluster bombs effectively mining tracts of countryside (even now a continuing problem, with over 400 casualties from unexeploded ordnance in 2002), the flood of refugees fleeing from US bombing to urban centers that could not sustain the population, and later a US-led blockade after 1979 (except for Khmer Rouge-lead groups opposing the new government, which the US "tilted" towards), nobody really knows how many died to what by whose hand. CIA funds election campaign of Camille Chamoun, quoted from the NYT, 3/31/1997: In Lebanon in 1957, the CIA supported Christian parties with U.S. government money and donations by American oil companies that wanted to insure a friendly government in Lebanon, a pivotal Middle Eastern country. Shortly thereafter 14,000 marines occupy Lebanon to repress dissidents opposing Chamoun's government, intervening in a small civil war to prop him up. Saddam Hussein, working as a CIA asset, makes his first botched attempt on the life of Iraq's nationalist leader Gen. Abdel Karim Qassim. Continuing an old feud, that being that Cuba is United States territory and not Cuban, the USG has continued intervening on it's own behalf in Cuba. With the overthrow of the US imposed and supported Batista dictatorship the CIA starts directing bombing raids from US soil, manned by exiled Cubans, against Cuba. The Cuban government sought redress in the UN in 1960, and the CIA bungled attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro 6 times between 1961 and 1963. The US ordered Britain not to provide arms to Cuba, forcing it to eventually seek aid from the Soviet Union, providing a pretext for further intervention. Direct support for sabatoge and terror attacks continue until 1966, including the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, strafing attacks on beach-side resorts, contamination of agricultural imports, and attacks on British cargo ships. In 1969 Nixon restarted the terror campaign, directing greater aid from the CIA and allowing exile groups to carry out attacks on Cuban targets from US soil with impunity, leading eventually to the bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people. These operations continue up until the present, with the FBI arresting Cuban infiltrators of US-based exile groups that engage in anti-Cuban terrorism: after being told about their presence by Cuban counter-terrorism officials in an effort to cooperate in anti-terror campaigns, such as those instigated by Bay of Pigs veteran Luis Posada Carriles. US embargos, continuing long past the end of the cold war, strangle the Cuban economy and deprive all but the highest American elites of fine Cuban cigars. To be fair to Cuba - and it's unlikely that this has much to do with Castro's administrative "genius" - it rates somewhere around 3rd or 4th in the Western hemisphere on basic human development indicators, its infant mortality rate is in fact lower than that of the United States. On human rights it's useful to compare notes on Cuba versus the United States and the top recipient in the hemisphere of US military aid, Columbia, before trying to explain or justify USG policy against Cuba as a response to Castro's human rights abuses. According to a book by ex-CIA agent Philip Agee, the CIA staged a Communist takeover of Ecuador before backing a military coup, ousting elected President J. M. Velasco Ibarra, and again in 1963 the government of Carlos Julio Arosemena. Agee now lives in Cuba and is accused of being a "KGB shill", which all around is probably better for the health than staying in the US and being a CIA target. It was a real riot: It was an odd change for the nation to get accustomed to, no doubt. Prior to 1960 the mobs were usually white. CIA assists Turkish Military Intelligence (MIT) in designing plans for mass arrests and repression of political opposition from 1960-69. In 1971 the CIA assists a military coup, and the plans are carried out, leading to the arrests and torture of 4,000 "suspects" in a single night. Lieutenant Colonel Hazim Sulayman seeks US cooperation in a planned military coup, assuring the US that ARAMCO's interests would be protected. The US warns the monarchy. Shortly after the Congo wins its independence from the brutal rule of Begium [*] - which received support from the USG - the USG assists in assassination attempts of the newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (including one attempt via a viral agent, delivery courtesy Sidney Gottlieb), bringing the former European colony into the US "sphere of dominance" under the USG backed reign of Joseph Mobutu Sese-Seko. As an informal colony of a troika between Belgium (for prestige), France (for trade), and the US (resource exploitation and supporting reactionary forces in neighboring states), the backers of Mobutu's regime set about some 37 years of supporting a brutal despot and kleptomaniac, leaving the Congo drownd in $12 billion of international debt. International propping of the regime continued well beyond IMF advisor Erwin Blumenthal's exposing the kleptocracy in 1982 and the IMF's and World Bank's continued support of it because of Western dominance in those organizations. Funds supplied by Western kickbacks and aid were used by Mobutu to bribe off select military, familial, and regional elites in order to maintain his position in the country. After his rise to power Mobutu proceeded to rape and brutalize the country and its citizens. Replaced by Laurent Kabila and then his son Joseph Kabila, things still aren't looking any better. Part of a general juggling and inadvertent discombobulation of African "nations" (artificial constructs based on the generally arbitrary borders established and afterwards maintained by "exiting" colonial powers) between world powers the Soviet role was "largely rhetorical". Saner imperial powers might have entered into an Anti-Circus-Ring Pact. Shortly after his retirement in 1962 CIA director Allen Dulles confessed, "I think that we overrated the Soviet danger, let's say, in the Congo." Nevertheless in 1964 the CIA provided air support for Mobutu, Cyril Adoula, and Moise Tshombe in Katanga, against Lumumba supporters in Stanleyville. The US consul there, released after being held by the rebels for three months, informed Washington in November that his captors were "within the Congolese political spectrum" and "essentially pragmatic and followed their own interests." During the 1970s the USG and France organized military support for Mobutu during rebel invasions from Angola into Shaba. Whatever finger-waving one might direct upon various outside actors, the IMF and WB institutions that are subsidiaries to Western interests, the problems of a corrupt and repressive state supported by them, and a helpless, repressed, and disorganized society, one has to admit that "the disaster had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference. ... Zaire's free fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad." (Foreign Affairs, 2001) In a region inunduated with US arms, torn over competition for cashcow exports to the West, three to five million people have been raped or slaughtered in the Congo War since 1998. While US administrations are waging one war after another on grounds of "humanitarian intervention" (Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq) they've done nothing about the Congo War besides pour weapons into the project (including training and aiding the militaries of contributing parties, such as Uganda and Rwanda). Life evidently doesn't mean much when the loss of it serves the so-called "national interest". Referred to today as "Camp Justice" by the Pentagon, this small island paradise in the Indian ocean was "sanitized" (ethnically cleansed) of its civillian population - their pet dogs gassed to death - by the British Empire and the American military. It remains the expropriated home for one of the largest American forward bases in the world. The CIA assists South Africa's apartheid government in arresting Nelson Mandela. CIA engages in a campaign to keep Joao Goulart from achieving control of Congress. Shortly after independence from Britain - long delayed by US pressure - the CIA organizes overthrow of the elected president Cheddi Jagan. The US backs nationalists in future elections, beginning 28 years of increasingly militant rule by the People's National Congress party until Jagan won the election of 1992 with US support, in the country's first monitored elections: meaning the US has been choosing the winner of Guyana's elections for some 40 years. The dictatorship Alfredo Stroessner receives $146 million in US aid, never receiving condemnations for its human rights abuses, the genocide of the indigenous Ache, drug trafficking and open arms policy for ex Nazis until the 1980s. The condemnation shortly preceded a 1988 coup. Stroessner took exile in Brazil. Starting in 1962 the CIA begins interfering in Chilean elections, turning in 1964 to incubation of the military junta that in 1973 put Augusto Pinochet into power after a CIA backed overthrow of Salvador Allende (having failed to buy his opponents elections and a failed coup attempt in 1970, among others). Salvador's government was replaced by a military dictatorship that suppressed and brutalized the country until 1990, with full USG knowledge and complicity, and included assistance in the murder of political opponents. Allende's crime: "Allende then proceeded towards strongly socialist policies based on his electoral victory, including a prices freeze, an increase in wages, nationalisation of the coal and steel industries, nationalisation of the main foreign copper firms, and of 60% of the private banks (Skidmore & Smith 2001, p127; Hudson 1994). Almost 500 firms would be nationalised (Hudson 1994). Workers often took the initiative, occupying the offices of foreign firms such as ITT and Ford until they were nationalised - this led to a partial financial blockade by the U.S., as well as the withholding of loans from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Skidmore & Smith 2001, p127)." The USG was supporting "anti-communist" factions in Chile as early as 1950. CIA activities received significant funding from the business community (allegedly Pepsi, from what I've read). The AFL-CIO was also involved, continuing its long history of working against foreign labor unions. In addition to everything else, the State Department concluded that the CIA might have had "an unfortunate part" in the death of 30-year old American journalist Charles Horman, who had unwittingly recieved sensitive information about the US role in the coup from a US Navy Engineer. Until the anti-apartheid movement managed to change US policy through congressional pressure in the late 80s - a policy change forcefully resisted by Reagan by veto (e.g. the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986), the rhetoric of "constructive engagement", and through the isolation of African states critical of the South African regime - South African apartheid formulated in 1948 received strong backing from Washington, making South Africa a defacto client state over the course of the Cold War. At the same time Washington was intermitently supporting different "alternatives" to the ANC, which also received occasional US funding, in attempts to build an anti-apartheid movement that would take its orders from Washington, regardless of whether this search meant delaying the end of apartheid indefinitely (thankyou Hubert Humphrey). A similar but shorter-lived situation existed in Rhodesia. The South African regime used its generous assistance from Washington to support incursions into neighboring states against independent governments, targetting - among others - Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Seychelles ^, Namibia, and Zimbabwe. With roots in the Eisenhower administration's coordination of policy with the UK against Egypt's Nasser under the "Omega" plan, the long-standing US political alliance with Saudi Arabia develops into a broadening and deepening level of - if often indirect - financial and political support for right-wing Islamist political movements as part of a policy to counter and weaken the forces of nationalism and pan-Arabism. After the failure of Kennedy's attempt at rapproachment with Egypt due to Nasser's support for the Republicans in the North Yemen Civil War, the US - along with Israel, Iran, Jordan, and the UK - joined Saudi Arabia in supporting the Royalist factions against the anti-monarchists in a conflict that lasted until 1970, ultimately seeing the 1967 partition of north and south into separate states for 23 years: the north becoming the Yemen Arab Republic after the mediated withdrawal of Egyptian and Saudi forces in 1970, while the south became a soviet proxy. The failure of the nationalist coup in Yemen and the 1967 defeat against Israel permantently discredited pan-Arabism and drastically improved political Islam's image across the Muslim world, allowing it to emerge from the fringe of Middle Eastern politics. With Nassers death in 1970 the CIA established a backchannel to his successor Anwar Sedat through Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham, transmitting Kissinger's promises to Sadat that Washington would assist Egypt against Israel if he broke off relations with the Soviet Union, which he did in 1972. To consolidate his position against the Nasserites and pro-Soviet left, Sadat entered into an alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood and allowed Egypt to become a center for Islamic political activism, declaring Islam the state religion and later adopting provisions for Shari'a into the constitution. Good as his word, Kissinger restrained Israel enough during the October War in '73 to engineer a stalemate, and Washington supported the new Egyptian regime with millions in annual economic aid. With political Islam flourishing across Saudi Arabia and Egypt the stage was set for Washington's crucial role in organizing the first global jihad. The "Health Alteration Committee", a CIA assassination program, sends the disobedient Iraqi dictator Abdel Karim Qassim - who came to power in 1958 overthrowing the British puppet Nuri Said and then helped found OPEC - a poisoned handkerchief. After a number of similarly failed coup attempts James H Critchfield finally stages a successful coup against Qassim supporting the Baath Party, ushering in a wave of bloodbaths against CIA-provided lists of leftists and communists, slaughter of the Kurds, and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Turkomans, and Shi'ites. The CIA backs another coup in 1968 putting Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr into power, leading directly to the dictatorship of long-time American asset Saddam Hussein in 1979. A right wing coup with ties to the USG forestalls an election in which Juan Jose Arevalo was favored to win. CIA organizes a right-wing coup of the Brazilian republic. The resulting dictatorship suppressed, censored, and tortured the opposition, the suspected opposition, everybody else, and it's economic policies drove the per capita GNP to one of the lowest in Latin American, in one of the wealthiest nations in the world.
Brazil has been more or less in the back pocket of US interests before and since, and makes a clear example of how US interests are protected by keeping peoples and governments in line, be it by hook or crook. The 2002 election of the liberal canidate Luiz Lula to the presidency demonstrates how foreign economic pressures are put to bear in the form of self-fulfilling prophecies: "For months international investment banks have been downgrading Brazil's government bonds, saying that a Lula presidency would likely lead to a default. This caused the collapse of the real, which has led to rising prices for all imports, including oil, and a spike in interest rates." 22 Panamanian students shot for raising a Panamanian flag in the canal zone. USG backs repressive dictatorship of Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Acting through the US client state in Brazil the USG works to influence Uruguay's elections with voter and candidate initimidation amidst US supported violence, militant repression and increased use of torture as part of the counterinsurgency program. USG supports rule of Ferdinand Marcos [2], the exemplar of "crony capistalism". Elected in 1965 and 1969, Marcos takes advantage of terrorist bombings (some of which were carried out by his government) in 1972 and seizes dictatoral power. He was praised by US leaders for his democratic virtues until his downfall in 1986, when he was exiled to California. The new Aquino government is also supported by the US, and uses "counter-insurgency" death squads - organized under Marcos with CIA assistance - to purge opposition to the new government, which fails to make significant economic reforms. USG supports Suharto's military coup under the auspices of a Communist plot and assists in the murder of 500,000-1,000,000 civilians, starting from a list of 5,000 provided by the State Department and CIA. Green Berets intervene to support client state. Arms and advisers sent to implement a counter-insurgency program.
When Kwame Nkrumah publishes his book Neo-Colonialism, predicting that the US and other foreign powers would continue to cynically interfere in African affairs, the US reacts harshly by cancelling aid it had promised and noting that the USG "could not now foresee all consequences of book but that these would 'undoubtedly become evident in due course.'" Such an "attack of this nature" - that is a relatively accurate written work of non-fiction - by a "Head of State" was "unacceptable". One simply cannot feel free to write a book expressing criticism of US policy if one runs a third world country. That would be outrageous. Four months later the CIA backs a coup against Kwame Nkrumah, the first in a long and troubled history, during which the country is ravaged by ensuing IMF structural adjustment policies, giving Western companies a monopoly over Ghana's large gold deposits, among other pillaged resources. 43 killed in confrontation between blacks and US military forces. Gen. Jos? Alberto Medrano, who is on the payroll of the CIA, organizes the ORDEN and ANSESAL paramilitary forces, the precursors to El Salvador's proliferation of death squads. Overthrow of the elected government by the military dictatorship of School of Americas graduate Major General Juan Valesco Alvarado, initiating military rule for seven years. Alvarado's junta ousted Belaunde Terry, who was resistant to nationalizing oil production and had devalued the Sol by over forty percent. Alvarado's leftist junta immediately nationalized oil production in 1968, but allowed foreign investors back in after 1971 under somewhat, for Peru, more generous contracts. The USG had been providing training to Peruvian security forces for some time, similar in content to that elsewhere. At the same time, throughout much of the 1970s, Peru was the leading recipient of Soviet arms in South America. After the reinstatement of democracy in 1980 the USG involved itself under the auspices of the drug war, during which it likely targetted Peru with biological and chemical warfare programs. Alberto Fujimori was president between 1990 to 2000, and the CIA was delivering $1 million a year to his intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos to fight drug trafficking, knowing at the time that Montesinos was in bed with narcotraffickers, and helping him rig elections to keep Fujimori in office. The USG has provided military helicopters and advisors to the Peruvian military, amid reports from human rights groups that the military was engaged in serious human rights abuses including disappearances, torture, and rape. Fujimori suspended democratic rule early in his first term and engaged in a violent, often indiscriminate but successful crack down against a resurgent Shining Path and Tupac Amaru. He used the suspension of democracy to enforce economic policies that plunged Peru deeper into poverty (minus an oppulent minority of Peruvian and Western business men) in one of the most thorough examples of 'shock therapy' in Latin America of the time. The SP is a brutal neo-Marxist/Leninist guerilla organization responsible for the murders of about 11,000 people, including a large number of "bourgeoisie" leftists. As part of the counter-insurgency Fujimori's security services formed the Grupo Colina, headed by a former SOA graduate that was an officer in a Honduras death squad. Grupo Colina engaged in numerous atrocities against civillians and contributed to the dramatic rise of human rights abuses, many targetting political opponents and journalists. Caught between a minority militant left and a dictatoral militant right: everybody else, particularly indigenous peoples living in oil rich areas. Fujimori is now in exile in Japan. Montesinos was caught on the run through Venezuela and extradited to Peru, where he was convicted of usurptation. USG covers for Mexican government's human rights absuses during their dirty war. The principal features of this ruthless oppression were the indiscriminate killing of civilians, including women and children; the attempt to exterminate or drive out of the country a large part of the Hindu population; the arrest, torture, and killing of Awami League activists, students, professional and business men and other potential leaders among the Bengalis; the raping of women, the destruction of villages and towns; and the looting of property. All this was done on a scale which was difficult to comprehend. In December 1970, elections held in East and West Pakistan (at the time a single nation where East Pakistan, some 1,000 miles from its counterpart, was ruled by the west - now Bangladesh and Pakistan respectively) result in a legislative majority for an East Pakistani nationalist party. The military dictator who chose to hold the elections and enact democratic reform in the first place, General Yahya Khan, suspends the election results. Resulting protests in East Pakistan lead to a rampage of violence by Khan's West Pakistani dominated military against the Awami League party and the Bengalese population in general. In the resulting genocide * * somewhere between 500,000 to 3 million East Pakistanis are slaughtered, raped, and tortured over the course of 9 months. President Nixon - against the advice of US diplomats and State Department officials who described the situation as genocide in the Blood Telegram and numerous subsequent reports to the White House - refuses to react to the campaign, or rather, reacts by supporting the perpetrators. An arms "embargo" was issued shortly after the onslaught began, on March 25th, but the embargo only applied to the issue of new arms licenses. Existing contracts for spare parts, ammunition, and other 'non-lethal' aid are honored, and through legal loopholes and third party allies, the US military aid continues to flow throughout much of the atrocites. The US ships some $15 million in military aid to Yahya Khan's government during the campaign, making it the only country in the world to continue support during the crisis by mid-year. When the India-Pak conflict steps up in December Pakistan is further assisted in the procurement of, among other things, American fighter planes via Iran and Jordan, supplying a squandron of 10 F-104As. While this was in response to rising tensions between India and Pakistan, the rising tensions were themselves created by events in East Pakistan, thus making any aid against India implicitly material and moral support for the continuation of atrocities. Nixon and Kissinger, in the midst of persuing talks with China through Pakistan (alternative channels had also been opened in Romania, and later Paris), act in every possible way to support Yahya. China, arguably as complicit a supporter of the campaign as Washington, promised aid but never delivered. No condemnation is ever issued over Yahya's policies in East Pakistan, and little to no effort is made to negotiate an end to the atrocities so much as the opposite. On the White House tapes, Kissinger scorned those empathetic Americans who “bleed” for “the dying Bengalis.” Briefing the White House staff about how Pakistani General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan helped get him into China during his secret July 1971 trip -- which was an important reason for his unyielding support for Pakistan -- he joked, “The cloak-and-dagger exercise in Pakistan arranging the trip was fascinating. Yahya hasn’t had such fun since the last Hindu massacre!” Amid all this some ten million East Pakistani refugees had flooded into India en masse by December of 1971. On December 3rd, after months of mounting tensions, Pakistani air attacks on Indian bases resulted in India's two week invasion of East Pakistan in December 1971 to end the destabalizing campaign of genocide ('civillian invasion', as India referred to it in the UN), weaken Pakistan, and to prevent the formation of a radicalized and independent East Pakistan. During the invasion the US sends the nuclear sub, USS Enterprise, into the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India, threatened to cut off economic aid to India, and went so far as to offer China a green light to invade India. When the UN finally takes up the issue of the events after the Indian intervention India makes appeals against the atrocities being perpetrated by the Pak army - the invasion effectively ends the atrocities and results in the repatriation of almost all East Pakistani refugees within a year. The Whitehouse response, and much of the rest of the world's, was to condemn India's 'aggression'. After independence the new Bengalese government is torn by inter-faction fighting and military coups - revenge campaigns, property seizures and other conflicts take a heavy toll (up to 150,000) on the non-Bengali population (primarily Bihari), who were percieved as and in many cases were collaborating with the Pak army. Population transfer programs under the New Delhi Agreement in 1973 results in Pakistan's recognition of Bangladesh in 1974, but Pakistan, with domestic problems of its own, is slow to repatriate the Bihari population. As of 1999 some 200,000 were still living in 66 refugee camps within Bangladesh [see: Rupture in South Asia, pdf]. British/Israeli/American backed coup of Idi Amin: "Amin repudiated Obote's nonaligned foreign policy, and his government was quickly recognized by Israel, Britain, and the United States". In early 1972 Amin reverses his alignment however, kicking out Israeli advisers and accepting support from the Soviets and Libya. After breaking relations with the Soviets in 1976 over their intervention in Agola Amin became increasingly isolated, with only Libya and the PLO offering assistance against the 1978 Tanzania invasion, with 1,000 Ugandan exiles, that send him into exile in early 1979. Amin's rule was brutal, ethnically cleansing Uganda's ~60,000 ethnic Asians, killing as many as 250,000 Ugandan citizens, and destroying the economy. School of Americas graduate General Hugo Banzer Suarez leads a bloody coup in 1971 and installs a military dictatorship with strong US backing - recieving more US military aid in his first year than Bolivia had recieved in the previous 12. In 1974 he begins a campaign of repression against labor leaders, leftist politicians, and Catholic aid workers who were attempting to aid the indigenous Bolivians the regime had dispossessed. Henry Kissinger plots the Nazi overthrow of Willy Brandt. Nixon resigns and Gerald Ford nixes the Nazis. USG backs overthrow of Philippine republic. Overthrow of the elected government by the military dictatorship of School of the Americas graduate Major General Guillermo Rodriguez, initiating military rule for seven years. US directs Iranian marine invasion in support of the Sultan, quelling the anti-monarchist Dhofar rebellion. The effect on foreign nations, the biological, biochemical, and chemical warfare programs, CIA involvement in funding death squad activity with narcotrafficking proceeds, the massive influx of said narcotrafficking into American cities - nevermind dousing unwitting members of the general population with LSD - and other fall out from the war on drugs is dealt with intermintently elsewhere. At home the drug war policy of the past 40 years has become largely a matter of controlling sectors of the domestic population, primarily black men. In an apparent effort to make China look good, the US has thrown over 500,000 drug "offenders" behind bars out of political expediency. A full third of the population has used illegal narcotics - funding in turn the secret wars waged by Uncle Sam with the drug money - and presumably belong in there with them. Instead it is overwhelmingly young black men who suffer the highest rates of incarceration. 300 million US citizens make up about 5% of the world's population, and it's 2,000,000 inmates make up about 25% of the world's imprisoned population, with another 4,000,000 citizens on probation. In comparison, China's police-state with a population of 1.3 billion people has 1.5 million inmates and an estimated 230,000 in laogai 're-education camps' - together approxiamately one fifth the incarceration rate of the world's greatest democracy. About a quarter of all robbery, burglary, and larceny offenses were committed to obtain drugs. About 25% of the Federal prison population is put to forced labor, compensated at less than a dollar an hour. Many Americans have sought asylum in Canada, calling into question facile arguments about why nobody is trying to get out of this country. Like most people I'd like to see an end to the heroin trade and a reasonable drug policy with respect to marijuana and other relatively harmless, none-to-low addiction, entertaining substances, with social programs that focus on rehabilitation, stress responsible drug use and provide accurate information, and national programs that focus on blocking the importation of illegal narcotics. Actually, I would have assumed that this is what a "war on drugs" would have originally entailed. The past 30 years of policy have been completely the opposite: non-rehabilitative treatment, invading foreign countries to destroy local agriculture, manipulating agriculture prices to drive out foreign competition and push third world farmers into drug production, funding, arming, and cooperating with narcotraffickers abroad, and using profits off drug traffic to fund covert operations. Sort of makes the sincerity of the anti-drug warriors sound a little disingenuous. I think I'm paraphrasing Bill Maher when I point out that we're deforesting South America because we can't kick our cocaine habit. Failing to bring about a subservient government by meddling in elections and political repression, the USG supports the military in their power grab. I've read that the military government created the highest percentage of a population imprisoned for political reasons in the world. The CIA, cooperating with Iranian and Pakistani intelligence, foment Islamic fundamentalists linked to the Saudi Muslim World League and Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood into abortive coup attempts against Mohammed Daoud in 1973 and 1974 [*]. The attempts nevertheless move Daoud to the right, and the US begins providing financial and military assistance to him as he cracks down on the left. While actively competing for influence in Afghanistan since the 1950s with economic assistance, the USG had refrained from providing military assistance without a signature on an anti-Communism pact - US policy being antagonistic to non-aligned nations. This begins the USG's long history of involvement in the internal affairs of Afghanistan. US armed forces lay siege on Lakotas at Wounded Knee. This is where the US government, after some of the extent of past activities is revealed to the public, sends up a wall of salvos hailing reform, rehabilitation, and a new era in US benevolence. It reflected a renewed dedication to "plausible deniability". Longtime bigwhig and hotspot bureaucrat Frank Carlucci - later to be Deputy Director of the CIA under Carter and Secretary of Defense under Reagan - begins a stint as Ambassador to Portugal immediately after the 1974 revolution, which came about due to shifts in military demographics away from the aristocracy towards working class conscripts, who were then being sent off to fight anti-colonial rebellions in Portugal's African dependencies (Angola, Mozambique, et. al.). Since World War II the USG had intermittently supported the repressive, colonialist regime - particularly under Nixon. When the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA), consisting mostly of mid-rank officers who had no interest in dying for somebody else's colonial enterprise, lead a coup, the old government surrendered to the relatively conservative General Spinola. The US was initially unworried by these developments, until Spinola appointed General Vasco dos Santos Goncalves, who was a member of Portugal's Communist Party, as his replacement. The USG government then begins supporting more conservative liberal-socialist groups within the MFA, leading to strong electoral victories in elections that are held during 1975 and 1976. No death squads or mass murders of "suspected leftists", Portugal remained within the "Western sphere" and became a typical liberal-capitalist state, with the economic disparities of the old system left intact. It could have easily happened, if Kissinger got his way. Given the alternatives, or the lack of them, one might agree with Ambassador Robert Hunter: I don't know if you remember, Frank, when I worked for Sen. Ted Kennedy and we visited Lisbon in November 1974 and, when we came back - against the opposition of certain people in a certain administration - the Senator got $50 million for Portugal. Frank Carlucci was then sent out there to keep the lid on. But he took the lid off and helped produce democracy rather than a fall into communism in Portugal. I'm not so sure, Frank, that everybody's really thanked you as much as they need to do so, but Portugal is a free and democratic nation to a great extent because of this gentleman sitting here, to promote the aspirations of peoples for democracy. Carlucci is now Chairman of the Carlyle Group, because "former U.S. Secretaries of Defense get their calls returned everywhere on the planet, especially when they've got multibillion dollar funds at their disposal". Since its 1974 passage the US government has forcibly relocated 100 Hopi and 12,000 Navajo. In 1975 the USG collaborated with South Africa in its invasion of Angola, and in response Castro sent 30,000 Cuban troops to assist Angola without, it seems, informing the Soviets. After 1976 the CIA continues assisting South African backed nationalist rebels of FNLA and UNITA, fueling a conflict against the internationally recognized Angolan government of the MPLA. Covert aid increases dramatically after 1985, with over $50 million being delivered in 1989. At the same time American oil companies are in Angola being protected by Cuban troops. The USG supported violence resulted in over 100,000 deaths - mostly civillian, by 1989, and amidst cease-fire agreements continued to support UNITA's efforts to prolong the conflict. The West supports Suharto's killing spree of hundreds of thousands of East Timorese, exterminating somewhere on the order of one third of the population in one of the most thorough acts of genocide committed in recent history. Expansive trade relations, military aid, and the sale of arms to Indonesisa continued unabated until 1999, and in 2002 began anew.
Invaded by Vietnam in 1979, the genocidal "communist" Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia - allied with the Sihanoukist National Army (ANS) and Son Sann's Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF) - almost immediately began recieving assistance from the US government and was recognized by the UN (under US pressure) as a legitamate member of a fictional coallition government of Cambodia. Humanitarian aide organizations were pressured by the US into providing assistance to Khmer Rouge guerillas using refugee camps as bases of operation while the rest of the country was placed under a blockade in the midst of a mass famine. In 1989 the US congress passed a bill prohibiting lethal aid to Pol Pot, long held up as evidence for the evil of Communism. Curiously it rarely is seen as evidence of an utter, abject failure of US foreign policy. In response to the Congressional ban, the Whitehosue began directing arms shipments to the Khmer Rouge through Singapore. Suspected CIA organization of coup against Timoci Bavadra, who attempted to ban nuclear vessels from Fiji ports. Army assists raids in cocaine producing regions, with ineffective results. In 1988 the USG places an embargo on Panama, after the DEA indicts the US client Noriega on drug trafficking charges. Bush sends 26,000 US troops to invade Panama, killing thousands of Panamanians before capturing a CIA-employee of 30 odd years and bringing him to Florida to stand trial. Of all the charges brought only one took place after 1984, and the US government had known he was involved in the drug trade since 1972. After years of helping Noriega steal elections despite his well-known abuses, this explanation for his removal does not suffice, nor is it explained as a response to violence against Americans, except as an indication of Noriega's recent unwillingness to follow US orders, in part concerning the canal. His being a thug, and a relatively minor one, was exaggerated to raise public support for the invasion - that the worst human rights abuses were committed by US trained forces is never mentioned. Regardless of US motivation the intervention may well have been justified, as would operations to oust the US-assisted dictators in El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, etc., all of whom had far worse records of drug trafficing and/or human rights abuse. These having had hand-picked US agents committing the atrocities, no such operations occurred. Since at least 1988 the US has been fucking with Columbia's internal politics and backing state sponsored and paramilitary violence, well beyond any legal involvement in the "war on drugs" or anything justifying the rape of another South American country, considering the military we're supporting is part of the drug racket and that the people profiting the most off the trade, both in arms and drugs, are Americans. The violence between FARC and the Columbian military/paramilitary has pushed Columbia's inhabitants deep into poverty, causing cocoa production to explode as farmers move away from what is now unsustainable crop development, exacerbated further by US scorched earth polices, carried out by DynCorp [2]. Caught in the middle of the violence are various Columbian autonomous municipalities. According to the UN there are some 720,000 refugees in Columbia, and many have spilled over into neighboring nations. " American involvement in Columbia is increasing drastically, supporting President Uribe - who just so happens to be a member of the notorious narco-trafficking Mendellin Cartel. Following the Gulf War the US advances through the UN the most severe sanctions program in history and initiates a similarly unique decade-long bombing campaign. Between the war, bombing and sanctions the US sent a once-modern nation back to the dark ages. The campaign of indiscriminate destruction during the Gulf War wiped out 90% of Iraq's water supplies and was responsible for deaths of some 100,000 to 600,000 children under the age of 5, nevermind other mounting casualties and suffering among the civillian population, and making them depedent upon the state for survival. Two directors of the UN humanitarian program in Iraq, Dennis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, resigned in protest of the destruction of civillian life wreaked by the sanctions regime, calling them "genocidal". Because of such "efforts" Hussein's grip over southern Iraq, if anything, tightened. A much touted Iraqi defector, Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, reported in 1995 that shortly after the Gulf War Iraq destroyed its unconventional weapons. Few actual weapons were found by UNSCOM, no actual chemical weapons were found that the Iraqi government didn't lead inspectors to, and there certainly wasn't anything like the Whitehouse claimed in 2003. Despite Iraqi manuevering both the IAEA and UNSCOM were highly successful in destorying remaining bits and pieces of potential weapons programs, preventing the reconstitution of weapons programs, and verifying that much of Iraq's armaments had been unilaterally destroyed by Iraq. What remained were elements the UN had evidence of, but which Iraq had destroyed their own documents on, making it impossible to definitively prove the program's destruction in 1991. Instead Iraq simply insisted the programs didn't exist. Rather than seeking disarmament US policy was that sanctions be conditional on regime change rather than disarmament per the UN mandate. Complicating the matter further the US was using inspections for that purpose, making the regime justifiably paranoid about exposure to weapons inspections. Paradoxically the situation feared by successive US administrations was that Iraq actually prove that it had disarmed in 1991 and begin normalizing relations with its neighbors. The US begins backing revolutionary and separatist groups inside and outside Iran that are engaged in various terrorist campaigns against the Iranian government. In September of 2009 President Obama signs a directive, the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, granting Pentagon brass expansive powers to carry out covert military operations in Iran, Syria, Somalia, Saudia Arabia, Yemen, and others. The alleged recipients of this support include a patchwork of islamist and communist terrorist organizations in neighboring states: In Iraq: Funding for their separatist causes [inside Iran] comes directly from the CIA's classified budget but is now "no great secret", according to one former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph. US Special Forces deployed to assist in the fight against Boko Haram. The US directly supports the massive criminal enterprise of the Saudi led invasion of Yemen with naval support for an indiscriminate blockade, planning and targetting assistance, occasional special forces interventions, routine drone attacks, and an endlesstream of arms to it's UAE and Saudi allies. With children making up a quarter of the victims of the war some 250,000 people have died, about 1% of Yemen's population. The United States elects Juan Guaidó to the Presidency of Venezuela. Venezuelans appear to have already elected their own president, who anti-democratically refuses to vacate the goverment for the foreign vassal. Guaidó leads a circus rather than a shadow government from inside the country, where for some reason he is allowed to continue presiding over his clown show from home rather than in exile, which just serves as further evidence of Maduro's totalitarian repression of dissent. Manipulating the Organization of American States election monitoring regime, the United States leads an effort to discredit the results of President Evo Morales' re-election, fomenting a coup and Morales' exile. The pretexts for the coup turn out to be so embarrassingly ridiculous that Morales' finance minister Luis Arce handily wins the subsequent election in 2020. The Biden administrationi's refrain that Ukraine has a right to join NATO because sovereign nations have the right to ally with whomever they choose is quickly dispensed with when they support a military coup against Pakistan's elected president for remaining neutral in the Ukraine-Russia conflict on the other side of the continent. Opposite the president's campaign trail promises -- Joe Biden made the conflict a campaign issue and promised a ceasefire alongside a promise to recognize the Armenian genocide -- the Biden administration runs around Congress to approve arms sales for Azerbaijan's ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population from Nagorno-Karabakh. President Biden supports Israel's genocidal ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza and escalation of state-sponsored terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank, all in the name of defeating a group of war orphans named "Hamas" that is primarily supported by agents of the Israeli far right like Benjamin Netanyahu, who use their bloodlust as a tool to divide and conquer Palestinians and prevent a settlement. It's not easy to assess the size or exact value of our empire of bases. Official records on these subjects are misleading, although instructive. According to the Defense Department's annual "Base Structure Report" for fiscal year 2003, which itemizes foreign and domestic U.S. military real estate, the Pentagon currently owns or rents 702 overseas bases in about 130 countries and HAS another 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories. Pentagon bureaucrats calculate that it would require at least $113.2 billion to replace just the foreign bases -- surely far too low a figure but still larger than the gross domestic product of most countries -- and an estimated $591,519.8 million to replace all of them. The military high command deploys to our overseas bases some 253,288 uniformed personnel, plus an equal number of dependents and Department of Defense civilian officials, and employs an additional 44,446 locally hired foreigners. The Pentagon claims that these bases contain 44,870 barracks, hangars, hospitals, and other buildings, which it owns, and that it leases 4,844 more. Not only by controlling the manifolds of public/academic/media access to government agencies but by outright destruction of its own historical documents. The demands of national security require that certain agencies are not held accountable for their actions for some finite length of time, but a nation is only damaged by wiping out its past. In 1994 it was revealed that in August 1974, the Joint Chiefs of Staff destroyed all the minutes and transcripts of their meetings going back to 1947, and in 1978 essentially stopped keeping any such records. The State Department's own historians hired to review the declassification process have been duly outraged by such policies. Dr. Warrant Cohen resigned as chairman of HADCOM in 1989 because of distortions of the documentary record regarding US policy towards Iran. Despite the advances made since the enactment of the FOIA, on Nov 1, 2001 President Bush issued an executive order to seal all presidential records since 1980. "Overall, 117 partisan electoral interventions were made by the US and the USSR/Russia between 1 January 1946 and 31 December 2000. Eighty-one (or 69%) of these interventions were done by the US while the other 36 cases (or 31%) were conducted by the USSR/Russia. To put this number in the proper perspective, during the same period 937 competitive national-level executive elections, or plausible targets for an electoral intervention, were conducted within independent countries.20 Accordingly, 11.3% of these elections, or about one of every nine competitive elections since the end of the Second World War, have been the targets of an electoral intervention." "Free" trade: the fact that they're the only international agreements the US is interested in alone should tell you something about them. The US, which may be the last "hegemon", has taken the lead on behalf of the agenda of transnational elite. The World Bank estimates that by the early 1980's, intra-firm trade within the largest 350 transnational corporations contributed about 40% of global trade. The nation-state is increasingly becoming obsolete as the unit of analysis. Though economy and decision-making interacts, the 'independent' variable which ultimately counts is the economic globalization. Documents: |