Our Empire Documents;
Part 2. (36 pages.)
OTHER STATEMENTS ON RICH WORLD ACTION
"…the West has a long and bloody history of working with and through fascist dictators against democracy and other impediments to profits."
Edwards, The Compassionate Revolution, Green Books, 1998.
"…the West has a long and bloody history of working with and through fascist dictators against democracy and other impediments to profits."
Edwards, The Compassionate Revolution, Green Books, 1998.
While decrying human rights abuses in countries like China, the US and its allies support or at least ratify abuses elsewhere–notably where economic and or military aid has been extended. In the case of Yugoslavia, the 79 days of US-engineered NATO bombings not only severely damaged the Serb infrastructure and killed hundreds of people, but assaulted virtually every canon of international law and order, even the NATO Charter itself which prohibits military attacks against sovereign nations not engaged in aggression. At this juncture we quickly encounter yet another definition of globalization. The US, exercising its self-granted right as military superpower, has consistently expressed contempt for global bodies, meetings, procedures that do not buttress its own policies.
The deadly attack on Yugoslavia justified as a moral campaign against 'ethnic cleansing', might well turn out to be the first 'war' fought strictly for the purpose of extending the international market economy presided over by the US .
T. Fotopoulos,"Globalisation , the reformist left and the anti-globalisation movement, Democracy and Nature, 7, 2, July 21001.p.249.
Ellen C. Collier, Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad, 1798-1993, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, CRS Issue Brief, October 7, 1993– available online at <http://www.fas.org/man/crs/crs 931007.htm>.
The Congressional Research Service lists sixty six instances of the employment of U.S. military forces abroad over the period 1945-1993 (245 over the period 1798-1993). This list can be updated for the last eight years, bringing the total since 1945 to over seventy.
There has been a blackout on the subject of the role of the United States as arguably the leading terrorist force in the world. In 1998, for example, Amnesty International released a report which made it clear that the United States was as responsible for extreme violations of human rights around the globe–including the promotion of torture and terrorism and the use of state violence–as any government or organization in the world.
The U.S. role in propping up corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and its appalling record of supporting and bankrolling the Israeli assault on the Palestinians are outside the purview of most U.S. residents.
Amnesty International, The United States of America: Rights for AII (London: Amnesty International, 1998), see especially chapters 7 and 8. Available online at: <http://web.amnesty.org>.
Hence in Britain, empire was justified as a benevolent "white man's burden." And in the United States, empire does not even exist; "we" are merely protecting the causes of freedom, democracy, and justice worldwide.
The Editors, "After the attacks…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review, 53, 6, Nov., 2001. P 7 .
How power is exercised… Britain was forced to accept the US proposals at the Bretton Woods conference.
In Britain there was a great deal of informal dissent about the agreement, but Parliament had been informed that a condition of the latest US war loan to Britain was acceptance r of the conference proposal, and this was duly carried.
Editorial, "An era of error ends in terror", ERA Newsletter, 2, 21, Nov-Dec, 2001.
International affairs commentators Michael Albert and Stephen Shalom point out that the US government's current approach violates international law, which provides for international courts, established by the United Nations, to try persons who are accused of crimes against humanity such as the massacre in the US. According to UN doctrine, a nation is entitled to act in self-defence but - in Albert and Shalom's words - this "does not allow countries themselves to launch massive reprisal raids - precisely because to allow such reprisals would lead to an endless cycle of unrestrained violence." (from "Five Reasons Not to Go to War", www.zmag.org)
The sad fact is that the US state, as part of its foreign policy strategy, has long been using terrorist networks, and carrying out acts of terror itself. Notorious examples include: US support for the military coup that overthrew the Allende government in Chile in the early 1970s; US support for fighters who used terrorist methods in ousting the former Soviet Union‚s occupying forces from Afghanistan in the 1980s.
There are billions of people in the world who have nothing to lose and the only thing they own is their burning hate against us, the so called "wealthy countries".
Ed Deak, Economic Theories more destructive than terrorists, Gold River Record, 21 Sept, 2001.
…this relentless pursuit of terrorism is, in my opinion, almost criminal. It allows the United States to do what it wishes anywhere in the world. Take, for example, the 1998 bombing of Sudan. That was done because Bill Clinton was having trouble with Monica Lewinsky. There was a paper-thin excuse that they were bombing a terrorist factory, which turned out to be a pharmaceutical factory producing half the pharmaceutical supply for the country, which a few weeks later was in the grip of a plague. Hundreds of people died as a result of the plague because there were no pharmaceuticals to treat them because of the willful bombing by the United States…
Any threat to its interests, whether it's oil in the Middle East or its geostrategic interests elsewhere, is labelled as terrorism, which is exactly what the Israelis have been doing since the mid-1970s in response to Palestinian resistance to their policies. ..
The French used the word terrorism for everything that the Algerians did to resist their occupation, which began in 1830 and didn't end until 1962. The British used it in Burma and in Malaysia. Terrorism is anything that stands in the face of what we want to do.
This focus obscures the enormous damage done by the United States, whether militarily, environmentally, or economically, on a world scale, which far dwarfs anything that terrorism might do.
The greatest source of terrorism is the US itself and some of the Latin American countries, not at all the Muslim ones.
The Iraqi civilian population has suffered enormous harm, genocidal harm, thanks to the United Kingdom and the United States.
The power and wealth of the United States is such that most people have no awareness of the damage that has been caused in its name - or the hatred that has been built up against it throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world.
Edward Said, "What they want is my silence", Third World Resurgence, 131/132, 2001, 68.
As if corporate globalization, pushed by the U.S. government and its closest allies, with the help of the World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF, had not unleashed a tremendous immiseration process on the Third World, with budget cuts and import devastation of artisans and small farmers. Many of these hundreds of millions of losers are quite aware of the role of the United States in this process.
Noam Chomsky and I reported back in1979, of 35 countries using torture on an administrative basis in the late 1970s, 26 were clients of the United States. The idea that many of those torture victims and their families, and the families of the thousands of "disappeared" in Latin America in the 1960s through the 1980s, may have harbored some ill-feelings toward the United States remains unthinkable to U.S. commentators.
During the Vietnam war the United States used its enormous military power to try to install in South Vietnam a minority government of U.S. choice, with its military operations based on the knowledge that the people there were the enemy. This country killed millions and left Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) devastated. A Wall Street Journal report in 1997 estimated that perhaps 500,000 children in Vietnam suffer from serious birth defects resulting from the U.S. use of chemical weapons there. Here again there could be a great many people with well-grounded hostile feelings toward the United States.
The same is true of millions in southern Africa, where the United States supported Savimbi in Angola and carried out a policy of "constructive engagement" with apartheid South Africa as it carried out a huge cross-border terroristic operation against the frontline states in the 1970s and 1980s, with enormous casualties. U.S. support of "our kind of guy" Suharto as he killed and stole at home and in East Timor, and its long warm relation with Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, also may have generated a great deal of hostility toward this country among the numerous victims.
Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation," and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture; and they surely remember that the United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war with them, and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons against the enemy state. Their civilian airliner 655 that was destroyed in 1988, killing 290 people, was downed by a U.S. warship engaged in helping Saddam Hussein fight his war with Iran. Many Iranians may know that the commander of that ship was given a Legion of Merit award in 1990 for his "outstanding service" (but readers of the New York Times would not know this as the paper has never mentioned this high level commendation).
The Iraqis then had their turn. Saddam moved from valued ally in the 1980s, whose use of "weapons of mass destruction" against Iran and the Iraqi Kurds caused no problem at all with his U.S. and British friends, to "another Hitler" upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Suddenly his possession of "weapons of mass destruction" became an extremely urgent matter as the man had demonstrated an inability to follow orders. The war and "sanctions of mass destruction" that followed have killed more than a million Iraqis, and in the well-know words of Madeleine Albright, questioned on whether the death of 500,000 Iraqi children was justified by the U.S. policy ends, replied, "it is worth it." No doubt, but an objective observer would recognize that there may be many Iraqis who feel with some justification that the United States is an evil force.
The unbending U.S. backing for Israel as that country has carried out a long-term policy of expropriating Palestinian land in a major ethnic cleansing process, has produced two intifadas -- uprisings reflecting the desperation of an oppressed people. But these uprisings and this fight for elementary rights have had no constructive consequences because the United States gives the ethnic cleanser arms, diplomatic protection, and carte blanche as regards policy.
All of these victims may well have a distaste for "Western civilization and cultural values," but that is because they recognize that these include the ruthless imposition of a neoliberal regime that serves Western transnational corporate interests, along with a willingness to use unlimited force to achieve Western ends. This is genuine imperialism, sometimes using economic coercion alone, sometimes supplementing it with violence, but with many millions--perhaps even billions--of people "unworthy victims." The Times editors do not recognize this, or at least do not admit it, because they are spokespersons for an imperialism that is riding high and whose principals are prepared to change its policies. This bodes ill for the future. But it is of great importance right now to stress the fact that imperial terrorism inevitably produces retail terrorist responses; that the urgent need is the curbing of the causal force, which is the rampaging empire.
Extracts from "Folks out there have a "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values", Edward Herman, 2001. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HER109A.html
…during the Korean War, terror bombing of civilians was the policy of the US Air Force's Far Eastern Command, which was instructed to pulverize anything that moved in enemy territory. So successful was the policy that in the summer of 1951, the commander was able to report that "there is no structure left to be targeted." In Vietnam, where the US was frustrated by the fact that combatants and civilians were indistinguishable, indiscriminate killing of civilians was a central part of a "counterinsurgency war" in which 20,000 civilians were systematically assassinated under the CIA's Operation Phoenix Program in the Mekong Delta.
…the underlying issues are the twin pillars of US policy in the Middle East. One is subordination of the interests of the peoples of the region to the US' untrammeled access to Middle East oil in order to maintain its petroleum-based civilization. To this end, the US overthrew the nationalist government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, cultivated the repressive Shah of Iran as the gendarme of the Persian Gulf, supported anti-democratic feudal regimes in the Arabian peninsula, and introduced a massive permanent military presence in Saudi Arabia, which contains some of Islam's most sacred shrines and cities. The war against Saddam Hussein was justified as a war to beat back aggression, but everybody knew that Washington's key motivation was to ensure that the region's most massive oil reserves would remain under the control of pro-Western elites.
The other pillar is unstinting support for Israel. That Arab feelings about Israel are so elemental is not difficult to comprehend. It is hard to argue against the fact that the state of Israel was born on the basis of the massive dispossession of the Palestinian people from their country and their lands. It is impossible to deny that Israel is a European settler-state, one whose establishment was essentially a displacement from European territory of the ethnocultural contradictions of European society. The Holocaust was an unspeakable crime against humanity, but it was utterly wrong to impose its political consequences--chief of which was the creation of Israel--on a people who had nothing to do with it.
It is hard to contradict Arab claims that it was essentially support from the United States that created the state of Israel; that it has been massive US military aid and backing that has maintained it in the last half century; and that it is deep confidence in perpetual US military and political support that enables Israel to oppose in practice the emergence of a viable Palestinian state.
Unless the US abandons these two pillars of its policies, there will always be thousands of recruits for acts of terrorism such as that which occurred last week.
Focus on The GlobalSouth, A Program of Development Policy Research, Analysis and Action, Issue # 31, September 18, 2001.
What is most depressing, however, is how little time is spent trying to understand America's role in the world, and its direct involvement in the complex reality beyond the two coasts that have for so long kept the rest of the world extremely distant and virtually out of the average American's mind. You'd think that 'America' was a sleeping giant rather than a superpower almost constantly at war, or in some sort of conflict, all over the Islamic domains. Osama bin Laden's name and face have become so numbingly familiar to Americans as in effect to obliterate any history he and his shadowy followers might have had before they became stock symbols of everything loathsome and hateful to the collective imagination.
Yet to most people in the Islamic and Arab worlds the official US is synonymous with arrogant power, known for its sanctimoniously munificent support not only of Israel but of numerous repressive Arab regimes, and its inattentiveness even to the possibility of dialogue with secular movements and people who have real grievances. Anti-Americanism in this context is not based on a hatred of modernity or technology-envy: it is based on a narrative of concrete interventions, specific depredations and, in the cases of the Iraqi people's suffering under US-imposed sanctions and US support for the 34-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Israel is now cynically exploiting the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians.
There has been terror of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror.
Edward Said, Many Islams, 17th Sept., 2001.
John Pilger argues that we can't be surprised at the attacks, given Western treatment of the Third World, and the Arab world in particular, such as killing of civilians in Iraq. Such events are not reported and are of no concern in the West. He lists many reasons people in the Third World have for hating the West. The US, through the CIA, has largely created and funded" terrorist" organisations such as the Mujahadeen and bin Laden's group. The US has supported many terrorist regimes which have killed tens of thousands of people, and it uses terror and repressive regimes to secure its empire. (Comment by TT.)
IF the attacks on America have their source in the Islamic world, who can really be surprised?
Two days earlier, eight people were killed in southern Iraq when British and American planes bombed civilian areas. To my knowledge, not a word appeared in the mainstream media in Britain.
An estimated 200,000 Iraqis, according to the Health Education Trust in London, died during and in the immediate aftermath of the slaughter known as the Gulf War.
This was never news that touched public consciousness in the west.
At least a million civilians, half of them children, have since died in Iraq as a result of a medieval embargo imposed by the United States and Britain.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Mujahadeen, which gave birth to the fanatical Taliban, was largely the creation of the CIA. The terrorist training camps where Osama bin Laden, now "America's most wanted man", allegedly planned his attacks, were built with American money and backing.
In Palestine, the enduring illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing. Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims - principally the victims of US fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms, military, strategic and economic, is the greatest source of terrorism on earth.
This fact is censored from the Western media, whose "coverage" at best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, put it this way: "Western foreign policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence."
That Tony Blair, whose government sells lethal weapons to Israel and has sprayed Iraq and Yugoslavia with cluster bombs and depleted uranium and was the greatest arms supplier to the genocidists in Indonesia, can be taken seriously when he now speaks about the "shame" of the "new evil of mass terrorism" says much about the censorship of our collective sense of how the world is managed.
One of Blair's favourite words - "fatuous" - comes to mind. Alas, it is no comfort to the families of thousands of ordinary Americans who have died so terribly that the perpetrators of their suffering may be the product of Western policies. Did the American establishment believe that it could bankroll and manipulate events in the Middle East without cost to itself, or rather its own innocent people?
The attacks on Tuesday come at the end of a long history of betrayal of the Islamic and Arab peoples: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the foundation of the state of Israel, four Arab-Israeli wars and 34 years of Israel's brutal occupation of an Arab nation: all, it seems, obliterated within hours by Tuesday's acts of awesome cruelty by those who say they represent the victims of the West's intervention in their homelands.
"America, which has never known modern war, now has her own terrible league table: perhaps as many as 20,000 victims."
As Robert Fisk points out, in the Middle East, people will grieve the loss of innocent life, but they will ask if the newspapers and television networks of the west ever devoted a fraction of the present coverage to the half-a-million dead children of Iraq, and the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. The answer is no.
There are deeper roots to the atrocities in the US, which made them almost inevitable.
It is not only the rage and grievance in the Middle East and south Asia.
Since the end of the cold war, the US and its sidekicks, principally Britain, have exercised, flaunted, and abused their wealth and power while the divisions imposed on human beings by them and their agents have grown as never before.
An elite group of less than a billion people now take more than 80 per cent of the world's wealth.
In defence of this power and privilege, known by the euphemisms "free market" and "free trade", the injustices are legion: from the illegal blockade of Cuba, to the murderous arms trade, dominated by the US, to its trashing of basic environmental decencies, to the assault on fragile economies by institutions such as the World Trade Organisation that are little more than agents of the US Treasury and the European central banks, and the demands of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in forcing the poorest nations to repay unrepayable debts; to a new US "Vietnam" in Colombia and the sabotage of peace talks between North and South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).
Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism, a word that journalists dare not speak or write. The expulsion of the population of Diego Darcia in the 1960s by the Wilson government received almost no press coverage.
Their homeland is now an American nuclear arms dump and base from which US bombers patrol the Middle East.
In Indonesia, in 1965/6, a million people were killed with the complicity of the US and British governments: the Americans supplying General Suharto with assassination lists, then ticking off names as people were killed.
"Getting British companies and the World Bank back in there was part of the deal", says Roland Challis, who was the BBC's south east Asia correspondent.
British behaviour in Malaya was no different from the American record in Vietnam, for which it proved inspirational: the withholding of food, villages turned into concentration camps and more than half a million people forcibly dispossessed.
In Vietnam, the dispossession, maiming and poisoning of an entire nation was apocalyptic, yet diminished in our memory by Hollywood movies and by what Edward Said rightly calls cultural imperialism.
In Operation Phoenix, in Vietnam, the CIA arranged the homicide of around 50,000 people. As official documents now reveal, this was the model for the terror in Chile that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected leader Salvador Allende, and within 10 years, the crushing of Nicaragua.
All of it was lawless. The list is too long for this piece.
Now imperialism is being rehabilitated. American forces currently operate with impunity from bases in 50 countries. "Full spectrum dominance" is Washington's clearly stated aim.
Read the documents of the US Space Command, which leaves us in no doubt.
In this country, the eager Blair government has embarked on four violent adventures, in pursuit of "British interests" (dressed up as "peacekeeping"), and which have little or no basis in international law: a record matched by no other British government for half a century.
What has this to do with this week's atrocities in America? If you travel among the impoverished majority of humanity, you understand that it has everything to do with it.
People are neither still, nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism.
But how patient the oppressed have been.
It is only a few years ago that the Islamic fundamentalist groups, willing to blow themselves up in Israel and New York, were formed, and only after Israel and the US had rejected outright the hope of a Palestinian state, and justice for a people scarred by imperialism.
Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalised places have at last come home.
John Pilger, "Inevitable ring to the unimaginable", Sept, 2001, Full article at:http://www.theherald.co.uk/news/archive/13-9-19101-0-24-43.html
The authors refer to "The US role in propping up corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and its appalling record of supporting and bankrolling the Israeli assault on the Palestinans…"
The editors, "After the attacks; the war on terrorism…", Monthly Review, Nov., 2001, pp. 8.
Third world governments like that of Suharto in Indonesia "…are Western clients…whose task is to open their countries to foreign plunder, repress the population (by huge massacres if necessary), and enrich them selves if they feel like it…"
N. Çhomsky "The capitalist principle and Third World debt",.
"The most effective means for ensuring a lasting colonisation of Third World countries is to set up a Westernised elite, hooked on a model of economic development which it is willing to promote regardless of the interests of the majority of its citizens."
E. Goldsmith, "Empires without armies", The Ecologist, 29. 2. May/June 1999, p. 155.
Any threat to (US) interests, whether it's oil in the Middle East or its geostrategic interests elsewhere, is labelled as terrorism, which is exactly what the Israelis have been doing since the mid-1970s in response to Palestinian resistance to their policies. The French used the word terrorism for everything that the Algerians did to resist their occupation, which began in 1830 and didn't end until 1962. The British used it in Burma and in Malaysia. Terrorism is anything that stands in the face of what we want to do. This focus obscures the enormous damage done by the United States, whether militarily, environmentally, or economically, on a world scale, which far dwarfs anything that terrorism might do. The greatest source of terrorism is the US itself and some of the Latin American countries, not at all the Muslim ones. The power and wealth of the United States is such that most people have no awareness of the damage that has been caused in its name - or the hatred that has been built up against it throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world
Source not recorded
The culpability of third world governments - say, Suharto in Indonesia is enormous, but remember that these governments are western clients, outposts virtually, whose task is to open their countries to foreign plunder, repress the population (by huge massacres if necessary), and enrich themselves if they feel like it (that's not a responsibility, just an incidental benefit accorded them). Suharto was ''our kind of guy,'' as the Clinton administration put it, as long as he fulfilled this role.
N. Chomsky, quoted in ERA Email Network, 18.4.2001-02-28.
"The economically overdeveloped countries… continue to exploit the other countries of the world, but they now do so through transnational corporations and global financial and regulatory institutions." 21
K. Jones, Beyond Optimism, Jon Carpenter, 1993.
McMurtry refers to "…the billion-dollar-a-day NATO war machine which is used for strategic genocide for any developing nation pursuing an economic alternative — from the Soviet Union and Nicaragua to Iraq or Yugoslavia."
…reported in ERA Newletter, 2, 14, Sept-Oct, 12000, p. 9.
US training of terrorists.
"If any government sponsors the outlaws and killers of innocents," George Bush announced on the day he began bombing Afghanistan, "they have become outlaws and murderers themselves. And they will take that lonely path at their own peril." I'm glad he said "any government", as there's one which, though it has yet to be identified as a sponsor of terrorism, requires his urgent attention.
For the past 55 years it has been running a terrorist training camp, whose victims massively outnumber the people killed by the attack on New York, the embassy bombings and the other atrocities laid, rightly or wrongly, at al-Qaida's door. The camp is called the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or Whisc. It is based in Fort Benning, Georgia, and it is funded by Mr Bush's government.
Until January this year, WHISC was called the "School of the Americas", or SOA. Since 1946, SOA has trained more than 60,000 Latin American soldiers and policemen. Among its graduates are many of the continent's most notorious torturers, mass murderers, dictators and state terrorists. As hundreds of pages of documentation compiled by the pressure group SOA Watch show, Latin America has been ripped apart by its alumni.
In June this year, Colonel Byron Lima Estrada, once a student at the school, was convicted in Guatemala City of murdering Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998. Gerardi was killed because he had helped to write a report on the atrocities committed by Guatemala's D-2, the military intelligence agency run by Lima Estrada with the help of two other SOA graduates. D-2 coordinated the "anti-insurgency" campaign which obliterated 448 Mayan Indian villages, and murdered tens of thousands of their people. Forty per cent of the cabinet ministers who served the genocidal regimes of Lucas Garcia, Rios Montt and Mejia Victores studied at the School of the Americas.
In 1993, the United Nations truth commission on El Salvador named the army officers who had committed the worst atrocities of the civil war. Two-thirds of them had been trained at the School of the Americas. Among them were Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of El Salvador's death squads; the men who killed Archbishop Oscar Romero; and 19 of the 26 soldiers who murdered the Jesuit priests in 1989. In Chile, the school's graduates ran both Augusto Pinochet's secret police and his three principal concentration camps. One of them helped to murder Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington DC in 1976.
Argentina's dictators Roberto Viola and Leopoldo Galtieri, Panama's Manuel Noriega and Omar Torrijos, Peru's Juan Velasco Alvarado and Ecuador's Guillermo Rodriguez all benefited from the school's instruction. So did the leader of the Grupo Colina death squad in Fujimori's Peru; four of the five officers who ran the infamous Battalion 3-16 in Honduras (which controlled the death squads there in the 1980s) and the commander responsible for the 1994 Ocosingo massacre in Mexico.
All this, the school's defenders insist, is ancient history. But SOA graduates are also involved in the dirty war now being waged, with US support, in Colombia. In 1999 the US State Department's report on human rights named two SOA graduates as the murderers of the peace commissioner, Alex Lopera. Last year, Human Rights Watch revealed that seven former pupils are running paramilitary groups there and have commissioned kidnappings, disappearances, murders and massacres. In February this year an SOA graduate in Colombia was convicted of complicity in the torture and killing of 30 peasants by paramilitaries. The school is now drawing more of its students from Colombia than from any other country.
The FBI defines terrorism as "violent acts... intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a government, or affect the conduct of a government", which is a precise description of the activities of SOA's graduates. But how can we be sure that their alma mater has had any part in this? Well, in 1996, the US government was forced to release seven of the school's training manuals. Among other top tips for terrorists, they recommended blackmail, torture, execution and the arrest of witnesses' relatives.
Last year, partly as a result of the campaign run by SOA Watch, several US congressmen tried to shut the school down. They were defeated by 10 votes. Instead, the House of Representatives voted to close it and then immediately reopen it under a different name. So, just as Windscale turned into Sellafield in the hope of parrying public memory, the School of the Americas washed its hands of the past by renaming itself Whisc. As the school's Colonel Mark Morgan informed the Department of Defense just before the vote in Congress: "Some of your bosses have told us that they can't support anything with the name 'School of the Americas' on it. Our proposal addresses this concern. It changes the name." Paul Coverdell, the Georgia senator who had fought to save the school, told the papers that the changes were "basically cosmetic".
what should we do about the "evil-doers" in Fort Benning, Georgia?
Well, we could urge our governments to apply full diplomatic pressure, and to seek the extradition of the school's commanders for trial on charges of complicity in crimes against humanity. Alternatively, we could demand that our governments attack the United States, bombing its military installations, cities and airports in the hope of overthrowing its unelected government and replacing it with a new administration overseen by the UN
Extracts from George Monbiot,,"Backyard terrorism; The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at it", The Guardian, Tuesday October 30, 2001
The famous 1948 statement by George Kennan, within the influential US government Planning Document NS 68. Kenan was a global strategist and Presidential Foreign Policy Advisor.
"We have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only 6% of its population...In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task is to maintain this position of disparity without detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living
standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans, the better..."
Presidential Policy Statement 23 TOP SECRET [1948])
In Haiti '. . . the richest one per cent monopolise 44% of the nation's income . . . Most of the country's land is for export crops and is owned by large landowners. Most Haitians live in misery, and the country's government is guilty of a poor human rights record. However, America supports the "Baby Doc" Duvalier dictatorship because it is anti-communist and Haiti is considered "strategic" by U.S. officials.'
Kenkelen, 1983, 'Haiti: More U.S. aid means more refugees', Food First News, Summer, p. 1.
'In Brazil and Greece and several other countries, very mild socialist governments . . . were overthrown by military coups supported by the CIA. In every case so far, the United States has chosen to support reactionary landlords and militarists....'
W. Hunt and H. Sherman, Economics, 1972, 544. a
US support for France in Vietnam aimed to lock Asian countries into their system which could stimulate the flow of raw material resources to the area of the free world." 64.
R. Biel, The New Imperialism, Zed., 2000.
After referring to similar massacres in Guatemala Chomsky says "…this is international terrorism, supported or directly organised in Washington with the assistance of its international network of mercenary states,"
N. Chomsky, 1991, "International terrorism; Image and reality in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, p. 23.
Chomsky says "…the worst single terrorist act of 1985 was a car-bombing in Beirut on March 8 that killed 80 people and wounded 256. According to Woodward the attack "…was arranged by the CIA and its Saudi clients with the assistance of Lebanese intelligence and a British specialist…" In 1986 the major single terrorist act was the US bombing of Libya."
N. Chomsky, 1991, "International terrorism; Image and reality in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity,, p. 26.
During the 1980s the US assisted South Africa in the wars it initiated against neighbouring states in its effort to defent apartheit. Gervasi and Wong detail the activities that resulted in 1.5 million war related deaths.
S. Gervaszi and S., Wong, "The Reagan doctrine and the destabilisation of Southern Africa", in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991, 222, 226. See also J. Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbours; Apartheit Power in South Africa, Islington, London, Catholic Institute for International Relations.
"…torture, 'disappearance', mass killings and political imprisonment became the norm in many of the nations most heavily assisted by the United States…"
M. McClintock, "American doctrine and counterinsurgent state terror", in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, (1991), p. 133.
"…the US state has long been using terrorist networks, and carrying out acts of terror itself."
E. Deak, "Real fight is for control of central Asia's oil", Sydney Morning Herald, 25th Oct., 2001.
"The model of Third World development favoured by the West, which encourages foreign investment and keeps wages and welfare outlays under close control, often could not be put into place without terror."
Source not recorded.
…the US is mortally afraid that one of its client states will escape US control and set a 'bad' example for the whole Third World."
The Editors, Monthly Review, Feb. 1992, p. 18.
... the very logic of the system is to depress the masses ... to allow unconstrained pursuit of elite benefits ... State managers are ideologically conditioned to regard all dissent, protests and lower class organisational efforts as Communist subversion.' The support for repressive regimes is '. . . an intended outcome of US efforts to contain popular forces and preserve a favourable investment climate.'
E. S. Herman, The Real Terror Network, 1982, p. 126.
'. . . the basic intent of U.S. foreign policy has been to facilitate the overseas expansion of U.S. business'. (Block, 1977.)
From any objective standpoint, Israel and the United States more frequently rely on terrorism, and in forms that inflict far greater quantums of suffering on their innocent victims, than do their opponents.
R. Falk, The terrorist foundations of recent US foreign policy, Ch. 5., in A. George, Western State Terrorism, Polity, 1991.108.
A book-length 1966 pamphlet from the US Department of the Army, for example, outlines a prototype "counter-terror campaign" in South Vietnam called Operation Black Eye: "Selected Vietnamese troops were organized into terror squads Within a short time Viet Cong leaders - key members of the clandestine infrastructure - began to die mysteriously and violently in their beds. On each of the bodies was a piece of paper printed with a grotesque human eye." The operation was cited in the Army manual as an example of the use of "uncertain threat" in a terror campaign: the "eyes" – thoughtfully printed by the US Information Service - turned up not just on corpses but on the doors of suspects.
M. McClintock, American doctrine and counter-insurgent state terror, Ch. 6. In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991. P. 133.
American-led counter-guerrilla irregulars were among the principal executors of "counter-terror" in Vietnam, its best-known scenario. Most commentators, however, have discussed this only in the context of Operation Phoenix, revealed in 1971 to be a program of political murder carried out by some 30,000 counter-terrorists. But American-led counter-terror, teams (CTs) of 6-12 men - "death squads" in all but name - had operated under CIA and army Special Forces auspices years before (most Special Forces in Indochina served under CIA control until July 1963).
M. McClintock, American doctrine and counter-insurgent state terror, Ch. 6. In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991. P. 138.
Concurrently with the above, small and highly trained units, utilizing counter-guerrilla techniques will be operating out of the camps . . . ambushing, raiding, sabotaging and committing acts of terrorism against known VC personnel.55
M. McClintock, American doctrine and counter-insurgent state terror, Ch. 6. In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991. P. 139
The permissible targets of these early American-run "death squads" were ambiguously defined: and in any case distinguishing Viet Cong "supporters" or members of the guerrilla infrastructure called for skills for which assassins are not particularly well known. Similar language was used in a secret 1962 report to the joint chiefs of staff following a visit to Colombia by a team headed by the commander of the Special Warfare Center. P. 56.
In the "Secret Annex" to the report, General William P. Yarborough recommended immediate action against Colombia's then quiescent insurgency, using the "guerrilla" tactics of UW… This structure should be used to press toward reforms known to be needed, perform counter-agent and counter-propaganda functions and as necessary execute paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents." P. 139.
M. McClintock, American doctrine and counter-insurgent state terror, Ch. 6. In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991
Good intentions or bad, torture, "disappearance," mass killings, and political-imprisonment became the norm in many of the nations most heavily assisted by the United States in Latin America, and elsewhere.
M. McClintock, American doctrine and counter-insurgent state terror, Ch. 6. In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991. P. 142.
A fact that shouldsurely be of cardinal importance to us all: that the death and suffering brought about by those typically branded as terrorists is small in number when compared with that wrought directly and indirectly by the great powers in their attempts to maintain and strengthen their positions of domination.
E. S. Herman and G O'Sullivan, "Terrorism" as Ideology and Cultural Industry, Ch. 3 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 77
During the past 40 years the Western states - including South Africa and Israel, as well as the great powers have had to employ intimidation on a very large scale to maintain access, control, and privileged positions in the Third World in the face of the nationalist and popular upheavals of the "post-colonial' era. This has been primary terrorism, in two senses: first, it has involved far more extensive killing and other forms of coercion than the "terrorism" focused upon in the West (see table 3.1 ); and second, it represents the efforts by the powerful to preserve undemocratic privileges and structures from the threat of encroachment and control by popular organizations and mass movements.
E. S. Herman and G O'Sullivan, "Terrorism" as Ideology and Cultural Industry, Ch. 3 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 40-41.
The West is the main source of primary terror in recent decades…state terror has been immense, and the West and its clients have been the major agents.
E. S. Herman and G O'Sullivan, "Terrorism" as Ideology and Cultural Industry, Ch. 3 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 43.
The conventional discussion of terrorism: The terrorism industry manufactures, refines, and packages for distribution information, analyses, and opinion on a topic called "terrorism." The industry comprises, first, a public sector of government agencies and officials, who establish "policy" and provide official opinions and selected facts on terrorist activity in speeches, press conferences, press releases, hearings, reports, and interviews. It includes, also, a private sector of think tanks and research institutes, security firms that deal in risk analysis and personal and property security and protection, and an associated body of terrorism "experts. " The industry's experts are associated mainly with the institutes and think tanks, some of which are affiliated with academic institutions, but officials and analysts of security firms are also regarded as authorities on terrorism, particularly in its practical and control aspects.
E. S. Herman and G O'Sullivan, "Terrorism" as Ideology and Cultural Industry, Ch. 3 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p.52.
The major single terrorist act of the year was the blowing up of an Air India flight, killing 329 people. The terrorists had been trained in a paramilitary camp in Alabama run by Frank Camper, where mercenaries were trained for terrorist acts in Central America and elsewhere. According to ex-mercenaries, Camper had close ties to US intelligence and was personally involved in the Air India bombing, allegedly a "sting', operation that got out of control. On a visit of India, Attorney-General Edwin Meese conceded in a backhanded way that the terrorist operations originated in a US terrorist training camp.
N. Chomsky, International Terrorism; Image and Reality, Ch. 2 in . George, Introduction t A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, 26.
US policy in the Middle East is aimed at ensuring that no country, especially one that attempts, to determine its own course or rally anti-imperialist opposition, is strong enough to challenge US dominance of the region or threaten Washington's closest allies, most importantly Israel, Turkey and the dictatorial sheikhdoms of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia. The reason is simple. As General Norman Schwarzkopf, who led the 1991 attack on Iraq, told the US Congress in 1990: "Middle East oil is the west's lifeblood. It fuels us today and being 77% of the free world's proven oil reserves, is going to fuel us when the rest of the world runs dry." US oil companies have a huge stake in the region. It is estimated that oil accounts for 25% of all US profits from the Third World. Governments that the US cannot control are a danger to its oil supply as well as oil company profits. The US turned a blind eye to Saddam's human rights violations, including several horrible chemical attacks on the Kurdish people in 1988. This was because the US saw the 1979 Iranian revolution that overthrew the brutal pro-US shah as the greater threat to its interests.
Source not recorded.
Re NATO bombing of Serbia. Many civilian targets were bombed, including a market where 33 people were killed. The point of the bombing was not to defeat Serbia. The objective was terrorism; to get the people to turn against their government
H. Pinter, speaking on ABC, 30th March, 2002.
"Internal documents reveal that a major concern of US planners have always been the ‘demonstration effect’ of potential communist success, which mitght serve as a model for nationalist movements elsewhere in Western dominated regions." 10The primary US goal in the Third World is to ensure that it remains open to US economic penetration and political control." 10There is everywhere reason to suppose that the traditional US government policies of international subversion and …overt aggression will continue so as to ensure access to vital resources and to protect embattled investments abroad or the opportunity for future expansion of US based capital." 21
J. McMahan, Reagan and the World, Pluto, 1984, p. 139.
Statement by General Eisenhower, made in, 1953, "..a serious and explicit purpose of our foreign policy …(is)… the encouragement of a hospital climate for investment in foreign nations." , From N. Chomsky and E. S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar Indochina and the Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology, South End Press, Boston, 1979
R. Schafer, The United States and the Control of World Oil, Croom, 1983, p. 78.
;"…Third World regimes friendly to the United States are likely to be reactionary and repressive; no democratic government could permit its country’s resources to be developed on terms favourable to American corporate and government interests…It is no accident that America’s closest allies in the Third World are among the most authoritarian regimes; South Korea, South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and Taiwan."
I. Katznelson and M. Kesselman, (The Politics of Power??), 1983, p. 234.
The refusal to repair damage or apologise.
It’s a remarkable pattern. The United States has a long record of bombing nations, reducing entire neighborhoods, and much of cities, to rubble, wrecking the infrastructure, ruining the lives of those the bombs didn't kill. And afterward doing nothing to repair the damage. Though it was promised in writing that the US would pursue its "traditional policy" of "postwar reconstruction", no compensation was given to Vietnam after a decade of devastation. During the same war, Laos and Cambodia were equally wasted by US bombing. They, too, qualified to become beneficiaries of Washington's "traditional policy" of zero reconstruction.
Then came the American bombings of Grenada and Panama in the 1980s. Hundreds of Panamanians petitioned the Washington controlled Organization of American States as well as American courts, all the way up to the US Supreme Court, for "just compensation" for the damage caused by Operation Just Cause (this being the not tongue in cheek name given to the American invasion and bombing). They got nothing, as did the people of Grenada. It was Iraq's turn next, in 1991: 40 days and nights of relentless bombing; destruction of power, water and sanitation systems and everything else that goes into the making of a modem society. Everyone knows how much the United States has done to help rebuild Iraq. In 1999 we had the case of Yugoslavia: 78 days of round-the-clock bombing, transforming an advanced industrial state into virtually a third world country; the reconstruction needs were awesome. xvii-xviii
By the end of 2001 it was two and a half years since Yugoslavian bridges had fallen into the Danube, the country's factories and homes destroyed, its transportation tom apart. Yet Yugoslavia has still not received any funds for reconstruction from the architect and leading perpetrator of the bombing campaign, the United States. Unexploded ordnance—mainly cluster bombs—is still killing and maiming people in Laos a generation after the massive US carpet bombing of 1965-73. It is estimated that up to 30 percent of the two million tons of bombs dropped by the US failed to explode, and there have been 11,000 accidents so far. "More than half of the victims die almost immediately following the accident. Vietnam and Cambodia harbor similar dangers. As does the Persian Gulf. A 1999 Human Rights Watch report says that of an estimated 24 to 30 million bomblets dropped during the Gulf War, between 1.2 and 1.5 million did not explode, leading so far to 1,220 Kuwaiti and 400 Iraqi civilian deaths. 102.
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.
Kidnapping and looting. ln 1962, the United States kidnapped about 125 people from the Dominican Republic, and took them to the US and elsewhere. A suspected drug smuggler was spirited out of Honduras and taken to the US in 1988, although the Honduran constitution prohibits the extradition of Honduran citizens for trial in other countries. Presumably, in this case, it was carried out with the approval of the Honduran government under US pressure. In December 1989, the American military grabbed Manuel Noriega in Panama and hustled him off to Florida. The following year, the Drug Enforcement Administration paid bounty hunters to abduct Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico, fly him to El Paso and turn him over to the CIA. A Cypriot businessman, Hossein Alikhani, accused of violating US sanctions against Libya, was lured on board a plane in the Bahamas in 1992 in a US Customs sting and abducted to Miami.. 210
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.
At the close of World War 11, the US intervened in a civil war, taking the side of Chiang Kai~shek's Nationalists against Mao Tse-tung's Communists, even though the latter had been a much closer ally of the United States in the war. 126
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.
In June 26, 1993, President Clinton went before the American people and announced that the United States had fired several missiles against Iraq that day. It turned out that the missiles killed eight people and injured many more. The attack, said the president, was in retaliation for an Iraqi plot to assassinate former president George Bush who was due to visit Kuwait. (This alleged plot remains no more than that...alleged.) Clinton announced that the US attack "was essential to send a message to those who engage in state-sponsored terrorism and to affirm the expectation of civilized behaviour among nations."
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000
Yugoslavia—another war crimes trial that will never be. Beginning about two weeks after the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began in March 1999, intemational law professionals from Canada, the United Kingdom, Greece and the American Association of Jurists began to file complaints with the Intemational Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, charging leaders of NATO countries and officials of NATO itself with crimes similar to those for which the Tribunal had issued indictments shortly before against Serbian leaders. Amongst the charges filed were: "grave violations of intemational humanitarian law", including "wilful killing, wilfully causing great suffering and serious injury to body and health, employment of poisonous weapons and other weapons to cause unnecessary suffering, wanton destruction of cities, towns and villages, unlawful attacks on civilian objects, devastation not necessitated by military objectives, attacks on undefended buildings and dwellings, destruction and wilful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences." The Canadian suit names 68 leaders, including William Clinton, 5 Madeleine Albright, William Cohen, Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien, and NATO officials Javier Solana, Wesley Clark and Jamie Shea. The complaint also alleges "open violation" of the United Nations Charter, the NATO treaty itself, the Geneva Conventions and the Principles of Intemational Law Recognized by the Intemational Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The complaint was submitted along with a considerable amount of evidence to support the charges. The evidence makes the key point that it was NATO's bombing campaign which had given rise to the bulk of the deaths in Yugoslavia, provoked most of the Serbian atrocities, created an environmental disaster and left a dangerous legacy of unexploded depleted uranium and cluster bombs.
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000. 73
__________________________________________________________
Aerial bombings by the USA:
China 1945-46 Korea and China 1950-53 (Korean War) Guatemala 1954 Indonesia 1958 Cuba 1959-1961 Guatemala 1960 Peru 1965 Laos 1964-73 Vietnam 1961-73 Cambodia 1969-70 Guatemala 1967-69 Grenada 1983 Lebanon 1983, 194 (both Lebanese and Syrian targets) El Salvador 1980s Nicaragua 1980s Iran 1987 Panama 1989 Iraq 1991 Kuwait 1991 Somalia 1993 Bosnia 1994, 1995 Sudan 1998 Afghanistan 1998
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000. pp 93-94.
US opposition to the establishment of the International Court to deal with war crimes...(because its personnel would be liable to prosecution...)
Finally, in 1998 in Rome, the nations of he world drafted the charter of the International Criminal Court. American negotiators, however, insisted on provisions in the charter that would, in essence, give the United States veto power over any prosecution through its seat on the Security Council. The American request was rejected, and primarily for this reason the US refused to join 120 other nations who supported the charter. The ICC is an instrument Washington can't control sufficiently to keep it from prosecuting American military and government officials. Senior US officials have explicitly admitted that this danger is the reason for their aversion to the proposed new court. 77
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.
US willingness to use depleted uranium in ammunition.
Depleted uranium (DU) is a byproduct of the production of enriched fuel for nuclear reactors and weapons. It's used in the manufacture of armaments such as tank cartridges, bombs, rockets and missiles. Because DU is denser than steel, shells containing it are capable of drilling a hole through the strongest of tank armours. But depleted uranium does have a drawback—it's radioactive. And like all heavy metals, uranium is chemically toxic. Upon impact with a target, DU aerosolizes into a fine mist of particles, which can be inhaled or ingested and then trapped in the lungs, the kidneys or elsewhere in the body. This can lead to lung cancer, bone cancer, kidney disease, genetic defects and other serious medical problems. . . . . . . . In the Gulf War, countless Iraqi and American soldiers breathed: in the deadly DU dust, the product of tens of thousands of DU rounds | fired by US aircraft and tanks. ' 98
W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.
The US initiated war on Iraq for invading Kuwait, and on Serbia for "ethnic clensing" of Kosovo…but does not press Israel to move out of the territories it has invaded, and did not try to get Indonesia out of East Timor, and itself has invaded Grenada and Afghanistan. It claims to intervene now when human rights are being infringed…but doe s nothing to stop the Turkish attacks on the Kurds.The US unilaterally scrapped the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty in place since 1973, and refused to agree to the Kyoto climate control plan.
Historic vote was sham, ex-UN chiefs admit", Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Nov., 2001. P. 13..For a long list of US military interventions seeZmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm A Century of US Military interventions; Z Grossman.
The US "… has rained death and destruction on more people in more regions of the globe than any other nation in the period since the Second `World War consider the following. The United States has employed its military forces in other countries over seventy times since 1945, not counting : innumerable instances of counterinsurgency operations by the CIA. In the Middle East/Islamic world alone, over the last twenty years the U.S. military ;
shot down Libyan jets in 1981 -- sent military personnel and equipment to the Sinai as part of a multinational force in 1982 -- sent marines to Lebanon in 1982 -- dispatched an AWACS electronic surveillance plane directed against Libya to Egypt in 1983 -- used AWACS electronic surveillance aircraft to aid Saudi Arabia in shooting down Iranian fighter jets in the Persian Gulf in 1984 -- fired missiles at and bombed Libya in 1986 -- shot down Libyan fighters in 1989 -- escorted Kuwaiti oil tankers during the Iran-Iraq war -- fought the Gulf War against Iraq in 1991 -- fired missiles and carried out bombing strikes against Iraq on numerous occasions in the last decade -- carried out military exercises in Kuwait (aimed at Iraq) in 1992 -- deployed its armed forces in Somalia in 1992 -- demolished one of the few pharmaccutical plants in Sudan in a missile attack in 1998 -- fired sixty cruise missiles equipped with cluster bombs at Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998 -- commenced war operations in Afghanistan in 2001.
More than a hundred thousand Iraqi civilians were killed in the Gulf War, and as many as a half million children have died as a result of U.S.-imposed sanctions since the war. U.S. support for Israel in the form of billions of dollars of military aid each year coupled with its refusal to rein in Israel's territorial ambitions have made it a principal party to the war of terror inflicted on the Palestinian people.
What explains this imperialist thrust? In the years that have intervened since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. ruling class has thus been seeking a substitute for the Cold War with which to justify its imperial designs. Various alternatives have been offered: a war on terrorism; the struggle against "rogue states"; a "clash of civilizations" (Islam and China vs. the West, as proposed by Samuel Huntington); a war on the global drug trade; and humanitarian intervention—all of them up to now seen as unsatisfactory, but sufficient to keep the military budget from shrinking drastically after the Cold War. Fortunately, a godsend appeared in the form of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But the rapid victory over Iraqi forces in the Gulf War was so complete and so devastating that Hussein could no longer serve as the credible threat needed to justify U.S. worldwide military commitments. As General Colin Powell voiced the problem in 1991: "Think hard about it. I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains."
The editors, After the attacks…the war on terrorism, Monthly Review, Nov., 2001, 53,6.
Many of the harsh, brutal, oppressive regimes are backed by the U.S. That was true of Saddam Hussein, right through the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds. U.S. and British support for the monster continued. He was treated as a friend and ally, and people there know it. When bin Laden makes that charge, as he did again in an interview rebroadcast by the BBC, people know what he is talking about. Let's take a striking example. In March 1991, right after the Gulf War, with the U.S. in total command of the air, there was a rebellion in the Southern part of Iraq, including Iraqi generals. They wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They didn't ask for U.S. support' just access to captured Iraqi arms, which the U.S. refused. The U.S. tacitly authorized Saddam Hussein to use air power to crush the rebellion. The reasons were not hidden. New York Times Middle East correspondent Alan Cowell described the "strikingly unanimous view" of the U.S. and its regional coalition partners: "whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for stability than did those who have suffered his repression." Times diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman observed, not critically, that for Washington and its allies, an "iron-fisted Iraqi junta" that would hold Iraq together just as Saddam's "iron fist" had done was preferable to a popular rebellion, which was drowned in blood, probably killing more people than the U.S. bombing
The violent assault by the U.S. Tens of thousands of people died. The country was substantially destroyed, it may never recover. The effects on the country are much more severe even than the tragedies in New York the other day. They didn't respond by setting off bombs in Washington. They went to the World Court, which issued a judgment in their favour condemning the U.S. for what it called "unlawful use of force," which means international terrorism, ordering the U.S. to desist and pay substantial reparations. The U.S. dismissed the court judgment with contempt, responding with an immediate escalation of the attack. So: Nicaragua then went to the Security Council, which passed a resolution calling on states to observe international law. The U.S. vetoed it. They went to the General Assembly, where they got a similar resolution that passed near-unanimously, which the U.S. and Israel opposed two years in a row (joined once by E1 Salvador). That's the way a state should proceed.
We should not forget that the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state. P. 16
The US is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. It continues international terrorism. P 16
The editors, After the attacks…the war on terrorism, Monthly Review, Nov., 2001, 53,6.
“American business wants (Central America) as … a cheap labour area for exploitation.” 6
‘Military aid is given in order to maintain the power and the people i.e., contacts who can tip governments out when necessary”. p. 6
“On U S action in Cuba: “It was launched from Florida and it was totally illegal…international law we can't even talk about, but even by domestic law it was illegal, because it was a C.I.A. operation taking place on American territory, which is illegal. And it was serious: it involved blowing up hotels, sinking fishing boats, blowing up industrial installations, bombing airplanes. This was a very
serious terrorist operation. The part of it that became well known was the
assassination attempts—there were eight known assassination attempts
on Castro. A lot of this stuff came out in the Senate Church Committee hearings in 1975, and other parts were uncovered through some good investigative reportage.”
“And in fact, the Cubans had their own concerns: they were worried about
an American invasion. And now it turns out that those concerns were very
valid — the United States had invasion plans for October~1962; the Missile
Crisis was in October 1962. In fact, American naval and military units were
already being deployed for an invasion before the beginning of the Missile
Crisis; that's just been revealed in Freedom of Information Act materials.
Of course, it's always been denied here, like if you read McGeorge Bundy's
book on the military system, he denies it, but it's true, and now the documents are around to prove it. And the Cubans doubtless knew it, so that
was probably what was motivating them.” p. 8
“For example, take El Salvador in the 1980s. The purpose of U.S. policies there was to wipe out the popular organizations and support a traditional
Latin American-style regime that would ensure the kind of business climate
we expect in the region. So the independent press was destroyed, the political opposition was murdered, priests and labor organizers were murdered, and so on and so forth—and U.S. planners figured they had the problem licked.” p.12.
On CIA involvement in the drug trade:
“Leslie Cockburn was working at C.B.S., she was able to expose information of real importance about U.S. government involvement in drug-running through the Contras. I don't know if some of you saw that, but this was on a national network program, West 57th—tens of millions of people were watching American pilots in jail testifying about how they would fly arms down to the contras and come back with their planes loaded with cocaine, land at Homestead Air Force base in Florida guided in by radar, then trucks would come up and unload the drugs and take them away, all right on the Air Force base. That was on C.B.S.” p. 28.
“Why do we have to get rid of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua? In reality it's not because anybody really thinks that they're a Communist power about to conquer the Hemisphere—it's because they were carrying out social programs that were beginning to succeed, and which would have appealed to other people in Latin America who want the same things. In 1980 the World Bank estimated that it would take Nicaragua ten years just to get back to the economic level it had in
1977, because of the vast destruction inflicted at the end of the Somoza
reign [the four-decade Nicaraguan family dictatorship ousted by the Sandinista revolution…’ p.40
Japan developed the way “…every country in the world that developed had done it, by imposing high levels of protectionism, and by restricting its economy from free market discipline, and that’s precisely what the Western powers have been preventing the rest of the Third World from doing…” p. 66.
“The Vietnam war was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the Third World.” p. 91
“There is not a single economy in history that developed without extensive state intervention, like high protectionist tariffs and subsidies and so on. In fact, all the things we prevent the Third World from doing have been the prerequisites for development everywhere else — I think that's without exception.”
Re the secret bombing of Cambodia: “Why hadn't Nixon informed Congress? It wasn't, why did you carry out one of the most intense bombings in history in densely populated areas of a peasant country, killing, maybe 150,000 people? That never came up. The only question was, why didn't you tell Congress?”
“In terms of all the horrifying atrocities the Nixon government carried out, Watergate isn't even worth laughing about. It was a triviality.”
“Remember that the media have two basic functions. One is to indoctrinate the elites, to make sure they have the right ideas and know how to serve power. In fact, typically the elites are the most indoctrinated segment of a society, because they are the ones who are exposed to the most propaganda and actually take part in the decision-making process. For them you have the New York Times, and the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and so on. But there's also a mass media, whose main function is just to get rid of the rest of the population—to marginalize and eliminate them, so they don't interfere with decision-making. And the press that's designed for that purpose isn't the New York Times and the Washington Post, it's sitcoms on television, and the National Enquirer, and sex and violence, and babies with three heads, and football, all that kind of stuff. But the approximately 85 percent of the population that is the main target of that media, but the principle's quite clear.”
Re Palestine, “There has to be some settlement that recognizes the right of self-determination of Jews in something like the state of Israel, and the right of self-determination of Palestinians in something like a Palestinian state.”
“All of this has been obvious for years—why hasn't it happened? Well, of
course Israel's opposed to it. But the main reason it hasn't happened is because the United States has blocked it: the United States has been blocking
the peace process in the Middle East for the last twenty years—we're the leaders of the rejectionist camp, not the Arabs or anybody else. See, the United States supports a policy which Henry Kissinger called “stalemate"; that was his word for it back in 1970. At that time, there was kind of a split in the American government as to whether we should join the broad international consensus on a political settlement, or block a political settlement. And in that internal struggle, the hard-liners prevailed; Kissinger was the main spokesman. The policy that won out was what he called "stalemate": keep things the way they are, maintain the system of Israeli oppression. And there was a good reason for that, it wasn't just out of the blue: having an embattled, militaristic Israel is an important part of how we rule the world.” 5
“Basically the United States doesn't give a damn about Israel: if it goes
down the drain, U.S. planners don't care one way or another, there's no
moral obligation or anything else. But what they do care about is control of the enormous oil resources of the Middle East.”
“The standard line you always hear …is that we were opposing Stalinist terror—but that's total bullshit. … Do we oppose anybody else's terror? Do we oppose Indonesia's terror in East Timor? Do we oppose terror in Guatemala and El Salvador? Do we oppose what we did to South Vietnam? No, we support terror all the time—in fact, we put it in power
“The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things ~-
like health care and feeding people, and the general threat of a "demonstration effect" that follows from that—that is, the threat that people in other countries might try to do the same things. That's what they call a rotten
apple that might spoil the barrel, or a virus that might infect the region—
and then our whole imperial system begins to fall apart. I mean, for thirty
years, Cuba has been doing things which are simply intolerable—such as
sending tens of thousands of doctors to support suffering people around the Third World, or developing biotechnology in a poor country with no options, or having health services roughly at the level of the advanced countries and way out of line with the rest of Latin America. These things are not tolerable to American power—they'd be intolerable anywhere in the Third World, and they're multiply intolerable in a country which is expected to be a U.S. colony. That's Cuba's real crime.” p. 32 .
At first “… there were no Russians around, and Castro was in fact considered anti-Communist by the U.S. [Castro did not align with the Soviet Union until May 1961, after the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Cuba in January and had sponsored an invasion attempt in April.] p. 29. So the reason for deciding to overthrow the Castro government can't have had anything to do with Cuba being a Russian outpost in the Cold War—Cuba was just taking an independent path,which has always been unacceptable to powerful interests in the United
States.”
Strafing and sabotage operations began as early as October 1959. Then, soon after his inauguration in 1961, John F. Kennedy launched a terrorist campaign against them which is without even remote comparison in the ~-
history of international terrorism [Operation Mongoose]. And in February 1962, we instituted the embargo—which has had absolutely devastating effects on the Cuban population.” p. 30.
Haiti; “So Aristide was allowed in for a few months …with a national economic plan being rammed down his throat by the World Bank, a standard structural adjustment package.(P. 59.) I mean, it was referred to in the press as "the program that Aristide is offering the donor nations"—offering it with a gun to his head—and it has lots of nice rhetoric around in it for the benefit of Western journalists. But when you get right down to the core part of it, what it says is … "The renovated government," meaning Aristide, "must focus its energies and efforts on … particularly export industries and foreign investors. (p. 60.) …not grassroots organizations in Haiti…what ever foreign resources do come into Haiti will have to be used to turn the country back into what we've always wanted it to be in the first place: an export platform with super-cheap manufacturing labor and agricultural exports to the United States that keep the peasants there from subsistence farming as the population starves.”
Re Islam…”…there's a lot of talk in the U.S. about "Islamic fundamentalism," as if that's some bad thing we're trying to fight. But the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist state in the world is Saudi Arabia: are we going after the leaders of Saudi Arabia? No, they're great guys—they torture and murder and kill and all that stuff, but they also send the oil profits from their country to the West and not to the people of the region, so they're just fine. (p. 49.) Or take non-state agents: I suppose the most extreme fanatic Islamic fundamentalist in the world is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan, who got over a billion dollars of aid from the United States and Saudi Arabia and is now tearing what's left of Afghanistan to pieces. Yeah, he's a good guy, he's been fighting on our side—narco-trafficker, terrorist, all those things, but doing what we wanted.” P. 50.
“The United States has been supporting the Haitian military and dictators for two hundred years—it's not a new policy. And for the last twenty or thirty years, the U.S. has basically been trying to turn Haiti into kind of an export platform with super-cheap labor and lucrative returns for U.S. investors. And for a long time it seemed to be working: there was a lot of repression, the population was under control, American investors were making big profits, and so on. Then in 1990, something happened which really surprised the hell out of everyone. There was this free election in Haiti, …”
“…the Italian resistance was so significant that it basically liberated Northern Italy, and it was holding down maybe six or seven German divisions, and the Italian working-class part of it was very organized, and had widespread support in the population. In fact, when the American and British armies made it up to Northern Italy, they had to throw out a government that had already been established by the Italian resistance in the region, and they had to dismantle various steps towards workers' control over industry that were being set up. And what they did was to restore the old industrial owners, on the grounds that removal of these Fascist collaborators had been "arbitrary dismissal" of legitimate owners—that's the term that was used. And then we also undermined the democratic processes, because it was obvious that the resistance and not the discredited conservative order was going to win the upcoming elections. So there was a threat of real democracy breaking out in Italy—what's technically referred to by the U.S. government as "Communism"—and as usual, that had to be stopped.”
“So to destroy the Nazi resistance in Greece and restore the Nazi collaborators to power there, it took a war in which maybe 160,000 people were killed and 800,000 became refugees—the country still hasn't recovered from it. (p. 72.) In Korea, it meant killing 100,000 people in the late 1940s, before what we call the "Korean War" even started. (73.) But in Italy it was enough just to carry out subversion—and the United States took that very seriously. So we funded ultra-right Masonic Lodges and terrorist paramilitary groups in Italy, the Fascist police and strikebreakers were brought back, we withheld food, we made sure their economy couldn't function.(74.) In fact, the first National Security Council Memorandum, N.S.C. 1, is about Italy and the Italian elections. And what it says is that if the Communists come to power in the election through legitimate democratic means, the United States must declare a national emergency: the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean should be put on alert, the United States should start subversive activities in Italy to overthrow the Italian government, and we should begin contingency planning for direct military intervention—that's if the resistance wins a legitimate democratic election. “ p. 75.
“… the primary concern is to prevent independence, regardless ot the ideology. Remember, we're the global power, so we have to make sure that all the various parts of the world continue serving their assigned functions in our global system. And the assigned functions of Third World countries are to be markets for American business, sources of resources for American business, to provide cheap labor for American business, and so …the main commitment of the United States internationally, in the Third World, must be to prevent the rise of nationalist regimes which are responsive to pressures from the masses of the population for improvement in low living standards and diversification of production; the reason is, we have to maintain a-climate that is conducive to investment, and to ensure conditions which allow for adequate repatriation of profits to the West. Language like that is repeated year after year in top-level U.S. planning documents, like National Security Council reports on Latin America and so on—and that's exactly what we do around the world.”
“So the nationalism we oppose doesn't need to be left-wing—we're just as opposed to right-wing nationalism. I mean, when there's a right-wing military coup which seeks to turn some Third World country on a course of independent development, the United States will also try to destroy that government—we opposed Peron in Argentina, for example. So despite what you always hear, U.S. interventionism has nothing to do with resisting the spread of "Communism”, it's independence we've always been opposed to everywhere — and for quite a good reason. If a country begins to pay attention to its own population, it's not going to be paying adequate attention the overriding needs of U.S. investors. Well, those are unacceptable priorities, so that government's just going to have to go.
“In fact, if you look at the countries that have developed in the world, there's a little simple fact which should be obvious to anyone on five minutes' observation, but which you never find anyone saying in the United States: the countries that have developed economically are those which were not colonized by the West; every country that was colonized by the West is a total wreck. I mean, Japan was the one country that managed to resist European colonization, and it's the one part of the traditional Third World that developed.
East Timor;
“It's probably the biggest slaughter relative to the population since the Holocaust… and this is genocide, if you want to use the term, for which the United States continues to be directly responsible.”
“Indonesia invaded it illegally in 1975, and ever since they have just been slaughtering people. It's continuing as we speak, after more than two decades. And that massacre has been going on because the United States has actively, consistently, and crucially supported it: it's been supported by every American administration, and also by the entire Western media, which have totally silenced the story. The worst phase of the killing was in the late 1970s during the Carter administration. At that time, the casualties were about at the scale of the Pol Pot massacres in Cambodia. Relative to the population, they were much greater. But they were radically different from Pol Pot's in one crucial respect: nobody had any idea about how to stop the Pol Pot slaughter, but it was trivial how to stop this one. And it's still trivial how we can stop it— we can stop supporting it.”
Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 with the explicit authorization of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger [the American President and Secretary of State] Kissinger then at once (secretly, though it leaked) moved to increase U.S. weapons and counterinsurgency equipment sales to Indonesia, which already was about 90 percent armed with U.S. weapons. It's now known from leaked documents that the British, Australians, and Americans all were aware of the invasion plans in advance, and that they monitored its progress as it was unfolding. Of course, they only applauded. (pp. 37 – 39.)
The U.S. media have real complicity in genocide in this case. Before the invasion' news coverage of East Timor had in fact been rather high in the United States, surpisingly high actually — and the reason was that East Timor had been part of the Portuguese Empire, which was collapsing in the 1970s, and there was a lot of concern back then that the former Portuguese colonies might do what's called "moving towards Communism," meaning moving towards independence, which is not allowed…”
“… there's a huge offshore oil field in Timor's territorial waters, and before 1975 the Australians and the Western oil companies had been trying unsuccessfully to make a deal with Portugal to exploit it. Well, they hadn't had any luck with Portugal and they figured an independent East Timor would be even harder to deal with — but they knew that Indonesia would be easy.”
”…the exploitation has been proceeding rather nicely. (East Timor) and Indonesia signed a big treaty to start extracting Timorese oil [in 989], and right after the Dili massacre in 1991 [in which Indonesians killed hundreds of unarmed Timorese protesters at a funeral], the "Western reaction—apart from sending additional arms to Indonesia — was that fifteen major oil companies started exploration in the Timor Sea fields.”
AVOIDING NEOLIBERAL DEVELOPMENT…
“There is not a single case on record of any country that has developed successfully through adherence to “free market" principles: none. Certainly not the United States. I mean, the United States has always had extensive state intervention in the economy, right from the earliest days—we would be exporting fur right now if we were following the principles of comparative advantage.
Look, the reason why the industrial revolution took off in places like
Lowell and Lawrence is because of high protectionist tariffs the U.S. government set up to keep out British goods. And the same thing runs right up
to today: like, we would not have successful high-tech industry in the
United States today if it wasn't for a huge public subsidy to advanced industry, mostly through the Pentagon system and N.A.S.A. and so on—that
doesn't have the vaguest relation to a "free market. As a matter of fact, the United States has been the most economically protectionist country in history.”
Other countries who had their own cotton resources also tried to start on industrial revolutions—but they didn't get very far, because England had more guns, and stopped them by force. Egypt, for example, had its own cotton resources, and started on an industrial revolution at about the same time as the United States did, around 1820—but the British weren't going to tolerate an economic competitor in the Eastern Mediterranean, so they just stopped it by force. Okay, no industrial revolution in Egypt.”
“The same thing also happened in Britain's earliest "experiment" with these ideas, in what was called Bengal, in India. In fact, Bengal was one of the first places colonized in the eighteenth century, and when Robert Clive [British conqueror] first landed there, he described it as a paradise: Dacca, he said, is just like London, and they in fact referred to it as "the Manchester of India. " It was rich and populous, there was high-quality cotton, agriculture, advanced industry, a lot of resources, jute, all sorts of things—it was in fact comparable to England in its manufacturing level, and really looked like it was going to take off. Well, look at it today: Dacca, "the Manchester of India," is the capital of Bangladesh—the absolute symbol of disaster.46 And that's because the British just despoiled the country and destroyed it, by the equivalent of what we would today call "structural adjustment', [i.e. economic policies from the World Bank and International Mdonetary Fund which expose Third World economies to foreign penetration and control].
In fact, India generally was a real competitor with England: as late as the 1820s, the British were learning advanced techniques of steel-making there, India was building ships for the British navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815], they had a developed textiles industry, they were producing more iron than all of Europe combined—so the British just proceeded to de-industrialize the country by force and turn it into an impoverished rural society. P. 47.
“Saddam's worst crimes, by far, have been domestic, including the use of
chemical weapons against Kurds and a huge slaughter of Kurds in the late
80s, barbaric torture, and every other ugly crime you can imagine. These are
at the top of the list of terrible crimes for which he is now condemned,
rightly. It's useful to ask how frequently the impassioned denunciations and
eloquent expressions of outrage are accompanied by three little words: "with
our help."
“The crimes were well known at once, but of no particular concern to the
West. Saddam received some mild reprimands; harsh congressional condemnation was considered too extreme by prominent commentators. The Reaganites and Bush #1 continued to welcome the monster as an ally and valued trading partner right through his worst atrocities and well beyond.”
“Bush authorized loan guarantees and sale of advanced technology with clear
applications for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) right up to the day of
the Kuwait invasion, sometimes overriding congressional efforts to prevent
what he was doing. Britain was still authorizing export of military
equipment and radioactive materials a few days after the invasion.”
“When ABC correspondent and now ZNet Commentator Charles Glass discovered biological weapons facilities (using commercial satellites and defector
testimony), his revelations were immediately denied by the Pentagon and the
story disappeared. It was resurrected when Saddam committed his first real
crime, disobeying US orders (or perhaps misinterpreting them) by invading
Kuwait, and switched instantly from friend to reincarnation of Attila the
Hun.”
“The same facilities were then used to demonstrate his innately evil nature.
When Bush #1 announced new gifts to his friend in December 1989 (also gifts
to US agribusiness and industry), it was considered too insignificant even
to report, though one could read about it in Z magazine at the time, maybe
nowhere else.”
“A few months later, shortly before he invaded Kuwait, a high-level Senate
delegation, headed by (later) Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole,
visited Saddam, conveying the President's greetings and assuring the brutal
mass murderer that he should disregard the criticism he hears from maverick
reporters here.”
“Saddam had even been able to get away with attacking a US naval vessel, the
USS Stark, killing several dozen crewmen. That is a mark of real esteem. The
only other country to have been granted that privilege was Israel, in 1967.
In deference to Saddam, the State Department banned all contacts with the
Iraqi democratic opposition, maintaining this policy even after the Gulf
war, while Washington effectively authorized Saddam to crush a Shi'ite
rebellion that might well have overthrown him -- in the interest of
preserving "stability," the press explained, nodding sagely.… But he can't be anywhere near as dangerous as he was when the US and Britain were supporting him, even providing him with dual-use technology that he could use for nuclear and chemical weapons development, as he presumably did.”
“My government has set forth on a policy of unilateral intervention that runs contrary to the letter and intent of the United Nations charted. The truth of the matter is that Iraq is not a sponsor of the kind of terror perpetuated against the United States on September 11 and in fact is active in suppressing the sort of fundamentalist extremism that characterizes those who attacked the United States on that horrible day.”
The carve up of Indonesia when Suharto came to power:
'This was done in the most spectacular way,' Jeffrey Winters, professor at Northwestern University, Chicago, told me. 'They divided up into five different sections: mining in one room, services in another, light industry in another, banking and finance in another ... You had these big corporate people going around the table, saying [to Suharto's people] this is what we need: this, this and this, and they basically designed the legal infrastructure for investment in Indonesia.'
As a result, a mountain of copper and gold, nickel and bauxite, was handed out to American transnational companies. A group of American, Japanese and French companies got the tropical forests of Sumatra; and so on. I asked one of Suharto's representatives at the 1967 meeting, Emil Salim, if anyone had mentioned that up to a million people had died violently in bringing the new 'global economy' to Indonesia. 'No, that was not on the agenda,' he replied. 'We didn't have television then.'
The greatest massacre of the second half of the twentieth century was not so much news as cause for celebration. The world's fourth most populous country was 'ours'. Suharto's ascendancy was 'the West's best news in years'. James Reston, the doyen of American columnists, told readers of the New York Times that the bloody events in Indonesia were 'a gleam of light in Asia'.
In our universities, Indonesian scholars approved Suharto's big lie about a 'communist coup' being the cause of the killings, while western corporations anointed his regime's 'stability'. The silence lasted more than a quarter of a century, until it was broken by the cries of Suharto's victims in East Timor: a second genocide conducted with western military backing. As the Russian dissident economist Boris Kagarlitsky points out, 'Globalisation does not mean the impotence of the state, but the rejection by the state of its social functions, in favour of repressive ones, and the ending of democratic freedoms.'
“… the U.S. has supported oppressive, authoritative harsh regimes, and blocked democratic initiatives. For example, the one I mentioned in Algeria. Or in Turkey. Or throughout the Arabian Peninsula. Many of the harsh, brutal, oppressive regimes are backed by the U.S. That was true of Saddam Hussein, right through the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds. U.S. and British support for the monster continued. He was treated as a friend and ally, …. In March 1991, right after the Gulf War, with the U.S. in total command of the air, there was a rebellion in the southern part of Iraq, including Iraqi generals. They wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They didn't ask for U.S. support' just access to captured Iraqi arms, which the U.S. refused. The U.S. tacitly authorized Saddam Hussein to use air power to crush the rebellion. .. for Washington and its allies, an "iron-fisted Iraqi junta" dhat would hold Iraq together. We should not forget that the U.S. itself is a leading terrorist state. That was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. It continues international terrorism
In Beirut…” the Reagan Administration had set off a terrorist bombing there in 1985 that was very much like Oklahoma City, a truck bombing outside a mosque timed to kill the maximum number of people as they left. It killed eighty and wounded two hundred, aimed at a Muslim cleric whom they didn't like and whom they missed. It was not very secret. I don't know what name you give to the attack that's killed maybe a million civilians in Iraq and maybe a half a million children, which is the price the Secretary of State says we're willing to pay. Is there a name for that? Supporting Israeli atrocities is another one. Supporting Turkey's crushing of its own Kurdish population, for which the Clinton Administration gave the decisive support, 80% of the arms, escalating as atrocities increased, is another. Or take the bombing of the Sudan…Nobody knows how many thousands or tens of thousands of rich world deaths resulted from that single atrocity.”
This extract is from Chomsky but the source is uncertain. It is probably from Chomsky, Understanding Power. However it could be from “The US is a leading terrorist state”, Monthly Review, 53. 6. Nov., 2001, p. 10.
In 1953, the CIA conducted its first major covert operation - to overthrow Iran's legitimate president, Mohammed Mossadeq….
Over the next 20 years, the other arm of the US military-industrial oiligarchy dumped $18 billion worth of armaments into the country, and the CIA, through SAVAK - the Iranian secret police - launched a reign of terror on the civilian population. In 1976, Amnesty International said SAVAK had the worst human rights record on the planet, their CIA-textbook torture techniques were, according to Amnesty, "beyond belief."…
For over 50 years, the US has been waging what has been described by ex-CIA agents like John Stockwell, the highest ranking agent to go public, as a Third World war. In other words: continuous terrorist insurgency against developing countries that have no ability to strike back in any meaningful way (until recently, that is).
The 1975 Church Committee, the first government investigation to officially peer into the murky world of the CIA, estimated 900 major operations and 3,000 minor operations over the previous 14 years. John Stockwell (who ran the CIA's Angola operation) says the numbers extrapolate to 3,000 major ops and 10,000 minor ones over the life of the agency. The human carnage of "the third bloodiest war in history" is estimated at 6 million souls.
The CIA's Phoenix Operation, that was responsible for escalation of the Vietnam war also began in 1954, using the same modus operandi as in Iran, creating S. Vietnam's secret police that dished out the most feral slaughter: live burnings, garroting, rape, torture, sabotage. Ralph McGehee is another CIA agent who re-discovered his conscience and has written about his part in the operation, describing himself now as "nearly insane" during his time with the agency….
Arbenz…"…made two fatal mistakes: First, he allowed a small communist party to remain. Second, he undertook land reform in a country where 3% of the citizenry owned 70% of the land. He turned over 1.5 million acres, including his own family's estate, to starving peasants. Much of the land was (unused and duly compensated) acreage owned by the American United Fruit Company (Chiquita), in which the Dulles Bros. held stock. When rag-tag CIA "rebels" pouring over the border from Honduras (later staging ground for the Contras) failed, the CIA used their own planes to bomb the Capital. Bye, bye, Mr. Arbenz; hello 30 years of bloody torture and suffering: "Operation Success."…
"The United States is a peace-loving nation and our foreign policy is designed to lessen the threat of war as well as aggression."
Gerald Ford on appointing George H.W. Bush CIA director, on Jan. 30, 1976
Latin America's death squad leaders were trained right in the US, at Fort Benning, Georgia's School of the Americas. It's too sickening to describe the tidal wave of blood these bastards unleashed, so I'll chose just one date, one place: Dec. 11, 1981, El Mazote.
During Vice President Bush's watch (Reagan wasn't exactly awake) a dozen US-backed paramilitary troops rounded up the inhabitants of this small, El Salvadorian village and gunned them down. The mass grave yielded 900 men, women and children. 131 children under 12 years, three infants under three months. One woman, Rufina Amaya, survived by scrambling under nearby bushes as her children screamed: "Mama, they're killing us." Ten of the 12 murderers were recent graduates of the School of the Americas.
This was the way it was (and still is) in much of Latin America. Edgar Chamoro, recruited by the CIA to lead the Contras has admitted: "We were used to deceive the American people . . . . The tactics of the Contras was to terrorize the Nicaraguan people."
The Iran Contra investigations again revealed the mayhem at the heart of the American plutocracy. Bush Sr. never did answer questions regarding contact between his aides and Contra operatives. Congressman Jack Brooks of Texas summed up by saying: "We've been supplying weapons to terrorist nations [actually terrorist cells trained by the US and inserted into sovereign nations], trading arms for hostages, involving the US government in military activities in direct contravention of the law, diverting public funds into private pockets and secret unofficial activities, selling access to the president for thousands of dollars, dispensing cash and foreign money orders out of a White House safe, accepting gifts and falsifying papers to cover it up, altering and shredding national security documents and lying to the Congress.
"Now, I believe that the American people understand that democracy cannot survive that kind of abuse."
.. The most disgusting phoney war, besides the ongoing low-level Colombian destabilization, Afghanistan and the looming Desert Storm II (the US hasn't actually declared an authentic war since 1941), is George Bush Sr's 1989 invasion of Panama, the subject of an Academy Award-winning documentary film: The Panama Deception.. All to cover his slimy CIA relationship with (SOA grad) Manuel Noriega. Thousands of civilians were slaughtered and bulldozed into mass graves by US troops.
The CIA's bloody fingerprints, by Yuno Hu Sun Apr 14 '02 article#11488