OUR EMPIRE: COLLECTED DOCUMENTS

Afghanistan -- Bolivia -- East Timor -- El Salvador – Guatemala – Indonesia – Iraq – Iran – Israel – Mexico – Nicaragua – Panama - Turkey – Vietnam -- Zaire/.Congo

13. SOME REFERENCES

________________________________________________________

1. RICH COUNTRY SUPPORT FOR OPPRESSION AND TERROR.

Following is a selection of more forceful exposures and condemnations of the actions rich countries undertake to maintain their empire. (Some of these occur again in later sections on specific countries.)

The US "…is the greatest source of terror on earth."

Pilger, http://www.theherald.co.ukl/news/archive/;13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

… the US state, as part of its foreign policy strategy, has long been using terrorist networks, and carrying out acts of terror itself.

Ed Deak, Economic Theories more destructive than terrorists, Gold River Record, 21 Sept, 2001.

"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…it has employed its military forces in other countries over 70 times since 1945, not counting innumerable instances of counter insurgency operations by the CIA."

The Editors, "After the attacks…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review Nov. 53, 6, 2001, 1-9. P. 1.

Twenty years ago the United States launched a war against Nicaragua. That was a terrible war. Tens of thousands of people died. The country was practically destroyed. ... They went to the World Court with a case, the World Court ruled in their favour and ordered the United States to stop its "unlawful use of force" (that means international terrorism) and pay substantial reparations. Well, the United States responded by dismissing the court with contempt and immediately escalated the attack. At that point Nicaragua went to the UN Security council which voted a resolution calling on all states to obey international law. ... Well, the United States vetoed it. Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly which, two years in a row passed a similar resolution with only the United States and Israel opposed.

Wed, 10 Oct 2001 11:01:02 -0500

From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>

"There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame."

N. Chomsky, 1991, "International terrorism; Image and reality in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity,, p. 15.

"The greatest source of terrorism is the US itself and some of the Laltin American countries."

E. Said, "What they want is my silence", Third World Resurgence, 131/132;, 2001, 68.)

"…the US is itself a leading terrorist state."

N. Chomsky, "The US is a leading terrorist state", Monthly Review, 53, 6, Nov, 2001, p. 16.

"We are the target of terrorists because in much of the world our government stands for dictatorship, bondage, and human exploitation…We are the target of terrorists because we are hated… And we are hated because our governments have done hateful things….Time after time we have outsted popular leaders who wanted the riches of the land to be shared by the people who worked it…We are hated because our government denies (democracy, freedom, human rights) to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations."

Bowman, "Who would hate a pious America?, http:..www.rmbowman.com

"Many of the world's most brutal dictatorships "…are in place precisely because they serve US interests in a joint venture with local torturers at the expense of their majorities."

E. S. Herman, 1982, p. 15.

After documenting supply of aid to 23 countries guilty of "human rights abuses", Trosan and Yates say, "Without US help they would be hard pressed to contain the fury of their oppressed citizens and US businesses would find it difficult to flourish.," Whenever their people have rebelled and tried to seize power, thereby threatening foreign investments, the US has on every occasion actively supported government repression and terror, or has promoted coups to overthrow popular governments."

Trosan and M. Yates, 1980, "Brainwashing under freedom", Monthly Review, Jan. p. 44.

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.

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>.

American foreign policy since World War II has been conducted in an aggressive indeed, at times, terroristic fashion.

From CIA assassinations of key political figures in the Third World, to the carpet bombing of Indochina; from the My Lai massacre (not, we now know, an isolated event) to the bombing of a pharmaceutical company in Sudan in 1998; from the invasion of Grenada to the support given to fundamentalist Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan (known in the west at the time as "freedom fighters"); from the backing of Israeli policy against the Palestinians to the bombings of Lebanon and Libya; from the 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed during the Gulf War, to the 500,000 who have died as a result of America's economic blockade - the legacy of American foreign policy is littered with blood and bodies.

In 1937 George Orwell said "…the high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire - in order that England may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream."

G. Monbiot, How the rule the world, ERA Newsletter, 2.21.2001.

 "Perhaps the most important taboo is the longevity of the US as both a terrorist state and a haven for terrorists. That the US is the only state on record to have been condemned by the World Court for international terrorism (in Nicaragua) and has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on government to observe international law, is unmentionable.

In the war against terrorism" said Bush" we’re going to hunt down these evil doers wherever they are, no matter how long it takes." Strictly speaking, it should not take long, as more terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the US than anywhere in the world. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. There is no terrorist sanctuary to compare with Florida, currently governed by the President’s brother, Jeb.

 J. Pilger, The Great Game Resumed, Sydney Morning Herald, 3.7.02..

The dominant power gets others to do what it wants… Britain’s acceptance of the US proposals at the Bretton Woods conference.

Britain was forced to accept the US plan for the global financial system at the Breton 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 of the conference proposal, and this was duly carried.

Editorial, "An era of error ends in terror", ERA Newsletter, 2, 21, Nov-Dec, 2001.

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.

… 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…

Iranians may remember that the United States installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in1953…

Extracts from "Folks out there have a "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values", Edward Herman, 2001. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HER109A.html

Pilger refers to UK Prime Minister "… 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…

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

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 going Bold South Korea (in order to shore up North Korea's "rogue nation" status).

Western terror is part of the recent history of imperialism,…

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

'In September 1974 President Ford confirmed the fact that the Nixon administration had authorised the CIA to spend 9 million between 1970 and 1973 to weaken Allende and strengthen his opposition.'

S. Baily, The U.S. and the Development of South America 1945-1975, 1976, p. 206.

"All national economies in the North are engaged in international forms of accumulation which are in essence predatory."

R. Biel, The New Imperialism, Zed., 2000, p. 72.

'The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin America ... will not stay quietly on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly afraid. As in Stroessner's Paraguay, the rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich include a great many U.S. companies and individuals, which is why the United States has provided the guns, and much more.' 'The economic model of Third World development favoured by the West does not say "use terror", but the policies that are favoured, which would encourage foreign investment and keep wages and welfare outlays under close control, could often not be put into place without it. Privilege cannot be maintained and enlarged from already high levels if "the people" are allowed to organize, vote, and exercise any substantial power.'

E.S. Herman, Real Terror Network, 1982., c. p. 126.

In 1998 Amnesty International released a report which made it clear that the US was at least as responsible for extreme violation of human rights around the globe as -- including the promotion of torture and terrorism and state violence -- as any government or organisation in the world."

E. C Collier, Instances of Use of United States Forces Abroad 1798 - 1993, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, Oct. 7., 1993. See Amnesty International, 1998, The United States of America; Rights for All, http://web.amnesty.org

"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 victims than do their opponents."

R. Falk, 1991, "The terrorist foundations of recent US foreign policy", in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991.p.108.

That the existence and functioning of our empire has been clearly understood for decades by critical students of American Foreign Policy is evident in the following quotes from the late 1970s and early 1980s. "..the US and its allies have armed the elites of the Third World to the teeth and saturated them with counterinsurgency weaponry and training… Hideous torture has become standard practice in US client fascist states … Much of the electronic and other torture gear, is US supplied and great numbers of …interrogators are US trained…"

N. Chomsky and E. S. Herman, (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger., pp. ix, 9, 10.

The Editors, Monthly Review, op cit, p. 3.

George refers to the many events which "…give a good, if depressing, indication of the substantial involvement of the West in the most serious instances of terrorism today. P. 3.

 The United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism, and on a scale that puts its rivals to shame.

  George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p 15.

 …under the Reagan Doctrine, the US had forged new paths in international terrorism. Some states employ individual terrorists and criminals to carry out violent acts abroad. But in the Reagan years, the US went further, not only constructing a semi-private international terrorist network but also an array of client and mercenary states - Taiwan, South Korea, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others - to finance and implement its terrorist operations.

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 15

The US commitment to international terrorism reaches to fine detail. Thus the proxy forces attacking Nicaragua were directed by their CIA and Pentagon commanders to attack "soft targets," that is, barely defended civilian targets. The State Department specifically authorized attacks on agricultural cooperatives - exactly what we denounce with horror when the agent is Abu Nidal.

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991,

The crucial role of oppression within the empire is made clear in the following quotes.

"To maintain its levels of production and consumption…the US must be assured of getting increasing amounts of the resources of poor countries. …This in turn requires strong support of unpopular and dictatorial regimes which maintain political and police oppression while serving American interests, to the detriment of their own poor majorities. If on the other hand Third World people controlled their own political economies,…they could then use more of their resources themselves…much of the land now used to grow export cash crops…would be used to feed their own hungry people for example."

W. Moyer, "De-developing the United States", Alternatives, Freedom From Hunger Campaign,1973.

"It is in the economic interests of the American corporations who have investments in these countries to maintain this social structure ( whereby poor masses are oppressed and exploited by local elites) It is to keep these elites in power that the United States has …provided them with the necessary military equipment, the finance and training."

F. Greene, 1980, The Enemy; Notes on Imperialism and Revolution, New York, Vintage, p. 125.

"The impoverished and long abused masses of Latin America…will not stay quietly on the farms or in the slums unless they are terribly afraid…the rich get richer only because they have the guns. The rich include a great many US companies and individuals, which is why the United States has provided the guns…."

N. Chomsky and E. S. Herman, (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger., p.3.

"Western countries have almost always opposed the efforts of Third World people to throw off repressive regimes in order to redirect the country’s resources to local needs. Such movements would hinder the freedom for rich world corporations to access wealth. They have usually been branded communist.""…Western countries do not tolerate such developments (struggles for liberation from the western empire), and in fact, consider any nation that supports liberation struggles…as an enemy to be destroyed…" 593"

With its extensive and valuable investments in the Third World accruing large profits, and its dependence on foreign sources of raw materials, the US clelarly stands to lose heavily from these revolutions. Its response has been to step up a global military machine, enter into alliances with repressive and reactionary regimes, and intervene against revolutionary movements." 599

E. Hutchful, The Peace Movement and the Third World, Alternatives, Spring, 1984, 593-603.

"…the US government has…been involved in a large number of well-documented clandestine attempts to overthrow regimes not to its liking…" 115"…US foreign aid and military assistance…has long been used to support regimes characterized by brutal repression and a total lack of commitment to the most elementary democratic freedoms.’ P. 116. "That torture is now a key technique in the counter insurgency strategy which is the cornerstone of US foreign policy in the Third World is beyond doubt." P. 135.

A. Mack, Imperialism, Intervention and Development, 1981.

Following is a list of prominent foreign individuals whose assassination (or planning for same) the United States has been involved in since the end of the Second World War. (CIA humorists have at times referred to this type of operation as "suicide involuntarily administered", to be carried out by the Agency's Health Alteration Committee.)

 1949 Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader 1950s ClA/Neo'Nazi hit list of more than 200 political figures in West Germany to be "put out of the way" in the event of a Soviet invasion 1950s Zhou Enlai, Prime Minister of China, several attempts on his life  1950s, 1962 Sukamo, President of Indonesia  1951 Kim II Sung, Premier of North Korea  1953 Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran 1950s (mid) Claro M. Recto, Philippined opposition leader 1955 Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Mihister of India 1957 Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt  1959, 1960s Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia  1960 Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, leader of Iraq 1950s-70s Jose Figueres, President of Costa Rica, two attempts on his life 1961 Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, leader of Haiti 1961 Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo 1961 Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Republic 1963 Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam 1960s Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, many attempts and plots on his life 1960s Raul Castro, high official in govemment of Cuba 1965 Francisco Caamano, Dominican Republic opposition leader 1965-6 Charles de Gaulle, President of France 1967 Che Guevara, Cuban leader 1970 Salvador Allende, President of Chile 1970 Gen. Rene Schneider, C-in-C of Army, Chile 1970s, 1981 General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama 1972 General Manuel Noriega, Chief of Panama Intelligence 1975 Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire 1976 Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica 198~1986 Moammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya, several plots and attempts upon his life 1982 Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran 1983 Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, Moroccan Army commander 1983 Miguel d'Escoto, Foreign Minister of Nicaragua 1984 The nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate 1985 Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanese Shiite leader (see note below) 1991 Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq  1998 Osama bin Laden, leading Islamic militant 1999 Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, 38-41

In 1998 President Clinton went before the United Nations to speak about terrorism. "What are our global obligations?" he asked. "To give terrorists no support, no sanctuary." 84

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

“Disaster capitalism”
.

This is the title of the excellent discussion by Naomi Klein. When a major disruption hits a region, such as a tsunami or earthquake, or war, the corporations and the local rich quickly move in and grab before the stunned locals have time to get their bearings. For instance, after the big Asian tsunami authorities rezoned much coastal land which h\ad been occupied by villagers for tourist resorts etc., so when the remnants of devastated regions struggled back they found their land had been taken.

Consider revolutionary movements and civil wars; Yugoslavia was not accessible to Western corporations…now it is. Consider Libya…

Disaster Capitalism Swoops Over Libya

By Pepe Escobar

The “Responsibility to protect” doctrine is the new pretext.

“...the new Libya as the latest spectacular chapter in the Disaster Capitalism series. The target is the same: regime change. And the project is the same: to completely dismantle and privatize a nation that was not integrated into turbo-capitalism; to open another (profitable) land of opportunity for turbocharged neo-liberalism.

From oil to rebuilding - in this juicy business opportunities loom.

“We’re going to open up Libya for hardcore, no holds barred, terrible capitalism.” Abdeljalil Mayouf, information manager at the "rebel" Arabian Gulf Oil Company.

The winners in the oil bonanza are already designated: NATO members plus Arab monarchies. Among the companies involved, British Petroleum (BP), France's Total and the Qatar national oil company. For Qatar - which dispatched jet fighters and recruiters to the front lines, trained "rebels" in exhaustive combat techniques, and is already managing oil sales in eastern Libya - the war will reveal itself to be a very wise investment decision.

The Russians - from Gazprom to Tafnet - had billions of dollars invested in Libyan projects; Brazilian oil giant Petrobras and the construction company Odebrecht also had interests there. It's still unclear what will happen to them. The director general of the Russia-Libya Business Council, Aram Shegunts, is extremely worried: "Our companies will lose everything because NATO will prevent them from doing business in Libya."

<http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&username=xa-4b75742d76f1531d>

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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.

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.

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, 17^th 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, 25^th 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

2. THE SEPT 11^th ATTACK ON THE WORLD TRADE CENTRE.

( …i,e, connections between the attacks and the empire.)

Since 1812… the US virtually exterminated the indigenous population, conquered half of Mexico, intervened violently in the surrounding region, conquered Hawaii and the Philippines (killing hundreds of thousands of Filipinos), and in the past half century particularly, extended its resort to force throughout much of the world. The number of victims is colossal. For the first time, the guns have been directed the other way. The same is true, even more dramatically, of Europe.

Interview of N. Chomsky, Radio B92, Belgrade. Sept. 2001.

The wealth of North America and Europe casts a huge shadow over the world, which has risen up to strike back.

G. Dauncey, Econews,, Oct, 2001.

The way the American people failed to grasp the situation…The general response was as if … "A benevolent democratic and peace living nation was brutally attacked by insane evil terrorists who hate the US …"

The editors, "After the attack…the war on terrorism", Monthly Review, Nov., 53.6, 2001, pp. 1-9, p.

On the 11 Sept 2001, 36,615 children also died through hunger. Here's the statistics...

Victims: 35,615 (according to FAO)

Location: WORLD'S POOREST COUNTRIES

Special TV reports on the tragedy: NONE

Newspaper articles: NONE

Messages from heads of state: NONE

Appeals by organisations against the crisis: NONE

Solidarity messages: NONE

Minutes of silence: NONE

Homages to the victims: NONE

Special forums organised: NONE

Messages from the Pope: NONE

Stock exchange status: NORMAL

Alarm level: NONE

Mobilisation of armed forces: NONE

Media speculation over identity of perpetrators: NONE

Those probably responsible for crime: GLOBAL FREE-MARKETEERS

Relayed by: Viviane Lerner <vlerner@interpac.net>

Source: Mai-not network <mai-not@flora.org>

Subject: The other big tragedy of 11 September

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.

But how patient the oppressed have been.

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

Could it be that the …anger that led to the attacks has its taproot … in the US government's record of commitment and support to … to military and economic terrorism, insurgency, military dictatorship, religious bigotry and unimaginable genocide …?

Fearing an attack from America, one million citizens have fled from their homes and arrived at the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The UN estimates that there are eight million Afghan citizens who need emergency aid. As supplies run out - food and aid agencies have been asked to leave - the BBC reports that one of the worst humanitarian disasters of recent times has begun to unfold.

In 1979, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA and Pakistan's ISI (Inter Services Intelligence) launched the largest covert operation in the history of the CIA. Their purpose was to harness the energy of Afghan resistance to the Soviets and expand it into a holy war, an Islamic jihad, which would turn Muslim countries within the Soviet Union against the communist regime and eventually destabilise it. When it began, it was meant to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam. It turned out to be much more than that. Over the years, through the ISI, the CIA funded and recruited almost 100,000 radical mojahedin from 40 Islamic countries as soldiers for America's proxy war. The rank and file of the mojahedin were unaware that their jihad was actually being fought on behalf of Uncle Sam.

The CIA continued to pour in money and military equipment, but the overheads had become immense, and more money was needed. The mojahedin ordered farmers to plant opium as a "revolutionary tax". The ISI set up hundreds of heroin laboratories across Afghanistan. Within two years of the CIA's arrival, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderland had become the biggest producer of heroin in the world, and the single biggest source of the heroin on American streets. The annual profits, said to be between $100bn and $200bn, were ploughed back into training and arming militants.

In 1995, the Taliban - then a marginal sect of dangerous, hard-line fundamentalists - fought its way to power in Afghanistan. It was funded by the ISI, that old cohort of the CIA, and supported by many political parties in Pakistan. The Taliban unleashed a regime of terror. Its first victims were its own people, particularly women.

And what of America's trusted ally? Pakistan too has suffered enormously. The US government has not been shy of supporting military dictators who have blocked the idea of democracy from taking root in the country.

The US government, and no doubt governments all over the world, will use the climate of war as an excuse to curtail civil liberties, deny free speech, lay off workers, harass ethnic and religious minorities, cut back on public spending and divert huge amounts of money to the defence industry. To what purpose? President Bush can no more "rid the world of evil-doers" than he can stock it with saints. It's absurd for the US government to even toy with the notion that it can stamp out terrorism with more violence and oppression. Terrorism is the symptom, not the disease.

The September 11 attacks were a monstrous calling card from a world gone horribly wrong. The message may have been written by Bin Laden (who knows?) and delivered by his couriers, but it could well have been signed by the ghosts of the victims of America's old wars. The millions killed in Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the 17,500 killed when Israel - backed by the US - invaded Lebanon in 1982, the 200,000 Iraqis killed in Operation Desert Storm, the thousands of Palestinians who have died fighting Israel's occupation of the West Bank. And the millions who died, in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Haiti, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Panama, at the hands of all the terrorists, dictators and genocidists whom the American government supported, trained, bankrolled and supplied with arms. And this is far from being a comprehensive list.

For a country involved in so much warfare and conflict, the American people have been extremely fortunate. The strikes on September 11 were only the second on American soil in over a century.

But who is Osama bin Laden really? … He has been sculpted from the spare rib of a world laid to waste by America's foreign policy: its gunboat diplomacy, its nuclear arsenal, its vulgarly stated policy of "full-spectrum dominance", its chilling disregard for non-American lives, its barbarous military interventions, its support for despotic and dictatorial regimes, its merciless economic agenda that has munched through the economies of poor countries like a cloud of locusts. Its marauding multinationals who are taking over the air we breathe, the ground we stand on, the water we drink, the thoughts we think.

(Re the US demand for Bin Laden to be handed over she says,…)

(While talks are on for the extradition of CEOs - can India put in a side request for the extradition of Warren Anderson of the US? He was the chairman of Union Carbide, responsible for the Bhopal gas leak that killed 16,000 people in 1984. We have collated the necessary evidence. It's all in the files. Could we have him, please?)

Extracts from THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE JUSTICE, By Arundhati Roy,The Guardian - U.K. - Saturday September 29, 2001.

For further discussion of the hypocrisy of the reactions to this terrorist attack, see Cockburn, Corruptions of Empire, pp. 399-401.

Following their bombing of Iraq, the United States wound up with military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and neighbouring countries in the Persian Gulf region.

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

Following their bombing of Afghanistan, the United States appears on course to wind up with military bases in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and perhaps elsewhere in the area.

The bombing, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan were conducted—apart from the primitive lashing out in blind revenge against...somebody—primarily for the purpose of ensuring the installation of a new government that would be sufficiently amenable to Washington's international objectives, including the siting of bases.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000k, p. xviii

Speaking of Russia's problem with Chechnya in 1999, the US State Department's second in command, Strobe Talbott, urged Moscow to show "restraint and wisdom". Restraint, he said, "means taking action against real terrorists, but not using indiscriminate force that endangers innocents." (However in response to the Sept.11 events…) an American professor arrived at considerably more than 3,500 Afghan dead through early December, and still counting.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000k, p. xii

The bin Laden network and others like them draw a lot of their support from the desperation and anger and resentment of the people of the region. …they’re angry about US support for undemocratic, repressive regimes in the region and U.S. insistence on blocking any efforts towards democratic openings. "  

Uncertain source, W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 51.

_________________________________________________

3. US TRAINING FOR TERRORISTS

In the 1960s Kennedy instituted "counterinsurgency, essentially the development of "special forces" trained in the use of terror to prevent peasants from supporting revolutionary groups. For decades the US School of the Americas has provided this training to large numbers of Laltin American police and military personnel, including many of the regions worst tyrants and torturers. As Monbiot says, "The US has been training terrorists at a camp in Georgia for years - and it's still at it."

G. Monbiot, The Guardian,Tuesday October 30, 2001.

. Training manuals include explicit material on the use of torture and terror.

M. McClintock, 1991, "American doctrine and counterinsurgent state terror", in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991, p. 133.

For documentation on the campaign by School of the Americas Watch to have the School closed see www.soaw.org.

Military training gives the US access. Why, in the face of decades of terrible publicity, increasingly more militant protests, thousands of arrests, and sharply decreasing Congressional support, has the Pentagon clung to the School of the Americas? What is it that's so vital to the military brass? The answer may lie in this: the school and its students, along with a never-ending supply of US military equipment to countries around the world, are part of a package that serves the US foreign policy agenda in a special way. The package is called "access". Along with the equipment come American technicians, instructors, replacement parts and more. Here s the testimony before Congress of General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander in Chief, US Central Command (CENTCOM), in1990. "Security assistance leads directly to access, and without access afforded by our friends we cannot project U.S. military forces into [an] area and stay there for any appreciable length of time If our military assistance programs diminish, our influence will erode. 64

CIA, "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare", 1984 A manual designed for the US-backed Contra forces (the guerrillas) fighting in Nicaragua against the leftist Sandinista government. It advised: "It is possible to neutralize carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, mesta judges [justices of the peace], police and State Security officials, CDS [Sandinista Defense Committees] 4 chiefs etc." 42.

The World Court found that in producing and disseminating this manual, the United States "encouraged the commission...of acts contrary to general principles of humanitarian law," including the 4 Geneva Conventions of 1949. 48

The School of the Americas (SOA), an Army school at Benning, Georgia, has been beleaguered for years by protestors because so many of its graduates have been involved in very serious human-rights abuses in Latin America, often involving torture and murder. Who are these military men being trained to fight if not the army of another country? Who but their own citizens? Over the years, SOA has trained tens of thousands of Latin' American military and police in subjects like counter-insurgency, infantry tactics, military intelligence, anti-narcotics operations and ~ commando operations. The students have also been taught to hate and fear something called "communism". 61

In September 1996, under continual insistence from religious and grassroots groups, the Pentagon released seven Spanish-language 4 training manuals used at the SOA until 1991, A New York Times editorial declared: Americans can now read for themselves some of the noxious lessons the United States Army taught to thousands of Latin American military and police officers at the School of the Americas during the1980s. A training manual recently released by the Pentagon recommended interrogation techniques like torture, execution, blackmail and arresting the relatives of those being questioned. 63  SOA graduates have led a number of military coups—so many that the Washington Post reported in 1968 that the school was known throughout Latin America as the 'escuela de golpes' or coup school"—and are responsible for the murders of thousands of people, particularly in the 1980s. p. 63

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

_____________________________________________________________

4. PREVENTING EXAMPLES OF NON-CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT

"The primary concern of American foreign policy to Latin America (explicit in the National Security Commission 5432 Review, 1954) is "…nationalistic regimes which are responsive to the demands of the masses o0f the population for an improvement in their low living standards and for diversification of production." 20. "In contrast, we have to organize export-oriented production and integration into the world market, and not nationalism, not use of resources for domestic needs. They are not allowed to devote their resources to say, subsistence agriculture, but rather to export crops…The way to do this (was for us) to take control of the Latin American military." 20."The reason we are in Central America is resource extraction The concern with Nicaragua is that an alternative demonstration could succeed. "If any country can fall into the hands of nationalist leaders who devote resources to their own populations. It could very well have a demonstration effect." 20. Hence the hysteria re Grenada.

N. Chomsky, Interview in Multinational Monitor, Nov., 1988, 19-23.

In Latin America an alliance between foreign capital and local rich people "…reinforces itself with ceaseless propaganda stamping any form of progressive alternative as ‘communist’"

M. Manley, "The Caribbean Basin, in R. Gauhar, Ed., Third World Affairs, 1985.  p. 343.

"Our effort in Vietnam was intended to be a model counter-insurgency –the struggle in which we would demonstrate that wars of national liberation must fail…a failure…would lend credibility to the proponents of revolutionary warfare and inspire oppressed peoples everywhere to revolt against Pax Americana." 54.

M. J. Klare, War Without End, Knopf, 1972.

The US aim …"in its efforts to cripple the Nicaraguan economy is... to ensure that the case of Nicaragua does not present an attractive example which other countries might be tempted to follow." "If the Sandinistas were t0o succeed in promoting economic development where Somoza and other American clients in the region have failed that would encourage aspirations among people in other countries under American domination to break free."

J. McMahan, Reagan and the World, Pluto, 1984, p. 139.

‘The Administrations concern was with the symbol, with the example that Grenada had set for other countries in the region."

J. McMahan, Reagan and the World, Pluto, 1984, p. 164

"The great fear "..the dread of a revolutionary movement that will sweep through Latin America and abolish the century old system of exploitation that enriches American businesses at the expense of the rest of the hemisphere…Between 1960 and 1970 the US spent $1 billion to overcome insurgent threats to the existing order."

M. J. Klare, War Without End, Knopf, 1972, p. 270

By destroying Vietnam to its core, by poisoning the earth, the water and the gene pool for generations, Washington had in fact achieved its primary purpose: preventing what might have been the rise of a good development option for Asia. Ho Chi Minh was, after all, some kind of communist.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000 135

American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon the free market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization" as the summum bonum, that will not change its laws to favour foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will not allow asbestos, banned pesticides and other products restricted in the developed world to be dumped onto their people, that will not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched~earth policy upon the country's social services or standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil...To the highly sensitive nostrils of Washington foreign-policy veterans, Yugoslavia smelled a bit too much like one of these governments.

Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be reduced to basket cases, or, where feasible, simply overthrown, like Albania and Bulgaria in the early 1990s; failing that, life has to be made impossible for these renegades, as with Cuba, still. ..

And this was the foundation—the sine qua non—of American foreign policy for the entire twentieth century, both before and after the existence of the Soviet Union, from the Philippines, Panama and the Dominican Republic in the first decade of the century, to Peru.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

“The Vietnam war was fought to prevent Vietnam from becoming a successful model of economic and social development for the Third World.” p. 91

N. Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 91.

“The real crime of Cuba was the successes, in terms of things ~-

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

Source Uncertain; probably N. Chomsky, Understanding Power.

Just as Yugoslavia served as a "bad" example in Europe, so Iraq served as a bad example to other nations in the Middle East. The last thing the plutocrats in Washington want in that region is independent, self-defining developing nations that wish to control their own land, labor, and natural resources.

US economic and military power has been repeatedly used to suppress competing systems. Self-defining countries like Cuba, Iraq, and Yugoslavia are targeted. Consider Yugoslavia. It showed no desire to become part of the European Union and absolutely no interest in joining NATO. It had an economy that was relatively prosperous, with some 80 percent of it still publicly owned. The wars of secession and attrition waged against Yugoslavia---all in the name of human rights and democracy---destroyed that country's economic infrastructure and fractured it into a cluster of poor, powerless, right-wing mini-republics, whose economies are being privatized, deregulated, and opened to Western corporate penetration on terms that are completely favorable to the investors. We see this happening most recently in Serbia. Everything is being privatized at garage sale prices. Human service, jobs, and pension funds are disappearing. Unemployment, inflation, and poverty are skyrocketing, as is crime, homelessness, prostitution, and suicide ---we can anticipate that the same thing is in store for Iraq following a US occupation: An Iraqi puppet government will be put in place, headed by someone every bit as subservient to the White House as Tony Blair. The Iraqi state-owned media will become "free and independent" by being handed over to rich  conservative private corporations. Anything even remotely critical of US foreign policy and free market capitalism will be deprived of an effective platform. Conservative political parties, heavil financed by US sources, will outspend any leftist groupings that might have survived. On this steeply unleveled playing field, US advisors will conduct US-style "democratic elections," perhaps replicating the admirable results produced in Florida and elsewhere. Just about everything in the Iraqi economy will be privatized at giveaway prices. Poverty and underemployment, already high, will climb precipitously. So  will the Iraqi national debt, as international loans are floated that "help" the Iraqis pay for their own victimization. Public services will dwindle to nothing, and Iraq will suffer even more misery than it does today.

M Parenti, To Kill Iraq. 2002.

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 5. INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS = THUGGERY.

The following quotes illustrate the way international relations are frequently about little more than grabbing and bullying.

After the defeat of Japan in 1945, the US intervened repeatedly to prevent the restoration of Dutch colonial power in Indonesia, while at the same time supporting the Indonesian army and right-wing politicians in their drive against the Indonesian left. Following an army offensive against the left in Madiun, East Java, in September 1948, which left thousands of people dead, the Truman administration hailed the government of Vice-President/Prime Minister Mobamad Hatta as "the only government in the Far East to 'have met and crushed an all-out communist offensive." Once Hatta had proven his anti-communist credentials, Washington proceeded to compel the Dutch to abandon their military operations against republican forces and enter into negotiations with the Republic for the transfer of sovereignty in 1949. The negotiations in the Hague took place under the patronage of US diplomat Merle Cochrane, who lobbied tenaciously to iron out disagreements and prevent Dutch obstinacy from sabotaging US objectives. 182

C. Budiardjo, "Indonesia; Mass Extermination and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Power", Ch. 8 in A. George, Western State Terrorism, Polity, 1991.

Secretary Weinberger however, proposed a reformulation. In his words, the United States had to oppose "the geographic expansion of Soviet control and military presence worldwide, particularly where such presence threatens our geo-strategic position." This was a definite hardening of previous formulations. For, among other things, it implied active measures to prevent B] change or revolution which might threaten US interests and which might be supported - or be thought to be supported - by the Soviet Union.' 221.

In 1983, the US which was displeased with Zimbabwe's voting in the Security Council, cut assistance to that country by almost half. US officials stated that Zimbabwe's sponsorship of a resolution condemning US intervention in (Grenada and its abstention on a US- sponsored resolution after the Korean airliner incident "played a bitpart" in its decision.

In 1983, when large numbers of Mozambicans faced starvation and when tens of thousands had already died from lack of food, the Reagan administration deliberately held back food aid to that country, just as it was seeking to "persuade" it to sign a non-aggression pact with South Africa. Mozambique had repeatedly refused to agree to South Africa's demand that the ANC be expelled from its territory. 327

In early 1986, the Reagan administration virtually declared open war on Angola. In a major public relations campaign to garner support for UNITA, the Reagan administration brought Jonas Savimbi to Washington, where he talked to influential groups and met with President Reagan. It was later reported that the US had agreed to give UNITA some $15 million in arms and equipment, but the amount was, in fact, substantially higher. Samora Machel, the president of Mozambique, was killed in an airplane crash on the South African border with Mozambique in October, 1986. Machel's death was a terrible blow to Mozambique, to the front-line states and to the Non-Aligned Movement. The crash was not accidental. South Africa used sophisticated electronic equipment which caused the instruments on Machel's aircraft to malfunction. The highly classified equipment had come from the United States.

In the summer of 1986, a Zimbabwe minister, speaking at a public function, sharply criticized the US for its refusal to enact adequate economic sanctions against South Africa. Former President Jimmy Carter, who was present, walked out. A few days later, the Reagan administration suspended - and later withheld - more than $13 million in aid to Zimbabwe.

"The Reagan Doctrine and the Destabilization of Southern Africa", Sean Gervasi and Sybil Wong, Ch. 9 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p.52.

They claim to abhor the unprecendented "aggression" of Iraq against Kuwait. But aggression is the name of the game for all these powers. The United States was the driving force behind the resolution. Yet only a year ago US troops stormed into Panama, killing 7000 people in one night and then setting up a puppet government which "invited them in". Ten years earlier the US had armed 30,000 Contras to wage war against the elected government of Nicaragua. The USSR eagerly backed the resolution. Just two years ago Russian troops withdrew from Afghanistan after ten years of trying to occupy. Gorbachev's government still insists on enforcing its rule on Lithuania, 50 years after Stalin used military force to seize the country.

The butchers of Tienanmen Square also gave their support. China has been in military occupation of Tibet for 30 years, ruthlessly crushing all opposition. Eagerly applauding the UN resolution was Israel, which has forcibly occupied the Palestinian West Bank for 23 years, attempting ruthlessly to crush al1 opposition. Eight years ago Israel staged an unprovoked and brutal invasion of Lebanon, killing tens of thousands of people. It still holds on to a strip of southern Lebanon in defiance of any alleged "international law". At no point have the great powers even talked about sanctions against Israel. 27

A supposed example of "peaceful negotiation" was the Vienna Congress of 18I5, which it claimed "established boundaries that lasted 100 years. The Vienna Congress was in fact no alternative to war but a conference where the victors in the long and bloody wars against Napoleon divided up the spoils between them. It was a congress which imprisoned nations and re-installed the most disgusting reactionary monarchies. Far from leading to peace, almost every war and revolution in Europe over the next century was fought against the decisions of this Congress. 29

R. Bollard, No Blood For Oil, International Socialist Organisation, (undated; c 2001.)

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6. THE DRUG CONNECTION

The US CIA has made extensive use of the drug trade to raise money for it s operations.

 In 2000, the Taliban government under advice from the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP) imposed a total ban on opium production. Prior to the ban, according to the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Afghanistan produced more than 70% of the world's opium in 2000…These multibillion dollar revenues of narcotics were deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks -together with their affiliates in the offshore banking havens-laundered large amounts of narco-dollars. In other words, Afghanistan, the poorest country on earth, was the source of tremendous financial wealth derived from the drug trade to financial institutions, business syndicates and organised crime….Immediately following the installation of the US puppet government under Prime Minister Hamid Kharzai, opium production soared, regaining its historic levels. According to the UNDCP, opium cultivation increased by 657 % in 2002 (in relation to its 2001 level). In 2001, opium cultivation had fallen to an estimated 7606ha.(See table below). It is currently estimated by the UNDCP to be of the order of 45,000 -65,000ha.

US BOMBING OF AFGHANISTAN RESTORES TRADE IN NARCOTICs by Michel Chossudovsky,Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), http://globalresearch.ca/ 20 May, 2002

In my 30 year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA. Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement .

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

1950s to early 1970s, Southeast Asia…

The Nationalist Chinese army, defeated by the communists in 1949 and forced into exile, became part of an army formed by the CIA in Burma to wage war against Communist China. The Agency closed its eyes to the fact that their new clients were becoming the opium barons of the Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world's largest source of opium and heroin. Air America, the Principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia, to sites where the opium was processed into heroin, and to trans-shipment points on the route to Westem customers. 218

 During the US military involvement in Vietnam and Laos, the CIA worked closely with certain tribal peoples and warlords engaged rr in opium cultivation. In exchange for tactical or intelligence support from these elements, the Agency protected their drug operations. Air America pilots were again engaged in flying opium and heroin throughout the area to serve the personal and entrepreneurial needs of the ClA's various military and political allies, at times lining their own pockets as well; on occasion, the proceeds also helped finance CIA covert actions off budget; ultimately, the enterprise turned many Gls in Vietnam into heroin addicts.  The operation was not a paragon of discretion. Heroin was refined in a laboratory located on the site of CIA headquarters in Northern Laos. After two decades of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world's illicit opium and the major supplier for America's booming heroin market. 219

1980s, the United States and the Cocaine Import Agency. In addition to the cases cited above of drug-laden planes landing in the US unmolested by authorities, there is the striking case of Oscar Danilo Blandon and Juan Norwin Meneses, two Nicaraguans living in Califomia. To support the Contras (particularly during a period in which Congress banned funding for them), as well as enriching themselves, the two men turned to smuggling cocaine into the US under CIA protection. This led to the distribution of large quantities of cocaine into Los Angeles' inner city… 225. For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman General Manuel Noriega was a highly paid CIA asset and collaborator, despite knowledge by US drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega facilitated "guns-for-drugs" flights for the Nicaraguan Contras, providing protection and pilots; safe havens for drug cartel officials and discreet banking facilities for all. Yet, US officials, including CIA Director William Webster and several Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for his efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors Of his Medellin Carrel patrons). William Casey, who became CIA Director in 1981, declared that he didn't denounce Noriega for his relationship with drug traffickers because the Panamanian "was providing valuable support for our policies in Central America, especially Nicaragua".

When a confluence of circumstances led to Noriega falling into political disfavour with Washington, the Bush administration was reluctantly obliged to tum against him. In 1989, the US invaded Panama, kidnapped and imprisoned the general, and falsely ascribed the invasion to the war on drugs whereas several foreign policy imperatives actually lay behind the operation. Drug trafficking through Panama continued unabated under the new US-installed goveRNment. 220.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

l980s, Central America.

Washington's philosophy was consistent: let 'em traffic in drugs, murder, rape and torture, let 'em bum down schools and medical clinics...as long as they carry out our wars, they're our boys, our good ol' boys. Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated and abetted drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the Contras. 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations (the Kerry Committee) concluded a three year investigation by stating: There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region...U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua...ln each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter...Senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras, funding problems. 221

Hull and other ClA-connected Contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian, drug trafficker who later admitted to giving more than $4 million in cash to the Contras. Morales' planes were loaded with weapons in Florida, flown to Central America and then brought back with cocaine on board. 221

The US repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradict Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial. Another Costa Rican base drug ring involved anti-Castro Cubans whom the CIA had hired a' military trainers for the Contras. Many of the Cubans had long been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking. They used Contra planes and a Costa Rican-based shrimp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the United States.

In Honduras, in exchange for allowing the US to convert the country into a grand military base, the CIA and DEA turned a virtually blind eye to the extensive drug trafficking of Honduran military officers, government officials and others.   There were other way stations such as the Guatemalan military intelligence service, closely associated with the CIA, and which harboured many drug traffickers, and Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador, a key component of the US military intervention against the country's guerrillas. Former DEA officer Celerino Castillo, stationed in El Salvador, has written of how Contra planes flew north loaded with cocaine, landed with impunity in various spots in the United States, including an Air Force base in Texas, then returned laden with cash to finance the war. "All under the protective umbrella of the United States Government."

The connections were everywhere: Four companies that distributed "humanitarian" aid to the Contras but were "owned and operated by narcotics traffickers", and under investigation in the United States for drug trafficking, received State Department contracts of more than $800,000. Southern Air Transport, "formerly" ClA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was deeply involved in the drug A running as well. 223

See the "Interventions" chapter for discussion of how Washington ignored much of the drug trafficking of government and military A personnel in Peru, Colombia and Mexico in the l990s because of A the anti-leftist campaigns being waged by these regimes with USA support. 224

1980s to early I99Os, Afghanistan CIA supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in opium cultivation while fighting against the Soviet-supported government. The agency's political protection and logistical assistance enabled the growers to markedly increase their output. ClA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to heroin laboratories along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The output is estimated to have provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 199O that they failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. 224

1986 to I 994, Haiti …While working to keep right-wing Haitian military and political leaders in power, the CIA looked away from their drug trafficking. 224

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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7. THE COLD WAR.

One of the most enduring Soviet-threat stories—the alleged justification for the birth of NATO—was the coming Red invasion of Western Europe. If, by 1999, anyone still swore by this fairy tale, they could have read a report in The Guardian of London on newly declassified British government documents from 1968. Among the documents was one based on an analysis by the Foreign Office joint intelligence committee, which the newspaper summarized as follows:

The Soviet Union had no intention of launching a military attack on the West at the height of the Cold War, British military and intelligence chiefs privately believed, in stark contrast to what Western politicians and military leaders were saying in public about the "Soviet threat".

"The Soviet Union will not deliberately start general war or even limited war in Europe," a briefing for the British chiefs of staff—marked Top Secret, UK Eyes Only, and headed The Threat: Soviet Aims and Intentions—declared in June 1968. "Soviet foreign policy had been cautious and realistic", the department argued, and despite the Viemam War, the Russians and their allies had "continued to make contacts in all fields with the West and to maintain a limited but increasing political dialogue with NATO powers".

In other words, whatever the diplomats and policymakers at the time thought they were doing, the Cold War skeptics have been vindicated—it was not about containing an evil, expansionist ~ communism after all; it was about American imperialism, with "communist" merely the name given to those who stood in its way.

Cold War: …dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to obviate the need for a land invasion of Japan, thus saving thousands of American lives? However, it's been known for years that the Japanese had been trying for many months to surrender and that the US had consistently ignored these overtures. The bombs were dropped, not to intimidate the Japanese, but to put the fear of the American god into the Russians.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p.12

During the Cold War, US foreign policy was carried out under the waving banner of fighting a moral crusade against what cold warriors persuaded the American people, most of the world, and usually themselves, was the existence of a malevolent International Communist Conspiracy. But it was always a fraud; there was never any such animal as the International Communist Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in misery, rising up in protest against their condition, against an oppressive government, a government likely supported by the United States. p. 14

Cold War is seen not as an East-West struggle, but rather a "North South" struggle, as an American effort—as mentioned above—to prevent the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model, and to prevent the rise of any regional power that might challenge American supremacy, then that particular map with the pins stuck in it still hangs on the wall in the Pentagon's War Room. (Said a Defense Department planning paper in 1992: "Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival...we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role." [emphasis added]) 23-24

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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8. THEY MUST FEAR UNRESTRAINED BRUTAL RETALIATION.

In March 1998, an internal 1995 study, "Essentials of Post Cold War Deterrence", by the US Strategic Command, the headquarters responsible for the US strategic nuclear arsenal, was brought to light. The study stated: "Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be potentially 'out of control', can be beneficial to creating and reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part of the national persona we project to all adversaries."

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 26.

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9. WESTERN WAR CRIMINALS?

If George Bush were to be judged by the standards of the Nuremberg tribunals,

he'd be hanged. So too, mind you, would every single American President since

the end of the second world war, including Jimmy Carter.

BBC Interview by Noam Chomsky and Jeremy Paxman , BBC News- May 21, 2004.

The reason why the US refuses to accept the establishment of an International Criminal Court is that its leaders would be likely to be indicted for war crimes.

Blum argues that the following people should be indicted as war criminals:

William Clinton, president, for his merciless bombing of the people Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights, taking the lives of many hundreds of civilians, and producing one of the greatest ecological catastrophe in history; for his relentless continuation of the sanctions and rocket attacks upon the people of Iraq; and for his illegal and lethal bombings of Somalia, Bosnia, Sudan and Afghanistan.

General Wesley Clark, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, for his direction of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia with an almost sadistic fanaticism..."He would rise out of his seat and slap the table. 'I've got to get the maximum violence out of this campaign—now!" George Bush, president, for the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including many thousands of children, the result of his 40 days of bombing and the institution of draconian; sanctions; and for his unconscionable bombing of Panama, producing $-~ widespread death, destruction and homelessness, for no discernible reason that would stand up in a court of law. General Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for his prominent role in the attacks on Panama and Iraq, the latter including destruction of nuclear reactors as well as plants making biological and chemical agents. It was the first time ever that live reactors had been bombed, and ran the risk of setting a dangerous precedent. Hardly more than a month had passed since the United Nations, under whose mandate the United States was supposedly operating in Iraq, had passed a resolution reaffirming its "prohibition of military attacks on nuclear facilities" in the Middle East In the wake of the destruction, Powell gloated: "The two operating reactors they had are both gone, they're down, they're finished." He was just as cavalier about the lives of the people of Iraq. In response to a question concerning the number of Iraqis killed in the war, the good general replied: "It's really not a number I'm terribly interested in."

And for his part in the cover up of war crimes in Vietnam by troops of the same brigade that carried out the My Lai massacre. General Norman Schwarzkopf, Commander in Chief, US Central Command, for his military leadership of the Iraqi carnage; for continuing the carnage two days after the cease-fire; for continuing it against Iraqis trying to surrender.

 Ronald Reagan, president, for eight years of death, destruction, torture and the crushing of hope inflicted upon the people of El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Grenada by his policies; and for his bombings of Lebanon, Libya and Iran. He's forgotten all this, but the world shouldn't. Elliott Abrams, Assistant Secretary of State under Reagan, for rewriting history' even as it was happening, by instituting Iying as public policy. He was indispensable to putting the best possible face on the atrocities being committed daily by the Contras in Nicaragua and by other Washington allies in Central America, thus promoting continued support for them; a spinmeister for the ages, who wrestled facts into ideological submission. "When history is written," he declared, "the Contras will be folk heroes." 70. Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of Defense for seven years under Reagan, for his official and actual responsibility for the numerous crimes against humanity perpetrated by the United States in Central America and the Caribbean, and for the bombing of Libya in 1986. George Bush pardoned him for Iran-Contra, but he should not be pardoned for his war crimes

Lt. Col. Oliver North, assigned to Reagan's National Security Council, for being a prime mover behind the Contras of Nicaragua, and for his involvement in the planning of the invasion of Grenada, which took the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians.

Henry Kissinger… for his Machiavellian, amoral, immoral roles in the US interventions into Angola, Chile, East Timor, Iraq, Vietnam and Cambodia, which brought unspeakable horror and misery to the peoples of those lands. Gerald Ford, president, for giving his approval to Indonesia to use American arms to brutally suppress the people of East Timor, thus setting in motion a quarter-century-long genocide.

Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, a prime architect of, and major bearer of responsibility for, the slaughter in Indochina, from its early days to its extraordinary escalations; and for the violent suppression of popular movements 5 in Peru. 70

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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10. WESTERN ACCESS TO THIRD WORLD RESOURCES.

With its extensive and valuable investments in the Third World accruing large profits, and its dependence on foreign sources of raw materials, the US clearly stands to lose heavily from these revolutions. Its response has been to step up a global military machine, enter into alliances with repressive and reactionary regimes, and intervene against revolutionary movements." 599

E. Hutchful, The Peace Movement and the Third World, Alternatives, Sp4ring, 1984, 593-603.

Reviewing President Eisenhower's strategic thinking, diplomatic historian Richard Immerman observes that he "took it as an article of faith that America's strength and security depended on its maintaining access to—indeed control of global markets and resources, particularly in the Third World." Like other rational planners, he assumed that the West was safe from any Soviet attack, and that such fears were "the product of paranoid imagination." But the periphery "was vulnerable to subversion," and the Russians, Eisenhower wrote, "are getting far closer ~ to the Third World masses than we are" and are skilled at propaganda and other methods "to appeal directly to the masses." These are common features of the planning record. 28.

"The Third World itself is the real enemy." P. 33

N. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, 1991.

The grand prize of this war is unimpedable control by U.S. multinational oil corporations over the world's greatest oil and gas deposits which are located around the Caspian Sea of Central Asia, formerly the territory of the Soviet Union

Prof. John McMurtry." The New Totalitarian Movement", Mid 2002.(The reference is to the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.)

"The major policy imperative is to block indigenous nationalist forces that might try to use their own resources in conflict with US interests." 54

"……the term aid is a emphemism for methods by which the taxpayer funds business efforts to enhance market penetration and investment opportuinities." 68  "It is a war against the Third World." 64

N. Chomsky, Deterring Democracy, Verso, 1991.___________________

“… the primary concern is to prevent independence, regardless oF 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 govlernment—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.

N. Chomsky, Understanding Power,

Iraq business will now be taken by foreign corporatoions.

On 22 Sept it was announced that the US administration in Iraq would allow unlimited foreign investment in Iraq, except in the oil and minerals sector, with repatriation of 100% of profits permitted, and a maximum business tax rate of 15%.

This means the vast amount of business activity that takes place in Iraq has now been “given” to foreign corporations; they are the one’s who will come in and buy it up, under bonanza conditions.

Iraq was a “ socialist” economy; the government owned the major firms and foreign corporations had no access to tall his business activity.

The ultimate goal; control over resources.

“In reality, as many of the chapters in this book show, the real threat to the US and Britain in the postwar period came not from communist or the Soviet Union but from nationalist forces within developing countries. The principal “threat” they posed was to Western control over their economic resources – the fear that a country’s resources might be primarily used to benefit its people. Nationalist movements and governments were invariably labelled as communist to justify action against them. All US interventions until the invasion of Panama in 1989, and many British interventions, were justified as defending the free world from Soviet expansion.” 76

Britains basic priority – virtually its raison d’etre for several centuries -- is to aid British companies in getting their hands on other countries’ resources. 210

“When it comes to US interventions in Latin America, a clear pattern is visible, a popular government comes into power with an agenda of addressing poverty and inequality, these priorities threaten the control of resources by US businesses; the government is deemed an agent of international communism; and the US sends troops, or covertly engineers a change in government, to restore ‘order’ and ‘security”.

M.Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the, Vintage, 2003.

11. THE US GIVES SANCTUARY TO TERRORISTS

"The Cuban exiles in Miami have committed hundreds of terrorist acts, in the US and abroad." 78 The Cuban exiles are in fact one of the longest-lasting and most prolific terrorist groups in the world, and they're still at it. During 1997 they carried out a spate of hotel bombings in Havana, directed from Miami. Hijacking is generally regarded as a grave international crime, but although there have been numerous air and boat hijackings over the years from Cuba to the US, at gunpoint, knifepoint and/or with the use of physical force, including at least one murder, it's difficult to find more than a single instance where the United States brought criminal charges against the hijackers. In August 1996, three Cubans who hijacked a plane to Florida at knifepoint were indicted and brought to trial In Florida. This is like trying someone for gambling in a Nevada court. Even though the kidnapped pilot was brought back from Cuba to testify against the men, the defense simply told the jurors that the man was Iying, and the jury deliberated less than an hour before acquitting the defendants. Cubans are not the only foreign terrorists or serious human-rights violators who have enjoyed safe haven in the United States in recent years. …

There's former Guatemalan Defense Minister Hector Gramajo Morales. In 1995, a US court ordered Gramajo to pay $47.5 million in damages to eight Guatemalans and a US citizen for his responsibility in the torture of the American (Sister Dianna Ortiz—see "Torture" chapter) and the massacre of family members of the Guatemalans (among-thousands of other Indians whose death he was responsible for)…The judge stated that "The evidence suggests that Gramajo devised and directed the implementation of an indiscriminate campaign of terror ~. against civilians." 80

Florida is the retirement home of choice violators seeking to depart from the scene of their crimes. Former general Jose Guillermo Garcia, head of El Salvador's armed forces in the 1980s, when military-linked death squads killed thousands of people suspected of being "subversives", has lived in Florida since the early 1990s. 81

The system of international criminal prosecution covering genocide, terrorism, war crimes and torture makes all governments responsible for the criminal prosecution of offenders. ..84

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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12. DOCUENTS ON PARTICULAR COUNTRIES.

AFGHANISTAN

Not surprisingly, the CIA preferred the most fanatic and cruel fighters they could mobilise. The end result was to "destroy a moderate regime and create a fanatical one, from groups recklessly financed by the Americans" (London Times correspondent Simon Jenkins, also a specialist on the region). These "Afghanis" as they are called (many, like bin Laden, not from Afghanistan) carried out terror operations across the border in Russia, but they terminated these after Russia withdrew.

Bin Laden and his "Afghanis" turned against the US in 1990 when they established permanent bases in Saudi Arabia -- from his point of view, a counterpart to the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, but far more significant because of Saudi Arabia's special status as the guardian of the holiest shrines.

Bin Laden is also bitterly opposed to the corrupt and repressive regimes of the region, which he regards as "un-Islamic," including the Saudi Arabian regime, the most extreme Islamic fundamentalist regime in the world, apart from the Taliban, and a close US ally since its origins. Bin Laden despises the US for its support of these regimes. Like others in the region, he is also outraged by long-standing US support for Israel's brutal military occupation, now in its 35th year: Washington's decisive diplomatic, military, and economic intervention in support of the killings, the harsh and destructive siege over many years, the daily humiliation to which Palestinians are subjected, the expanding settlements designed to break the occupied territories into Bantustan-like cantons and take control of the resources, the gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, and other actions that are recognised as crimes throughout most of the world, apart from the US, which has prime responsibility for them. And like others, he contrasts Washington's dedicated support for these crimes with the decade-long British assault against the civilian population of Iraq which has devastated the society and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths while strengthening Saddam Hussein -- who was a favoured friend and ally of the US and Britain right through his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds, as people of the region also remember well, even if Westerners prefer to forget the facts. These sentiments are very widely shared. The _Wall Street Journal, (Sept. 14) published a survey of opinions of wealthy and privileged Muslims in the Gulf region (bankers, professionals, businessmen with close links to the U.S.). They expressed much the same views: resentment of the U.S. policies of supporting Israeli crimes and blocking the international consensus on a diplomatic settlement for many years while devastating Iraqi civilian society, supporting harsh and repressive anti-democratic regimes throughout the region, and imposing barriers against economic development by "propping up oppressive regimes." Among the great majority of people suffering deep poverty and oppression, similar sentiments are far more bitter, and are the source of the fury and despair that has led to suicide bombings, as commonly understood by those who are interested in the facts.

Simply ask how the same people would have reacted if Nicaragua had adopted this doctrine after the U.S. had rejected the orders of the World Court to terminate its "unlawful use of force" against Nicaragua and had vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law. And that terrorist attack was far more severe and destructive even than this atrocity.

The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed.

Interview of N. Chomsky, Radio B92, Belgrade. Sept. 2001

The U.S.-U.K. attack on Afghanistan is …clearly illegal. It violates international law and the express words of the United Nations Charter.

The Security Council has already passed two resolutions condemning the Sept. 11 attacks and announcing a host of measures aimed at combating terrorism.

Neither resolution can remotely be said to authorize the use of military force.

That's because the right of unilateral self-defence does not include the right to retaliate once an attack has stopped.

The right of self-defence in international law is like the right of self-defence in our own law: It allows you to defend yourself when the law is not around, but it does not allow you to take the law into your own hands.

Even the Security Council is only permitted to authorize the use of force where "necessary to maintain and restore international peace and security." Now it must be clear to everyone that the military attack on Afghanistan has nothing to do with preventing terrorism.

Critics of the Bush approach have argued that any effective fight against terrorism would have to involve a re-evaluation of the way Washington conducts its affairs in the world. For example, the way it has promoted violence for short-term gain, as in Afghanistan when it supported the Taliban a decade ago, in Iraq when it supported Saddam Hussein against Iran, and Iran before that when it supported the Shah.

For all that has been said about how things have changed since Sept. 11, one thing that has not changed is U.S. disregard for international law. Its decade-long bombing campaign against Iraq and its 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia were both illegal. The U.S. does not even recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court. It withdrew from it in 1986 when the court condemned Washington or attacking Nicaragua, mining its harbours and funding the contras. In that case, the court rejected U.S. claims that it was acting under Article 51 in defence of Nicaragua's neighbours.

The Arabs, of course, would also like an end to world terror. But they would like to include a few other names on the list. Palestinians would like to see Mr Sharon picked up for the Sabra and Chatila massacre, a terrorist slaughter carried out by Israel's Lebanese allies - who were trained by the Israeli army - in 1982. At 1,800 dead, that's only a quarter of the number killed on 11 September. Syrians in Hama would like to put Rifaat Al-Assad, the brother of the late president, on their list of terrorists for the mass killings perpetrated by his Defense Brigades in the city of Hama in the same year. At 20,000, that's more than double the 11 September death toll.

The Lebanese would like trials for the Israeli officers who planned the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which killed 17,500 people, most of them civilians - again, well over twice the 11 September statistic. Christian Sudanese would like President Omar al-Bashir arraigned for mass murder.

But, as the Americans have made clear, it's their own terrorist enemies they are after, not their terrorist friends or those terrorists who have been slaughtering populations outside American "spheres of interest". Even those terrorists who live comfortably in the US but have not harmed America are safe: take, for example, the pro-Israeli militiaman who murdered two Irish UN soldiers in southern Lebanon in 1980 and who now live in Detroit after flying safely out of Tel Aviv. The Irish have the name and address, if the FBI are interested - but of course they're not.

So we are not really being asked to fight "world terror". We are being asked to fight America's enemies. If that means bagging the murderers behind the atrocities in New York and Washington, few would object. But it does raise the question of why those thousands of innocents are more important - more worthy of our effort and perhaps blood - than all the other thousands of innocents. And it also raises a much more disturbing question: whether or not the crime against humanity committed in the US on 11 September is to be met with justice - or a brutal military assault intended to extend American political power in the Middle East.

Sources confused; either from "Say what you want but this war is illegal", M. Mandel, Globe and Mail, Oct., 9, 2001. Or "This is Not a War on Terror. It's a Fight Against America's Enemies", by Robert Fisk, Published on Tuesday, September 25, 2001 in the Guardian, UK.

The struggle over control of Afghanistan, is about installing a pliant, pro -Western government to allow Western oil corporations access to an oil pipeline corridor to draw off large deposits of Central Asian oil.

W. Bello, "Endless War?", FOCUS ON THE GLOBAL SOUTH, A Program of Development Policy Research, Analysis and Action, Issue # 31, September 18, 2001.

There has been terror of course, and nearly every struggling modern movement at some stage has relied on terror.

Edward Said, Many Islams, 17^th Sept., 2001.

The West’s "use and dump" attitude to Aghanistan.

(The West used Afghanistan to cripple the Soviet Union, by assisting the rebels to eject Soviet forces. However when this goal was achieved we left without helping a devastated country to establish stable government, a development initiative, or to attend to the serious health and malnutrition problems, or to reduce the huge number of small arms that had been pumped in…or to clear the mines. In 2001 mines were reported to be injuring or killing 40 people every week. (TT.)

Consider Zbigniew Brezinski, national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. In a 1998 interview he admitted that the official story that the US gave military aid to the Afghanistan opposition only after the Soviet invasion in 1979 was a lie. The truth was, he said, that the US began aiding the Islamic fundamentalist Monjahedeen six months before the Russians made their move, even though he believed—and told this to Carter—that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention".  Brzezinski was asked whether he regretted this decision.

 Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that rhe Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the break up of the Soviet empire.7

 And for playing a key role in causing all this, Zbigniew Brzezinski has no regrets. Regrets? The man is downright proud of it! The kindest thing one can say about such a person—as about a sociopath—is that he's amoral. 4-5

 Because of this uninhibited, sadistic cruelty directed against government and Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan, the fundamentalists—the moujahedeen (Muslim holy warriors)—were good terrorists. They were our terrorists. 33  "Your government is a monster," complained ~ an Algerian sociologist to a Los Angeles Times correspondent in Algiers. "Now it has turned against you

and the world—16,000 Arabs -~ were trained Afghanistan, made into a veritable killing machine." 34…in the later 1970s and most of the 1980s Afghanistan had a government committed to bringing the incredibly underdeveloped country into the 20th century (never mind the 21st), including giving women equal rights. The United States, however, poured billions of dollars into waging a terrible war against this government, simply because it was supported by the Soviet Union. By aiding the fundamentalist opposition, Washington knowingly and deliberately increased the probability of a Soviet intervention. And when that occurred, the CIA became the grand orchestrator: hitting up Middle Eastem countries for huge financial support, on top of that from Washington; pressuring and bribing neighbouring Pakistan to rent out its country as a military staging area and sanctuary; supplying a great arsenal of weaponry and military training.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

For two and a half months following September 11 the most powerful nation in history rained down a daily storm of missiles upon Afghanistan, one of the poorest and most backward countries in the world. Eventually, this question pressed itself onto the world's stage: Who killed more innocent, defenseless people? The terrorists in the United States on September 11 with their flying bombs? Or the Americans in Afghanistan with their AGM-86D cruise missiles, their AGM-130 missiles, their 15,000-pound "daisy cutter" bombs their depleted uranium and their cluster bombs?

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000

America helped to mine Afghanistan, then left without any effort to clean up the problem. Mines kill or injure 300 a month, in 2001.

As late as 1998 the US was paying the salary of every single Taliban official in Afghanistan? Isn't that strange? There is more oil and gas in the Caspian Sea area than in Saudi Arabia, but you need a pipeline through Afghanistan to get the oil out…

 UNOCAL, a giant American Oil conglomerate, wanted to build a 1000 mile long pipeline from the Caspian Sea through Afghanistan to the Arabian Sea…UNOCAL spent 10,000,000,000 on geological surveys for pipeline construction, and very nicely courted the Taliban for their support in allowing the construction to begin. …1998-1999 the Taliban changed its mind and threw UNOCAL out of the country and awarded the pipeline project to a company from Argentina. Isn't that strange?

John Maresca VP of UNOCAL testified before Congress and said no pipeline until the Taliban was gone and a more friendly government was established. Isn't that strange?

1999-2000 The Taliban became the most evil people in the world. Isn't that strange?... Bush goes to war against Afghanistan even though none of the hijackers came from Afghanistan.

Taliban offered to negotiate to turn over Bin Laden if we showed them some proof. We refused; we bombed. …

We have a new government in Afghanistan. ..The leader of that government formerly worked for UNOCAL. .. Bush appoints a special envoy to represent the US to deal with that new government, who formerly was the "chief consultant to UNOCAL". ..

"It is the Oil, Stupid!" by Joseph Clifford , Date: Tue, 4 Jun

Out of sight of the television cameras "at least 3,767 civilians were killed by US bombs between October 7 and December 10...an average of 62 innocent deaths a day", according to a study carried out at the University of New Hampshire in the US. This is now estimated to have passed 5,000 civilian deaths: almost double the number killed on September 11. There is no evidence that a single leader of al-Qaeda has been captured or, to anyone's knowledge, killed. Neither has the leader of the Taliban. The change in Afghanistan is minimal compared with the murderous feudalism that ruled during the 1990s, and before the Taliban came to power. Not only the Marines but the British public ought to feel duped. Both Washington and Whitehall knew long ago al-Qaeda was finished in Afghanistan. Apart from the element of revenge, for home gratification, the Americans have set out to reassert the control of their favourite warlords: people responsible for thousands of deaths in their stricken country. In recent months, the American rogue state… tried to sabotage the setting up of an international criminal court, understandably, because its generals and leading politicians might be summoned as defendants.

JOHN PILGER on America's bid to control the world Tue, 9 Jul 2002 Prof. John McMurtry." The New Totalitarian Movement", Mid 2002.  ____________________________________________________________

BOLIVIA

In 1967, anti-Castro Cubans, working with the CIA to find Che Guevara, set up houses of interrogation where Bolivians suspected' of aiding Che's guerrilla army were brought for questioning and '; sometimes tortured. When the Bolivian interior minister learned of the torture, he was furious and demanded that the CIA put a stop to it. W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 52.

An armed popular revolt in 1952 had defeated the military and reduced it to a small, impotent and discredited force. But under US guidance and aid, there was a slow but certain rejuvenation of the armed forces. By 1964, the military, with the indispensable support of the CIA and the Pentagon, was able to overthrow President Victor Paz, whom the United States had designated a marked man because of his refusal to support Washington's Cuba policies. The US continued f to dictate who should lead Bolivia long after. 144

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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BRAZIL

Brazil, 1961-64  President Joao Goulart was guilty of the usual crimes: he took an independent stand in foreign policy, resuming relations with socialist ,countries and opposing sanctions against Cuba; his administration passed a law limiting the amount of profits multinationals could transmit outside the country; a subsidiary of ITT was nationalized; he promoted economic and social reforms. …In 1964, he was overthrown in a military coup which had covert American involvement and indispensable support. 139.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Before the Office of Public Safety assigned Dan Mitrione to Uruguay, he had been stationed in Brazil. There he and other Americans worked with OPS, AID and CIA in supplying Brazilian security forces with the equipment and training to facilitate the torture of prisoners. The Americans also advised on how much electric shock could be administered without killing the person, if his or her death might prove awkward.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p.

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BRITISH GUYANA

British Guyana, 1953~64  The United States and Great Britain made life extremely difficult for the democratically elected leader, Cheddi Jagan, finally forcing him from office (see Elections chapter). Jagan was another Third World leader who incurred Washington's wrath by trying to remain neutral and independent. Although a leftist—more so than Sukamo or Arbenz—his policies in office were not revolutionary. But he was still targeted, for he represented Washington's greatest fear: building a society that might be a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model. John F. Kennedy had given a direct order for his ouster, as, presumably, had Eisenhower. 133

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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CAMBODIA

Thus it was that an American policy took root—to provide the Khmer Rouge with food, financial aid and military aid beginning soon after their ouster. The aim, in conjunction with China and long~time American client state Thailand, was to restore Pol Pot's , troops to military capability as the only force which could make the Vietnamese withdraw their army, leading to the overthrow of the Cambodian government.   The Khmer Rouge were meanwhile using this aid to regularly attack Cambodian villages, seed minefields, kill peasants and make off with their rice and cattle Cambodia, 1955-73 Prince Sihanouk was yet another leader who did not fancy being an American client. After many years of hostility towards his regime, including assassination plots and the infamous Nixon/Kissinger secret "carpet bombings" of 1969-70, Washington finally overthrew Sihanouk in a coup in 1970. This was all that was needed to impel Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge forces to enter the fray. Five years later, they took power. But the years of American bombing had caused Cambodia's traditional economy to vanish. The old Cambodia had been destroyed forever. Incredibly, the Khmer Rouge were to inflict even greater misery upon this unhappy land. And to multiply the irony, the United States supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge after their subsequent defeat I by the Vietnamese (See "Pol Pot" chapter).

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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CHILE

Arndo Fernandez Lanos, a member of a Chilean military squad responsible for the torture and execution of at least 72 political prisoners in the month following the 1973 coup, is now residing in the United States. Fernandez has publicly acknowledged his service as a member of the military squad, as well as his role as an agent of Chile's-notorious secret police, the DINA, during the Pinochet regime. He struck a plea bargain with US government prosecutors, pleading guilty to being an "accessory after the fact" in the DINA-sponsored 1976 Washington, DC bombing murder of former Chilean dissident official Orlando Letelier. 82  At least two former members of the Hondur an army's Battalion 316 (see "Torture" chapter), a ClA-trained intelligence unit that murdered hundreds of suspected leftists in the 1980s, are also known to be living the good life in South Florida…83

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

In September 15, 1970, following the election of Allende to be President of Chile, Richard Nixon summoned Henry Kissinger, Richard Helms, and John Mitchell to the White House. The topic was Chile Allende, Nixon stated, was unacceptable to the President of the United States. In his handwritten notes for this meeting, Nixon indicated that he was "not concerned" with the risks involved. As CIA Director Helms recalled in testimony before the Senate Committee, "The President came down very hard that he wanted something done, and he didn't care how."

Thus the President of the United States had given orders to the CIA to prevent the popularly-elected President of Chile from entering office.

To bar Allende from the Presidency, a military coup was organized, with the CIA playing a direct role in the planning. The United States sought also to bring the Chilean economy under Allende to its knees. In a situation report to Dr. Kissinger, our Ambassador wrote that:

Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty, a policy designed for a long time to come to accelerate the hard features of a Communist society in Chile. The ultimate outcome, as you know, of these and other efforts to destroy the Allende government was a bloodbath which included the death of Allende and the installation, in his place, of a repressive military dictatorship.

F. Church, "Covert action, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Feb., 1976, 7-11.

The CIA spent $3 million to influence the 1964 elections in Chile against Allende, and in 1967 $8 million. 14Pages 35- give a good account of CIA activity in Chile, and of US action against Cuba, pp. 42-64"…communism has been the traditional pretext for opposing reforms in Latin America." "In late 1953 the Eisenhower administration decided to arrange a coup to rid Guatemala of the Arbenz regime. 60

S. Kumar, The C IA and the Third World, Zed, 1981.

Salvador Allende was the worst possible scenario for the Washington power elite, who could imagine only one thing worse than a Marxist in power—an elected Marxist in power, one who honoured the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower was built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that "communists" can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.  After sabotaging Allende's electoral endeavour in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to undermining the economy and building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military, under General Pinochet, overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process.  The FBI accommodated the new government by trying to track down Chilean leftists in the United States, while Secretary of State Henry Kissinger assured Pinochet that "In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here...We wish your government well."143.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

'In September 1974 President Ford confirmed the fact that the Nixon administration had authorised the CIA to spend 9 million between 1970 and 1973 to weaken Allende and strengthen his opposition.'

S. Baily, The U.S. and the Development of South America 1945-1975, 1976, p. 206.

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COLOMBIA

As Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pointed out in 1999, in speaking of Colombia: "What we are really seeing is a ratcheting up of a counterinsurgency policy masquerading as a counter-drug policy.

In a 1994 report, Amnesty International estimated that more | than 20,000 people had been killed in Colombia since 1986, mainly by the military and its paramilitary allies—"not in the 'drug wars' but for political reasons". Many of the victims were "trade unionists, human rights activists and leaders of legal left-wing movements." Amnesty charged that "U.S.-supplied military equipment, ostensibly delivered for use against narcotics traffickers, was being used by the Colombian military to commit these abuses. 163

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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CONGO

See ZAIRE/CONGO

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COSTA RICA

Costa Rica, mid-195Os, 1970-71. Yet the United States tried to overthrow Figueres (in the 1950s, and perhaps also in the 1970s, when he was again president), and tried to assassinate him twice. 129

In keeping with this policy, the United States twice attempted to overthrow the Syrian government, staged several shows-of-force in the Mediterranean to intimidate movements opposed to US-supported governments in Jordan and Lebanon, landed 14,000 troops in Lebanon, and conspired to overthrow or assassinate Nasser of Egypt and his troublesome Middle-East nationalism. 132

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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CUBA

The Senate Intelligence Committee in I975 reported finding "concrete evidence of at least eight plots involving the CIA to assassinate Castro, and another to kill his brother Raul. The plots, the Senate report said, involved devices "which strain the imagination," including Mafia hit men, poisoned cigars, and a diving suit contaminated with disease-causing organisms …242 In addition, the CIA acknowledged nine other assassination attempts against Castro by persons with "operational relationships" with the CIA …242

J. Kwitney, Endless Enemies, Penguin, 1986.

Anti-Cuban terrorism was directed by a secret Special Group established in November 1961 under the code name "Mongoose," involving 400 Americans, 2,000 Cubans, a private navy of fast boats, and a $50 million in annual budget, run in part by a Miami CIA station functioning in violation of the Neutrality Act and, presumably, the law banning CIA operations in the United States.20 These operations included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports, etc. Not all of these actions were specifically authorized by the CIA, but no such considerations absolve official enemieS…a Cuban terrorist group operating from Florida with US government authorization carried out "a daring speedboat strafing attack on a Cuban seaside hotel near Havana where Soviet military technicians were known to congregate, killing a score of Russians and Cubans and shortly after, attacked British and Cuban cargo ships and again raided Cuba, among other actions that were stepped up in early October. At one of the tensest moments of the missile crisis, on November 8, a terrorist team dispatched from the United States blew up a Cuban industrial facility after the Mongoose operations had been officially suspended. Fidel Castro alleged that 400 workers had been killed in this operation, guided by "photographs taken by spying planes." This terrorist act, which might have set off a global nuclear war, evoked little comment when it was revealed. Attempts to assassinate Castro and other terror continued immediately after the crisis terminated, and were escalated by Nixon in 1969…

In October, ClA-trained Cuban exiles bombed a Cuban civilian airliner, killing all 73 aboard including Cuba's gold medal-winning international fencing team…in the US and the Caribbean area for 1969-79 to Cuban exile groups, and the major one, OMEGA 7, was identified by the FBI as the most dangerous terrorist group operating in the US during much of the 1970s.

N. Chomsky, International Terrorism; Image and Reality, Ch. 2 in . George, Introduction tA. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, 22-23.

Totally ignored by the American government, however, was Cuba's lawsuit of May 31, 1999, filed in a Havana court demanding $181.1 billion in US compensation for death and injury suffered by Cuban citizens in four decades of "war" by Washington against Cuba The document outlined American "aggression", ranging from backing for armed rebel groups within Cuba and the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, to subversion attempts from the US naval base of Guantanamo and the planting of epidemics on the island. Cuba said it was demanding $30 million in direct compensation for each of the 3,478 people it said were killed by US actions and $15 million each for the 2,099 injured. It was also asking $10 million each for the people killed, and $5 million each for the injured, to repay Cuban society for the costs it has had to assume on their behalf. 228.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

In 1971, also according to participants, the CIA turned over to Cuban exiles a virus which causes African swine fever. Six weeks later, an outbreak of the disease in Cuba forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. 109.

The motto of the CIA: "Proudly overthrowing Fidel Castro since 1959." Castro came to power at the beginning of 1959. As early as March 10, a US National Security Council meeting included on its agenda the feasibility of bringing "another government to power in Cuba". There followed 40 years of terrorist attacks, bombings, full-scale military invasion, sanctions, embargoes, isolation, assassinations...Cuba had carried out The Unforgivable Revolution, a very serious threat of setting a "good example" in Latin America. 140

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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EAST TIMOR

In August, 1975, as the Suharto dictatorship was preparing to invade East Timor, Australian Ambassador to Indonesia, Woolcott, sent a cable to Canberra urging compliance with Indonesia‚s plans to annex EastTimor. He wrote:

„It would seem to me that this Department [of Minerals and Energy] might well have an interest in closing the present gap in the agreed sea border and this could be much more readily negotiated with Indonesia than with Portugal; or independent Portuguese Timor. I know I am recommending a pragmatic rather than a principled stand but that is what national interest and foreign policy is all about ·‰

What followed was 25 years of Australian government complicity in an illegal and brutal military occupation of East Timor by Suharto‚s military. More than 200,000 East Timorese lost their lives to famine, war and slaughter. Tens of thousands more suffered torture, rape and other forms of terror. All throughout this period, Australian governments ˆ both Labour and Liberal ˆ led Suharto‚s backers in defending and recognising the invasion and occupation.

This policy helped Canberra to squeeze a good deal for itself out of the Suharto government on the Timor Gap Treaty that gave Canberra exploration and taxation rights over oil and gas resources which rightfully belonged to East Timor. In 1989 all the world witnessed Australian Foreign Minister, Gareth Evans and the Suharto dictatorship‚ Foreign Minister, Ali Alatas, raise champagne glasses to the treaty as they flew over the killing fields of East Timor. Canberra received this concession from Jakarta in return for its morally and politically bankrupt support for Jakarta‚s invasion of East Timor.

The Australian government secured a treaty that established a Zone of ooperation between Australia and Indonesia. Australia and Indonesia were to jointly manage resources exploration in this area and share taxation imposed on companies working in the region. But under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), none of this area falls into Australian territorial waters. UNCLOS determines that in the Timor Gap situation, the seabed boundary should be a equidistant median line etween Australia and East Timor. If this were applied, the whole of thecurrent Zone of Cooperation would fall in East Timorese territory. Most of the current oil exploration is inside the Zone of Cooperation.

Now that the East Timorese people have driven out Suharto‚s military and are on the way to independence, the treaty is now recognised as a document with no valdity, if it ever any had such legality in the first place. Negotiations have begun between Canberra and Dili (UNTAET cabinet ministers Mari Alkatiri and Peter Galbraith) on a new treaty between East Timor and Australia.

And the Howard government still wants its blood money from the Timorese peoples‚ oil! Canberra wants the East Timorese to accept the Zone of Cooperation as it currently stands, with Canberra getting a 50% share of royalties from the area.

Australia has no legitimate rights over these resources. Indeed, Canberra bears a moral debt to the East Timorese for 25 years of complicity in the destruction and terrorisation of their country.

The Democratic Socialist Party calls on the Australian government to: unconditionally recognise a seabed boundary equidistant between East Timor and Australia, as it already does in relation to ocean resources above the seabed * immediately declare to UNTAET and the Timorese that if the Timorese people decide, for whatever reason, they wish to keep the Zone of Cooperation, Australia will require no royalties. This is part compensation for the damage done by 25 years of complicity in Suharto‚swar against the East Timorese people* immediately announce a commitment to hand over to an independent EastTimor all royalties already collected from the Zone of Cooperation The high priests screwed the Timorese. However there was another reason that compelled the Australian government to get of its butt and do something usefull. In World War 2 thousands of Australian soldiers lives were saved by the Timorese who hid them and fed them in the mountains when the Japanese invaded. These old soldiers including a deputy prime minister have been campaigning for a fair go for the Timorese since then. There is a very strong popular feeling in support of the Timorese in Australia and that is the only thing that might give them an Oil and gas agreement that they need to rebuild their country.

Please check out our website, http://www.zerogrowth.org

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ECUADOR

Ecuador, 196~63. Infiltrating virtually every department of the government, up to and including the second and third positions of power, along with an | abundant use of dirty tricks, enabled the CIA to oust President Jose Maria Velasco because of his refusal to go along with US Cuba policy and because he did not clamp down hard on the left domestically. 137

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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EGYPT

Tor the last thirty years the US has supported Mubarak’s brutal reign with economic and military assistance – currently providing $1.3 billion p.a. in Foreign Military Financing.” There are additional forms of assistance. The US is the second largest foreign investor in the country, primarily in oil and gas.

“Egypt is central among a network of repressive Arab regimes which the British and Americans have actively supported since the early twentieth century to sustain control of cheap oil… Declassified Foreign Office files …show that the Gulf sheikdoms were largely created by Britain to ‘retain our control…

From The Great Unravelling, N. M. Ahmed, News Analysis, 1^st Feb., 2011.

EL SALVADOR

In El Salvador, the US ensures "…the maintenance of a violent and undemocratic regime…which without American intervention would clearly fall within the next three months…"

The Guardian, 8^th March, 1981.

Training by US military "…has directly aided the oligarchy to carry out its terror campaign against peasant and worker masses…"

El Salvador, A Dossier, Sydney, CISAC, 1981, p. 32.

"The US has unfailingly supplied the tools of terror and repression to the Salvadoran military, as well as training in their use."

George, Introduction in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991, p. 5.

The El Salvador regime '. . . has become well known for its systematic atrocities . . .' An estimated 40,000 murders have been carried out by the army in the last 8 years.

Sydney Morning Herald, 4th Feb., 1982, p. 1.

In the early 1980s approximately 40,000 people were killed by the ruling class in El Salvador, mostly via ‘death squads" composed of off duty military officers and police. "The regime which presides over these measures would long since have collapsed were it not for the support of the US. US backed loans in 1981 amounted to $523 million.

Since June 1980 over 38,000 civilians-in E1 Salvador have died, mostly at the hands of right-wing death squads composed of off-duty soldiers and police men. To put that in perspective, the equivalent in Britain would be 500,000 dead - like obliterating Manchester. In addition, 650,000 Salvadoreans (out of a population of 4~/4 million) are refugees. The government's campaign to suppress the guerrilla movement and its popular organizations has led to torture and misery on a scale almost unparalleled elsewhere in the world.

The regime which presides over these 'reprehensible measures' would long since have collapsed were it not for the support of the United States ---- US-backed loans, in 1981 alone, amounted to $523 million. p. 30.

New Internationalist, Feb., 1983, p. 30. See also Sydney Morning Herald, 4^th Feb., 1982, p. 4.

'Visiting a refugee camp in Honduras, Elizabeth Hanly reports the testimony of a Salvadoran peasant woman who describes a 1983 massacre, when the National Guard came to her village in US-supplied helicopters, killing her three children among others, chopping the children to pieces and throwing them to the village pigs: "The soldiers laughed all the while," she said. Like her, other women "still had tears to cry as they told stories of sons, brothers and husbands gathered into a circle and set on fire after their legs had been broken; or of trees heavy with women hanging from their wrists, all with breasts cut off and facial skin peeled back, all slowly bleeding to death." They described how "they had worked, generations of them, all day, every day on someone else's land,"

their children starving or parasite-ridden. Peaceful visits to the landowners to beg for food had brought the National Guard: "We asked for food; they gave us bullets".'

N. Chomsky, Turning the Tide, London, Pluto,1986.

According to Cockburn, in Corruptions of Empire, p. 396. "…aerial bombardment of El Salvador is a "secret war" in the special sense of being "a military enterprise carried out by the United States and known to its victims, international observers, humanitarian organizations, foreign journalists and the domestic radical community but, for reasons of collective internal censorship, not reported in the mainstream media of the United States" (Corruptions of Empire, p. 394). This is an important example of the media dutifully operating according to "their own voluntary guidelines and self-restraint in terrorism coverage," as Wilkinson (p. 177) urges they do (employing, to be sure, a different conception of terrorism).  The bombing continues to this day. For a recent eyewitness account by a US doctor of a bombing and strafing raid that killed five people (four of them children) and wounded sixteen others (eleven of them children), see Ann Mangamaro, "Villages Targeted in El Salvador Bombing," Central Amenia Register (July-August 1990).

A. George, The Discipline of Terrorology, Ch. 4., In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 93. 

Since the early 1980s, some 70,000 Salvadorans have died at the hands of their government's security forces. The terror is indiscriminate: anyone involved in educational, health, church, union, press, or human rights activities at any level is a likely target. In the countryside, the government's campaign against its own citizens is completely unrestrained, with the most intensive campaign of aerial bombardment in the history of the Americas taking a large civilian toll. The bombing campaign, begun in late 1983, is a no-holds-barred operation designed to terrorize the entire…

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.

Supply of arms and training: From January 1987, Britain has provided training at Sandhurst for members of the El Salvadoran military. In its defence, the British government has urged that such training will have a "civilizing influence" the exact nature of which can be appreciated by examining the murderous performance of the Atlacatl Battalion, trained from scratch by the US. See McClintock, The American Connection, pp. 307ff; also my "School for the Brutal," TheGuardian (London) (December 19, 1986)… p 93.

According to Chomsky, "The main target of terrorist attacks for the past twenty years has undoubtedly been Cuba;" he cites instances of Cuban boats and planes being attacked, embassies bombed, embassy personnel murdered and kidnapped, Cuban crops and livestock poisoned, attacks on Cuban oil refineries, bridges, and sugar mills, industrial sabotage, and numerous assassination attempts on Castro, most of these acts of terrorism being organized or supported by the Kennedy administration. P. 94

A. George, The Discipline of Terrorology, Ch. 4., In A. George, Ed.,Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 93

 The Bush administration throughout has provided the terroristic Salvadoran regime with support of every kind… atrocities perpetrated by those we support are chalked up either to the "terrorist" left or to "right-wing death squads" beyond the control of the Salvadoran military.

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 3.

The Salvadorean government and army survive only through a massive influx of aid from Washington, totalling $4.6 billion dollars over the past decade. US military aid (by now some $1 billion dollars) is essential for keeping in power military and security forces largely responsible for the deaths of 70,000 civilians in the past ten years. The US has unfailingly supplied the tools of terror and repression to the Salvadoran military, as well as training in their use. The massacres of November 1989 were no exception: in September 1989, as Salvadoran state repression against popular movements was intensifying, the liberal senator Christopher Dodd joined Jesse Helms in sponsoring a bill to provide the Salvadoran military with $90 million in military assistance, to show that "we appreciate and support what he [Cristiani] is doing and we stand behind him". 14

An alternative proposal linking aid with progress on human rights and peace negotiations was opposed by Dodd and fellow liberal Democrat John Kerry, and subsequently defeated 68 to 32. Dodd's measure was approved by an even wider margin. When, on November 15, as the bloodbath was getting under way, the Salvadoran government requested extra arms and ammunition from the United States, the Bush administration rejected appeals to link military assistance to a serious investigation into the murders of the Jesuit priests and insteadpromised to hasten delivery of the military aid allocated for the 1990 fiscal year. Shortly afterwards, a weak bill introduced in the House of Representatives to suspend 30 percent of military aid to El Salvador until the regime undertook an honest inquiry into the killings was defeated in both the House and the Senate.'5 As of this writing, the Bush administration is seeking a $50 million increase in aid to El Salvador next year: "I know of his [Cristiani's] commitment to democracy," Bush declared, "And I have been very impressed with the courage he has shown in going after those who have broken the law in his country. And that's been a shining example to all of us."' 6

Clearly, these all too familiar events raise many important questions, some of them formulated in general terms above. This is especially so because US actions in El Salvador are not isolated and egregious aberrations from a fundamentally freedom- and justice-loving foreign policy: similar patterns have been, and are being, played out in other parts of Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and South East Asia. Taken together, these give a good, if depressing, indication of the substantial involvement of the West in the most serious instances of terrorism today.

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p 5.

… an Amnesty International report entitled El Salvador. "Death Squads" - A Government Strategy, (October 1988), reporting the "alarming rise" in killings by official death squads as part of the government strategy of intimidating any potential opposition by "killing and mutilating victims in the most macabre way," leaving victims "mutilated, decapitated, dismembered, strangled or showing marks of torture . . . or rape." Since the goal of the government strategy is "to intimidate or coerce a civilian population" (that is, terrorism, as officially defined in the US Code), it is not enough simply to kill. Rather, bodies must be left dismembered by the roadside. ..

In the same years, a massacre of even greater scale took place in Guatemala, also supported throughout by the United States and its mercenary states…Notice crucially that all of this is international terrorism, supported or directly organized in Washington with the assistance of its international network of mercenary states.  

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p 21.

El Salvador 1980-2 Salvador's dissidents tried to work within the system. But with US support, the government made that impossible, using repeated electoral fraud and murdering hundreds of protestors and strikers. In 1980, the dissidents took to the gun, and civil war. Washington responded immediately.

Officially, the US military presence in El Salvador was limited to an advisory capacity. In actuality, military and CIA personnel played a more active role on a continuous basis. About 20 Americans were killed or wounded in helicopter and plane crashes while flying reconnaissance or other missions over combat areas, and considerable evidence surfaced of a US role in the ground fighting as well. The war came to an official end in 1992 with these results: 75,000 civilian deaths; the US Treasury depleted by six billion dollars; meaningful social change thwarted; a handful of the wealthy still owning the country; the poor remaining as ever; dissidents still having to fear right wing death squads; there would be no profound social change in El Salvador. 156  It was later learned that the US embassy had compiled lists of "communists", from top echelons down to village cadres, as many as . 5,000 names, and turned them over to the army, which then hunted those persons down and killed them. The Americans would then check off the names of those who had been killed or captured. "It really was a big help to the army," said one US diplomat. 1 41

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Another Salvadoran, a former member of the National Guard, later testified in a 1986 British television documentary: "I belonged to a squad of twelve. We devoted ourselves to torture, and to finding people whom we were told were guerrillas. I was trained in Panama for nine months by the [unintelligible] of the United States for anti~guerrilla warfare. Part of the time we were instructed about torture."

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 55

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DOMINICA

He called for land reform, low-rent housing, modest nationalization of business, foreign investment provided it was not excessively exploitative of the country and other policies making up the program of any liberal Third World leader serious about social change. He was likewise serious about the thing called civil liberties: communists, or those labelled as such, were not to be persecuted unless they actually violated the law. A number of American officials and congressmen expressed their discomfort with Bosch's plans, as well as his stance of independence from the United States. Land reform and nationalization are always touchy issues in Washington, the stuff that "creeping socialism" is made of In several quarters of the US press Bosch was red~baited. In September, the military boots marched. Bosch was out. The United States, which could discourage a military coup in Latin America with a frown, did nothing. (The most recent demonstration of this was in Ecuador in January 2000, where a military coup was rescinded almost immediately after a few calls from t Washington officials.)  Nineteen months later, April 1965, a widespread popular revolt broke out, which promised to put the exiled Bosch back into power. The United States sent in 23,000 troops to help crush it. c p 147.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

FRANCE

1947 to 1951, France  Corsican and Mafia criminal syndicates in Marseilles, Sicily and Corsica—benefiting from CIA arms, money and psychological warfare—suppressed strikes and wrestled control of labour unions from the Communist Party. In return, the CIA smoothed the way for the gangsters to be left unmolested, and unindicted, and to re-establish the; heroin racket that had been restrained during the war—the famous "French Connection" that was to dominate the drug trade for more than two decades and was responsible for most of the heroin entering the United States. 218

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

France, 1947: Communist Party members had fought in the wartime resistance, unlike many other French who had collaborated with the Germans. After the war the Communists followed the legal path to form strong labour unions and vie for political office. But the United States was determined to deny them their place at the table, particularly since some unions were taking steps to impede the flow of arms to French forces seeking to reconquer their former colony of Vietnam with US aid. The US funnelled very large amounts of money to the Socialist Party, the Communists' chief rival; sent in American Federation of Labor (AFL) experts to subvert the CP's union dominance and import scabs from Italy; supplied arms and money to Corsican gangs to break up Communist strikes, burn down party offices and beat up and murder party members and strikers; sent in a psychological warfare team to complement all of these actions and used the threat of a cut off of food aid and other aid...all to seriously undermine Communist Party support and prestige. It worked. 127

At the same time, Washington was forcing the French government to dismiss its Communist ministers in order to receive American economic aid. 127

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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GHANA

Ghana, 1966…When Kwame Nkrumah tried to lessen his country's dependence on the West by strengthening economic and military ties to the Soviet Union, China and East Germany, he effectively sealed his fate. A CIA-backed military coup sent the African leader into exile, from which he never returned. A CIA document, declassified in 1977, revealed that the Agency was in close contact with the military plotters and had been reporting to Washington. 14

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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GREECE

Clinton's visit to Greece in November 1999 brought out large and' fiery anti-American demonstrations, protesting the recent American bombing of Yugoslavia and the indispensable US support for the torturers par excellence of the 1967-74 Greek junta.234

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Greece, 1967-74. A military coup took place in April 1967, just two days before the campaign for national elections was to begin, elections which appeared certain to bring the veteran liberal leader George Papandreou back as prime minister. The coup had been a joint effort of the Royal Court, the Greek military, the CIA and the American military stationed in Greece, and was followed immediately by the traditional martial law, censorship, arrests, beatings and killings, the victims totalling some 8,000 in the first month. This was accompanied by the equally traditional declaration that this was all being done to save the nation from a "communist takeover". Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with equipment supplied by the United States, became routine. 143.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Greece, 1947-49 The United States intervened in a civil war, taking the side of the neo' fascists against the Greek left, who had fought the Nazis courageously. The neo-fascists won and instituted a highly brutal regime, for which the CIA created a suitably repressive internal security agency. For the next 15 years, Greece was looked upon much as a piece of real estate to be developed according to Washington's needs. 127

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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GRENADA

Grenada, 1979 - 83. How impoverished, small, weak or far away must a country be before it is not a threat to the US government? In a 1979 coup, Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in this island country of 110 thousand, and though their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castro's, Washington was again driven by its fear of "another Cuba", particularly when public appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met with great enthusiasm. Reagan administration destabilization tactics against the Bishop govemment began soon after the coup, featuring outrageous disinformation and deception. Finally came the invasion in October 1983, which put into power individuals more beholden to US foreign policy objectives. The US suffered 135 killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers. The invasion was attended by yet more transparent lies, created by Washington to justify its gross violations of international law. (c152?)

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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GUATEMALA

Between 1950 and 1976, 3,213 Guatemalan students were trained under the U.S. military assistance programme. Between 1961 and 1973 Guatemala received 4.85 million dollars in U.S. assistance to its police force. Between 1950 and 1976 Guatemala received a total of 74.6 million dollars in U.S. military assistance. Between 1970 and 1975 161 Guatemalan military personnel received training at the U.S. Army School of the Americas, Panama Canal Zone. Between 1973 and 1976 the U.S. supplied 1,120 revolvers, 640 carbines and 160,000 cartridges to the Guatemalan National Police.

Source: Michael T. Klare, Supplying Repression: Support for Authoritarian Regimes Abroad, Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, 1977.

"…Guatemala in 1954, when the CIA launched a coup to overthrow the elected government of Jacobo Arbenz Gusman who was attempting to nationalise areas of unused land held by the United Fruit company."

R. Biel, The New Imperialism, Zed., 2000. Between pp. 64-66.

"In Guatemala 100,000 died at the hands of the re0ressive system installed by the CIA in 1954…

F. Castro, On Grenada, Monthly Review, Jan., 1984, pp 11-29

UN statistics showed that 98% of Guatemala’s cultivated land wa owned by 143 individuals and corporations, in a population of 3.5 million.

Arevalo and Arbenz did try to change these conditions. In 1952 they proclaimed Decree 900, a land reform which called for the expropriation and redistribution of uncultivated land above a basic acreage. 82  But United Fruit owned most of the land, and United Fruit obviously didn’t want to be expropriated. When Arbenz actually took away the land – the unexploited, uncultivated land -- and distributed i6t to 180,000 peasants, the US immediately condemned it as communistic, and convened the CAS in Caracas to make that condemnation official. It then found ac right wing Colonel, Castillo Armas a graduate of US command School at Fort Leavenworth, fed him arms, trained him, gave him planes, even piloted some of the planes and finally through him brought down Arbenz. One American company, United Fruit, controls over 50% of the foreign earnings, and thus of the whole economic structure, of six Latin American counties.

J. Gerasis, "Imperialism and Revolution in Latin America", in R. D. Laing and Cooper, The Dialectics of Liberation. 81, 82-83.

On March 10, 1999, in a talk delivered in Guatemala City, President Clinton said that US support for repressive forces in Guatemala "was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake." But the word 'sorry" did not cross the president's lips, nor did the word apologize", nor the word "compensation". Forty years of unholy cruelty to a people for which the United States was pre-eminently responsible was not worth a right word or a penny. 233.

Guatemala, 1953-199Os A CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military-government death squads, torture disappearances, mass executions and unimaginable cruelty, totalling more than 200,000 victims—indisputably one of the most inhumane chapters of the 20th century… 12

References; May 23, 1997 release by the CIA of 1,400 pages of classified documents concerning the 1954 coup in Guatemala.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Guatemalan security forces, notably the Army unit called G-2, routinely tortured "subversives". One method was electric shock to the genital area, using military field telephones hooked up to small generators, equipment and instructions for use supplied by Uncle Sam. The US and its clients in various countries were becoming rather adept at this technique. The CIA advised, armed and equipped the G-2, which maintained a web of torture centers, whose methods reportedly included chopping off limbs and singeing flesh, in addition to electric shocks. The Army unit even had its own crematorium, presumably to dispose of any incriminating evidence. The CIA thoroughly infiltrated the G-2…

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 53

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HAITI

The US supported the Duvalier family dictatorship for 30 years, then opposed the reformist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Meanwhile; the CIA was working intimately with death squads, torturers and drug traffrickers. ((Clinton supported Aristride’s return, but delayed it for two years.)) Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor at the expense of the rich, literally; and that he would stick closely to free~market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally… 156

Haiti, 1959:The US military mission, in Haiti to train the troops of noted dictator Francois Duvalier, used its air, sea and ground power to smash an attempt to overthrow Duvalier by a small group of Haitians, aided by some Cubans and other Latin Americans. 132.

Numerous Haitian human-rights violators have resided in the United States in recent years, unmolested by the authorities. Their hands and souls are bloody from carrying out the repression of the Duvalier dynasty, or the overthrow of the democratically elected Father Jean Bertrand Aristide in 1991, or the return to repression after the coup…81  General Prosper Avril, another Haitian dictator, responsible for the torture of opposition activists, whom he then displayed, bloodied, on television. Forced out by angry mobs in 1990, he was flown to Florida by the US government, where he might have lived happily ever after except that some of his former torture victims brought suit against him. 82During the period of Aristide's exile, 1991-94, Colonel Carl Dorelien oversaw a 7,000-man force whose well-documented campaign of butchery included murder, rape, kidnapping and torture, leading to the deaths of some 5,000 Haitian civilians. The good colonel has found a home in Florida as well.  We also have leading Haitian death-squad leader Emmanuel Constant, former head of FRAPH, the paramilitary group of thugs which spread deep fear amongst the Haitian people with its regular murders, torture, public beatings, arson raids on poor neighbourhoods and mutilation by machete in the aftermath of the coup against Aristide. He was on the CIA payroll in Haiti and now lives in New York…

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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HONDURAS

During the 1980s, the CIA gave indispensable support to the infamous Battalion 316, which kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of citizens, using shock and suffocation devices for interrogation, amongst other techniques. The CIA supplied torture equipment, torture manuals, and in both Honduras and the US taught battalion  members methods of psychological and physical torture. On at least one occasion, a CIA officer took part in interrogating a torture victim. The Agency also funded Argentine counter~insurgency experts to provide further training for the Hondurans. At the time, Argentina was famous for its "Dirty War," an appalling record of torture, baby kidnappings and disappearances. Argentine and CIA instructors worked side by side training Battalion. US support for the battalion continued even after its director, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, told the US ambassador that he intended to use the Argentine methods of eliminating subversives. In 1983, the Reagan administration awarded Alvarez the Legion of Merit "for encouraging the success of democratic processes in Honduras." At the same time, the administration was misleading Congress and the American public by denying or minimizing the battalion's atrocities.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 55.

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IDONESIA

The U.S. action to overthrow Sukarno in 1958 -- really, bald-faced aggression—attracted little public attention in the U.S. Although similar to the Bay of Pigs invasion, and far grander in scale, it was so far away that most Americans aren't even aware of the disaster. But L. Fletcher Prouty, the liaison officer between the CIA and the air force, and a long time military intelligence official with experience in Asia, has written a detailed account. 279

The CIA trained large numbers of Indonesian dissidents and mercenaries at bases in the Philippines, and returned them to Sumatra, where they recruited other rebels. 279

Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force, from a base in Taiwan, supplied a fleet -

of old B-26 bombers, refitted with a new machine gun package that greatly

enhanced their firepower. 279

Kwitney, J., Endless Enemies, 1986.

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IRAN.

(Kwitney provides a good account of the Iranian coup; 160-3. mostly not copied into these documents.)

With far greater efficiency and effect than the Soviets have so far shown in Afghanistan, the U.S. violently repressed Iranian independence for twenty-six years. Every Iranian was aware of it. Yet despite the copious and unmistakable evidence, most Americans still have little conception of what happened. In other words, the CIA director and the secretary of state at the time of the Mossadegh coup were, in private life, well-paid lawyers for the major oil companies. 163. SAVAK, the torture-happy Iranian security organization that kept the shah in power over the next twenty-six years. In his memoirs, Kerrnit Roosevelt acknowledged that SAVAK was organized and trained by the CIA and Mossad—the Israeli intelligence service.

J. Kwitney, Endless Enemies, Penguin, 1986.

In1975, ..(Iran)… along with the United States, abandoned the Kurds to a terrible fate. At a crucial point, the Kurds were begging Kissinger for help, but he completely ignored their pleas. Kurd forces were decimated; several hundred of their leaders were executed. 145.

Iran, 1953; Prime Minister Mossadegh was overthrown in a joint US-British operation. Mossadegh had been elected to his position by a large majority of parliament, but he had made the fateful mistake o spearheading the movement to nationalize a British-owned oil company, the sole oil company operating in Iran. The coup restored the Shah to absolute power, initiating a period of 25 years of repression and torture, while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the US and Britain each getting 40 percent. 128

The notorious Iranian security service, SAVAK, which employed torture routinely, was created under the guidance of the CIA and Israel in the 1950s. According to a former CIA analyst on Iran, Jesse J. Leaf, SAVAK was-instructed in torture techniques by the Agency. After the 1979 revolution, the Iranians found CIA film made for SAVAK on how to torture women…

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, 51

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IRAQ.

The one constant is that the US must end up in control of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was authorized to suppress, brutally, a 1991 uprising that might have overthrown him because "the best of all worlds" for Washington would be "an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein" (by then an embarrassment), which would rule the country with an "iron fist" as Saddam had done with US support and approval (NYT chief diplomatic correspondent Thomas Friedman). The uprising would have left the country in the hands of  Iraqis who might not have subordinated themselves sufficiently to Washington. The murderous sanctions regime of the following years devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely for survival on his (highly efficient) system for distributing basic goods. The sanctions thus undercut the possibility of the kind of popular revolt that had overthrown an impressive series of other monsters who had been strongly supported by the current incumbents in Washington up to the very end of their bloody rule: Marcos, Duvalier, eausescu, Mobutu, Suharto, and a long list of others, some of them easily as tyrannical and barbaric as Saddam.

Had it not been for the sanctions, Saddam probably would have gone the same way, as has been pointed out for years by the Westerners who know Iraq best, Denis Halliday and Hans van Sponeck (though one has to go to Canada, England, or elsewhere to find their writings). But overthrow of the regime from within would not be acceptable either, because it would leave Iraqis in charge.

"Noam Chomsky Interviewed",by Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert; April 13, 2003.

 US supply of arms to Iraq.

October 1983. The Reagan Administration begins secretly allowing Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt to transfer United States weapons, including Howitzers, Huey helicopters, and bombs to Iraq. These shipments violated the Arms Export Control Act. (16)

November 1983. George Schultz, the Secretary of State, is given intelligence reports showing that Iraqi troops are daily using chemical weapons against the Iranians. (1)

December 20 1983. Donald Rumsfeld, then a civilian and now Defense Secretary, meets with Saddam Hussein to assure him of US friendship and materials support. (1) (15)

July 1984. CIA begins giving Iraq intelligence necessary to calibrate its mustard gas attacks on Iranian troops. (19) … March 1986. The United States with Great Britain block all Security Council resolutions condemning Iraq's use of chemical weapons, and on March 21 the U.S. becomes the only country refusing to sign a Security Council statement condemning Iraq's use of these weapons. (10)

May 1986. The U.S. Department of Commerce licenses 70 biological exports to Iraq between May of 1985 and 1989, including at least 21 batches of lethal strains of anthrax. (3)

May 1986. US Department of Commerce approves shipment of weapons grade botulin poison to Iraq. (7) February 1988. Saddam Hussein begins the "Anfal" campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq. The Iraq regime used chemical weapons against the Kurds killing over 100,000 civilians and destroying over 1,200 Kurdish villages. (8)

April 1988. US Department of Commerce approves shipment of chemicals used in manufacture of mustard gas. (7)

 August 1988. Four major battles were fought from April to August 1988, in which the Iraqis massively and effectively used chemical weapons to defeat the Iranians. Nerve gas and blister agents such as mustard gas are used. By this time the U.S.Defense Intelligence Agency is heavily involved with Saddam Hussein in battle plan assistance, intelligence gathering and post battle debriefing. In the last major battle with of the war, 65,000 Iranians are killed, many with poison gas. Use of chemical weapons in war is in violation of the Geneva accords of 1925. (6) (13)

August 1988. Five days after the cease fire Saddam Hussein sends his planes and helicopters to northern Iraq to begin massive chemical attacks against the Kurds. (8)

September 1988. U.S. Department of Commerce approves shipment of weapons grade anthrax and botulinum to Iraq. (7)

September 1988. Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State: "The US-Iraqi relationship is... important to our long-termpolitical and economic objectives." (15)…July 25, 1990. U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad meets with Hussein to assure him that President Bush "wanted better and deeper relations." Many believe this visit was a trap set for Hussein. A month later Hussein invaded Kuwait thinking the U.S. would not respond. (12)… July 1991. The Financial Times of London reveals that a Florida chemical company had produced and shipped cyanide to Iraq during the 80's using a special CIA courier. Cyanide was used extensively against the Iranians. (11)…June 1992. Ted Koppel of ABC Nightline reports: "It is becoming increasingly clear that George Bush, Sr., operating largelybehind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into [an aggressive power]." (5) July 1992. "The Bush administration deliberately, not inadvertently, helped to arm Iraq by allowing U.S. technology to be shipped to Iraqi military and to Iraqi defense factories... Throughout the course of the Bush administration, U.S. and foreign firms were granted export licenses to ship U.S. technology directly to Iraqi weapons facilities despite ample evidence showing that these factories were producing weapons." Representative Henry Gonzalez, Texas, testimony before the House. (18)…August 2002. "The use of gas [during the Iran-Iraq war] on the battle field by the Iraqis was not a matter of deep strategic concern... We were desperate to make sure that Iraq did not lose." Colonel Walter Lang, former senior U.S. Defense Intelligence officer tells the New York Times. (4)

This chronology of the United States' sordid involvement in the arming of Iraq can be summarized in this way: the United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam's army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The U.S. supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The U.S. supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens. The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked U.N. censure of Iraq's use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.

"Arming Iraq and the Path to War", by John King, UN Observer, April 2003.

Re the war on Iraq: The …"context is a blunt attempt by the superpower to reshape the world to suit itself."

…the website of the Project for the New American Century…

Last year, the Sunday Herald obtained a copy of a confidential report produced by the Project in September 2000, which suggested that blatting Saddam was the beginning, not the end of its strategy. "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." The wider strategic aim, it insisted, was "maintaining global US pre-eminence".

George Monbiot, Tuesday March 11, 2003. The Guardian.

…contrary to the Geneva Convention, the U.S. government intentionally used sanctions against Iraq to degrade the country's water supply after the Gulf War. The United States knew the cost that civilian Iraqis, mostly children, would pay, and it went ahead anyway. ..

… This document, which was partially declassified but unpublicized in 1995, can be found on the Pentagon's web site at www.gulflink.osd.mi

… As these documents illustrate, the United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality.

… For more than ten years, the United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives.

Extracts from, T. J. Nagy, "How the US deliberately destroyed Iraq’s water", posted at www.globalresearch.ca on29 August 2001. For detailed documentation see www.gulflink.osd.mil

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ITALY

Italy, 1947-1970s In 1947, the US forced the Italian government to dismiss its Communist and Socialist cabinet members in order to receive American economic aid. The following year and for decades thereafter, each time a combined front of the Communists and Socialists, or the Communists alone, threatened to defeat the US-supported Christian Democrats in national elections, the CIA used every (dirty) trick in the book and trained its big economic, political and psychological~warfare guns on the Italian people, while covertly funding the CD candidates. And it worked. Again and again. This I perversion of democracy was done in the name of "saving democracy" in Italy. American corporations also contributed many millions of dollars to help keep the left from a share of power.127

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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INDONESIA

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

Indonesia soon achieved complete control over East Timor, with the help of American arms and diplomatic support. Daniel Moynihan, who was US ambassador to the UN at the time, later wrote that the "United States wished things to turn out as they did, and worked to bring this about. The Department of State desired that the United Nations prove utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook. This task was given to me, and I carried it forward with no inconsiderable success." Amnesty International estimated that by 1989, Indonesian troops had killed 200,000 people out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000. The United States stood virtually alone in the world in its consistent support of Indonesia's claim to East Tlmor, and downplayed the slaughter to a remarkable degree, at the same time supplying Indonesia with all the military hardware and training it needed to carry out the job. Despite denials to the contrary, Washington continued this military aid up to and including the period of extensive massacres of pro-independence Timorese in 1999 by Indonesian soldiers and their militia allies. In 1995, a senior official of the Clinton administration, speaking of Suharto, said: "He's our kind of guy." 147

 W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

The military regime which came to power in Indonesia in 1965 has perpetrated numerous acts of terrorism against its own people and against the people of West Papua and East Timor. In the six months from October 1965 to March 1966, as General Suharto consolidated his control over the Indonesian state, hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in massacres initiated and organized by the Indonesian army, in a drive to eliminate the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). After West Papua was handed over to the Indonesian state in 1963, massacres of villagers and organized bands of resistors to Indonesian rule led to heavy loss of life; estimates of casualties vary from tens of thousands to 150,000, more than 10 percent of the population. In the first four years of Indonesia's war to annex East Timor, from December 1975 till 1979, it is estimated that up to 200,000 people, nearly a third of the population, were killed in aerial bombardments or from war-related starvation and disease.  Other, smaller-scale massacres have occurred. First there was the slaughter in Purwodadi, Central Java, of more than eight hundred captured communist suspects, who were clubbed to death by their captors in November and December 1968. Then came the murder, by army death squads, of about 4,000 people during 1983, in a so-called clampdown on crime. In September 1984, many dozens, perhaps more than a hundred people, attending a rally in Tanjung Priok, Jakarta, pressing for the release of four local mosque officials, were shot dead, and in February1989, many dozens of villagers were slain when troops attacked a village that had become the centre of a rebellion prompted by the expropriation of their land. P 180.  Not one of these well-documented acts of state terrorism has been condemned by any state power, West or East. There have been no UN resolutions calling Indonesia's rulers to account, no international commissions of inquiry to examine the facts and help establish more accurately the number of victims. The world's media has shown a singular lack of interest in the terrorist activities of the Indonesian state, reflecting the attitude of governments and multinational corporations which regard Indonesia under its present day rulers s the best possible safeguard for "business as usual"… p 182.  During the period of parliamentary democracy from 1950 to 1957, the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) made a remarkable political recovery, winning 18 percept of the votes and taking fourth place in Indonesia's first and only free and democratic parliamentary elections in 1955. In the following decade, the PKI grew to become the largest left-wing party outside the Eastern bloc. By 1965, it claimed a membership of three million, supported by trade unions, a peasants' organization, and other mass organizations, with a combined membership of around fifteen million. As the communist-led movement gained in mass support, (… a plot to kidnap generals led to the death of six of them…)…giving Suharto the pretext to order the physical destruction of the party and the left-wing movement.  (Much publicity was given to the claim that the bodies had been mutilated. This was later found to be untrue. This deception was crucial in Suharto's capacity to organise the elimination of the PKI.) According to Ralph McCehee, a former CIA agent, the campaign of deception which paved the way for the massacres was largely the work of the CIA. Referring to the fabricated horror stories about events at Halim, he wrote: This cynically manufactured campaign was designed to foment public anger against the communists and set the stage for the massacre . . . To conceal its role in the massacres of those innocent people, the CIA concocted a false account of what happened (later published by the Agency as a book,…p189  As Kolko states, the extermination of the PKI in 1965-66 "surely ranks as a war crime of the same type as those the Nazis perpetrated.... No single American action in the period after l945 was as bloodthirsty as its role in Indonesia, for it tried to initiate the massacre, and it did everything in its power to encourage Suharto, including equipping his killers, to see that the physical liquidation of the PKI was carried through to its culmination ." p 196.

C. Budiardjo, "Indonesia; Mass Extermination and the Consolidation of Authoritarian Power", Ch. 8 in A. George,Western State Terrorism, Polity, 1991.

…another recent major terrorist campaign: Indonesia's violent bid to gain control of the Portuguese territory of East Timor. This is a clear case of the "systematic use of murder and destruction… Begun in December 1975 and continuing to this day, the Indonesian aggression has resulted in the deaths of 100,000 to 200,000 of a Timorese population estimated in the mid-1970s at around 600,000. According to the head of the Catholic Church in East Timor, Indonesia's campaign has led to "the ethnic, cultural and religious extinction of the identity of the People of East Timor." Thirteen years have passed since Indonesia's invasion, Bishop Belo wrote in a recent letter to the Secretary General of the UN, "And we continue to die as a people and a nation."20  Amnesty International reported in the mid '80s the arbitrary killing of hundreds of non-combatants, the extrajudicial execution of those surrendering to Indonesian forces, "disappearances," arbitrary arrests and detention without trial "on a massive scale," and forced resettlement in campos de concentracao, as they are generally called by the Timorese. Torture of detainees was widespread and officially condoned: Amnesty confirmed the existence of secret military manuals issued to troops which permitted torture and suggested how force may best be used during interrogations.2' Deaths through massive aerial and naval bombardment, together with the consequent starvation, have taken thousands of lives. Throughout this period, …(Britain)… offered the Indonesian regime continuous and increasing military, financial, and diplomatic support. Sir John Ford, London's ambassador to Jakarta at the time of the invasion, reported in a telegram to the Foreign Office in July 1975: "…it is in Britain's interest that Indonesia should absorb the territory as soon and as unobtrusively as possible, and that if it should come to the crunch and there is a row in the United Nations, we should keep our heads down and avoid taking sides against the Indonesian Government." Fn p. 22.

A George, The Discipline of Terrorology, In In A. George, Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 81.

Re the "referendum" in West Irian:

"…Indonesia is being especially haunted by a referendum 32 years ago that former United Nations officials now admit was a sham."… "The Indonesians, sensing overwhelming opposition to the takeover, decided to canvass only 1. 025 handpicked supporters. The result was a unanimous vote for integration. The UN Security Council after being lobbied intensely by Washington, endorsed the vote."

Historic vote was sham, ex-UN chiefs admit", Sydney Morning Herald, 23 Nov., 2001. P. 13.

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IRAN

In Iran"…the US installed the Shah as an amenable dictator in 1953, trained his secret services in "methods of interrogation" and lauded him as he ran his regime of torture."

"Folks out there have a "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values", Edward Herman, 2001. http://www.globalresearch

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IRAQ

The United States supported Saddam Hussein all through the 1980s as he carried out his war (with Iran) …and turned a blind eye to his use of chemical weapons…"

"Folks out there have a "distaste of Western civilization and cultural values", Edward Herman, 2001. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/HER109A.html

During the 1980s, America and Britain supplied Saddam Hussein with every weapon he wanted, often secretly and illegally. The relationship was known cynically in Washington as "the love affair".

When Blair and Bush incessantly refer to Saddam "using chemical weapons

against his own people", specifically the Kurdish village of Halabja in

1988, they never explain that Britain and America were accomplices.

Not only did both governments secretly and illegally approve the sale of

chemical weapons' agents, officials in Washington and Whitehall tried to

cover up the Halabja atrocity, with the Americans even faking a story that

Iran was responsible.

…

When Bush and Blair call Saddam "a threat to his neighbours", they never mention that George Bush Senior, as head of the CIA and later President, pushed Iraq to attack Iran and supplied crucial intelligence to the Iraqi military that ensured the war went on for eight years. The result was millions of dollars in profits for American and British arms firms, and a million young men dead on both sides. A congressional investigation, long forgotten, described this as a "great crime".

THE REAL REASON FOR ATTACKING IRAQ

AMERICA burns a quarter of all the oil consumed by humanity. A study

sponsored by the US Council on Foreign Relations says that "the American

people continue to demand plentiful and cheap energy without sacrifice or

inconvenience". Transport in the United States alone burns 66 per cent of

America's petroleum.

One estimate is that the world's oil reserves will begin to decline within

five to 10 years at the rate of about two million barrels a day. In the

Middle East, the only country capable of significantly increasing its

production is Iraq, once described by Vice President Cheney as "the great

prize".

Lies, damned lies and terror warnins, by John Pilger on the evil art of black propoganda By John Pilger http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12422214&method=full&siteid=50143

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ISRAEL

There is enormous resentment at ongoing U.S. diplomatic, financial and military support for Israeli occupation forces and their policies.

The U.S. relationship with Israel is singular. Israel represents only one one-thousandth of the world's population and has the 16th highest per capita income in the world, yet it receives nearly 40 percent of all U.S. foreign aid. Direct aid to Israel in recent years has exceeded $3.5 billion annually,

As long as U.S. military, diplomatic and economic support of the Israeli

government remains unconditional despite Israel's ongoing violation of human rights, international law and previous agreements with the Palestinians, There is no incentive for the Israeli government to change its policies.

For over two decades, the international consensus for peace in the Middle East has involved the withdrawal of Israeli forces to within internationally recognized boundaries in return for security guarantees from Israel's neighbours, the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and some special status for a shared Jerusalem.

However, the U.S. has traditionally rejected the international consensus and currently takes a position more closely resembling that of Israel's right-wing government: supporting a Jerusalem under largely Israeli sovereignty, encouraging only partial withdrawal from the occupied territories, allowing for the confiscation of Palestinian land and the construction of Jewish-only settlements and rejecting an independent state Palestine outside of Israeli strictures.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other reputable human rights group have noted that the bulk of the violence has come from Israeli occupation forces and settlers.

The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.

The U.S. justifies the nearly $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel on the grounds of protecting that country from its Arab neighbours, even though the United States supplies 80 percent of the arms to these Arab states.

Furthermore, only the United Nations Security Council has the prerogative to authorize military responses to violations of its resolutions; no single member state can do so unilaterally without explicit permission. Many Arabs object to the U.S. policy of opposing efforts by Arabs states to produce weapons of mass destruction, while tolerating Israel's sizable nuclear arsenal and bringing U.S. nuclear weapons into Middle Eastern waters as well as rejecting calls for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the region.

There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from U.S. policy toward Iraq.

in recent years the United States has successfully pushed the UN Security Council to impose economic sanctions against Libya, Afghanistan and Sudan over extradition disputes, an unprecedented use of the UN's authority. However, the U.S. has blocked sanctions against such Middle East allies as Turkey, Israel and Morocco for their ongoing occupation of neighboring countries, far more egregious violations of international law that directly counter the UN Charter. In recent years, for example, the U.S. has helped block the Security Council from moving forward with a UN-sponsored resolution on the fate of the Moroccan-occupied country of Western Sahara because of the likelihood that the people would vote for independence from Morocco, which invaded the former Spanish colony with U.S. backing in 1975.

Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has used its veto power to protect its ally Israel from censure more than all other members of the Security Council have used their veto power on all other issues combined.

Most observers recognize that one of the major obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian peace is the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. However, the U.S. has blocked enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions calling for Israel to withdraw its settlements from Palestinian land. These settlements were established in violation of international law, which forbids the colonization of territories seized by military force. In addition, the U.S. has not opposed the expansion of existing settlements and has shown ambivalence regarding the large-scale construction of exclusively Jewish housing developments in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. Furthermore, the U.S. has secured additional aid for Israel to construct highways connecting these settlements and to provide additional security, thereby reinforcing their permanence. This places the United States in direct violation of UN Security Council resolution 465, which "calls upon all states not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically in connection with settlements in the occupied territories."

The United States has supported autocratic regimes in the Middle East.

The growing movement favoring democracy and human rights in the Middle East has not shared the remarkable successes of its counterparts in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Most Middle Eastern governments remain autocratic. Despite occasional rhetorical support for greater individual freedoms, the United States has generally not supported tentative Middle Eastern steps toward democratization.

In reality, these arms transfers and diplomatic and economic support systems play an important role in keeping autocratic Arab regimes in power by strengthening the hand of the state and supporting internal repression.

The U.S. promotion of a neo-liberal economic model in the Middle East has not benefitted most people of the region.

Extracts from, "Ten things you should Know about U.S. Policy in the Middle East", by Professor Stephen Zunes. University of San Francisco September 26, 2001

the Palestinians, forced to live in squalid refugee camps for decades subject to periodic harassment and slaughter, while the US gives 40% of its foreign aid to Israel. Much of this has been military equipment used to kill Palestinian and other Muslim people. Some 20,000 were killed when Israel invaded Southern Lebanon. Israel has been frequently condemned by the UN for holding territory taken from the Palestinians and building settlements on it. When Iraq invaded Kuwait the US retaliated with military force, killing hundreds of thousands, but the US does not condemn Israel’s invasions and acquisitions. Pilgler says "In Palelstine the illegal occupation by Israel would have collapsed long ago were it not for US backing…"

Pilger, http://www.theherald.co.ukl/news/archive/;13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

Of course Israel’s behaviour must be seen as a response to a problem of extreme insecurity and the death of many of its own citizens; the point of these illustrations is not to condemn Israel and exonerate the Arabs, it is to insist that the Palestinians like many other groups have abundant reason to be extremely discontented about the way they have been treated by the West.

___________________________________________________________________

KOREA

Korea, 1945-53. After World War II, the United States suppressed popular progressive organizations, who had been allies in the war—at times with brutal force—in favour of the conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. 127

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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LAOS

Laos, 1957_73 The Laotian left, led by the Pathet Lao, tried to effect social change peacefully, making significant electoral gains and taking part in coalition governments. But the United States would have none of that. The CIA and the State Department, through force, bribery and other pressures, engineered coups in 1958, 1959 and 1960. Eventually, the only option left for the Pathet Lao was armed force. The CIA created its famous Annee Clandesdine—totalling 30,000, from every cornier of Asia—to do battle, while the US Air Force, between 1965 and 1973, rained down more than two million tons of bombs upon the people of Laos. 136

 W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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LIBYA

The April 1986 American bombing of Libya took the lives of scores of people and wounded another hundred or so. The dead included Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi's young daughter all of Qaddafi's other seven children as well as his wife were hospitalized, suffering from shock and various injuries. A year later, 65 claims were filed with the White House and the Department of Defense under the Federal Tort Claims Act and the Foreign Claims Act, on behalf of those killed or injured. The claimants, who were asking for up to $5 million for each wrongful death, included Libyans, Greeks, Egyptians, Yugoslavs and Lebanese.9 Before long, the number of claimants reached to about 340, but none of their claims got anywhere in the American judicial system, with the Supreme Court declining to hear the case.230

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

NATO Nations Set to Reap Spoils of Libya War

(Re the 2011 overthrow of Gadaffi.)

France's President Nicolas Sarkozy, like his counterparts in the UK, Italy, the US and other countries, is keen to garner oil contracts once a new government emerges in Libya. Similarly, Reuters, under the headline, "Investors eye promise, pitfalls in post-Gaddafi Libya" noted that a new government in that country could "herald a bonanza for Western companies and investors".

Before Tripoli has completely fallen, before Gaddafi and his supporters have stepped down and before the blood dries on the bodies that have yet to be counted, Western powers are already eyeing up what they view us just rewards for the intervention.

As alluded to by the Economist, each country's contribution to the NATO effort in Libya is expected to have some impact on how much of the spoils it gets in the looming post-war period. An anonymous British official told the Economist that NATO's involvement in the Libyan uprising means that: "Now we own it."

As Reuters reports, "Western companies look well positioned as billions of dollars in oil exploration and construction contracts come up for grabs as part of the reconstruction effort."

Leaving aside the massive profits from the rebuilding that Libya is now going to need, there are vast oil spoils to distribute.

The striking feature of the West's relationship to the Middle East has been its cynical alliances with repressive rulers, propped up to shut down their populations while opening up resources to foreign access.

<http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2011/08/27

Published on Saturday, August 27, 2011 by Al Jazeera

The "Friends of Libya" conference held in Paris Thursday signaled the beginning of the imperialist carve-up of the oil-rich North African country.

Jointly chaired by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, the conference included participation by those countries which provided the fire-power under the umbrella of NATO and using a United Nations resolution as a cover to bring down the government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in a six-month war for "regime change." These include the US, France, Britain, Italy and Qatar. All of them are jockeying to reap the greatest possible return on their "investment" of bombs and missiles that have claimed thousands of lives and left much of Libya’s infrastructure in ruins.

On the day of the summit, the French daily Liberation published the copy of a letter written in Arabic, purportedly from a representative of the Benghazi-based National Transitional Council, promising to cede to France 35 percent of its oil in return for its support.

The letter, dated April 3, states: "With regard to the oil agreement struck with France as a token of this Council’s gratitude, at the London summit, we, in our capacity as legitimate representative of Libya, have delegated to brother Mahmud [Shammam, the NTC’s media minister] the power to sign this agreement allocating 35 percent of total crude oil to the French in exchange for its total, permanent backing for our Council." Spelling out that France considered its part in the war an investment that would be rewarded with Libyan oil wealth, the foreign minister said: "You know this operation in Libya costs a lot. It’s also an investment in the future because a democratic Libya is a country that will develop, offering stability, security and development in the region."

“Friends of Libya” meet in Paris for imperialist carve-up”,

By Bill Van Auken uruknet.info set 2011. WSWS, September 2, 2011.

Before the guns have even gone silent in Libya, one British business leader has complained to The Independent that Britain is behind the curve on securing opportunities. “It’s all politics, no commercial stuff. I think that is a mistake. We need to be getting down there as soon as possible.”

<http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/dash-for-profit-in-postwar-libya-carveup-2342798.html>

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MEXICO

These desires, however, conflict with the needs of NAFTA and other components of the globalized economy, which want the Zapatistas out of certain areas—or at least not claiming ownership to the land—for various reasons, oil and other natural resources being amongst them, as well as the decidedly bad example being set for other Mexican and Central American peasants. NAFTA's plans call for the "subsistence" agriculture long practiced by the indigenous l people to be "modernized"; i.e., to produce "high-profit" export crops, such as rubber and lumber. 161

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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MIDDLE EAST...PALESTINE

After the First World War the spoils of the collapsed Turkish Empire were divided up between Britain and France. Britain got control of the whole Gulf region, and ran it by carving out little states round each of its ports. The dominant local families were installed as "legitimate" monarchies—subject to the British Empire.  When the British drew up the borders in 1922, creating Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, their main aim was to prevent the new state of Iraq from having access to the Gulf which could enable it to threaten British dominance. That is why the state of Kuwait was established. The border between Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia was drawn up in a tent in the desert by Sir Percy Cox, the British High Commissioner in Baghdad.

Harold Dickson, the British military attache in the region recalled how it was done. Cox summoned to his tent Ibn Saud, the first ruler of Saudi Arabia. "It was astonishing to see him being reprimanded like a naughty schoolboy by His Majesty's high commissioner and being told sharpIy that he, Sir Percy Cox, would himself decide on the type and general line of the frontier. This ended the impasse. Ibn Saud almost broke down and pathetically remarked that Sir Percy was his father and mother who made him and raised him from nothing to the position he held and that he would surrender half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered."

In this way the British established the al-Sabahs to watch over British interests. Kuwait remained a British protectorate—a colony—until 1961…Britain's top four favourite families made up two thirds of- the cabinet, and one third of the directorships of the country's largest companies…lt is estimated that the al-Sabahs have $100 billion worth of foreign assets and investments. In return for its role in the Middle East, the West was prepared to overlook the human rights record of Kuwait.

George Bush and Bob Hawke originally claim to be sending to defend Saudi Arabia from the brutality of an Iraqi invasion. But one look at Saudi Arabia shows they are happy to go along with the most brutal of regimes as long as it defends their interests. Saudi Arabia covers four fifths of the Arabian peninsula and holds a quarter of the world's oil reserves. As a consequence its rulers have long enjoyed US backing…

The ruling dynasty of over 4.()00 princes has only survived through being propped up by Western powers keen to secure oil supplies… In May 1951 Iran's nationalist prime minister, Dr Mohammed Mussadeq, nationalised the country's oilfields. Anglo-lranian responded by stopping all production and Britain blockaded Iran's exports. The British cabinet discussed using force to steal the fields back. But the US. keen to get its companies' hands on lranian oil. refused to back a British invasion. Instead the British and the US colluded in a coup to bring Mussadeq down in August 1953.  

The plan was drawn up by the British Secret Service and executed by the CIA. The US pumped $250 million into the Shah's state in the following three years. It made him the world's largest importer of arms and a loyal policeman of Western interests.

By 1967 British companies' share of Middle Eastern oil had shrunk to 29 percent. The US oil giants now controlled 59 percent. By this time some of that enormous wealth was reaching Arab hands. But the overwhelming majority of Arab people continued to live in abject poverty. Their rulers simply lined their own pockets and built formidable armies to protect their rule.

The strategy of the Western powers ensured the bulk of the Arabian peninsula stayed under the control of reactionary monarchies. The rulers of Saudi Arabia held out against any kind of elected assembly. They have been content to live off their oil revenues, and to maintain a state in which more than half the population are illiterate and one in ten children die before their first birthday. In order to defend their oil supplies in the Gulf, Western powers have backed a state formed on the basis of the expulsion of the Palestinians from their land. But Palestine was once a nation in its own right. For over a thousand years, until the turn of the century, Palestine was populated overwhelmingly by Arabs, mostly Musiim, some Christian. A few thousand Jews lived beside them in peace. That peace was shattered, as a wave of anti-semism swept through Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Millions of Jews fled the pogroms (anti-Jewish massacres) incited by the Tsars in Russia. Most went to the USA and Canada. A smaller number, 120,000, went to Palestine. They were encouraged to adopt Zionism; the idea that anti-semitism would always exist and therefore it was necessary to set up an exclusively Jewish state.  At the end of the First World War Brittish forces took control of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. Palestine then had a population of over a million Arabs and 56,000 Jews. The British promised to grant independence to the Arabs, but secretly negotiated and promised support for "a nationaI homeland for the Jews" in Palestine. A bitter and bloody conflict followed, with the Palestinians facing an alliance of the British and the Zionist settlers. Arab peasants were evicted from their land. They were not allowed to work as labourers on settler-owned land or sell their products at settler markets. The Palestinians resisted. They staged a massive general strike in 1936 against the British for their betrayal of the promises of independence. It lasted six months and was followed by two years of uprising and civil war. The British responded with brutal repression. One third of all the troops in the British Empire were deployed Palestine. The RAF bombed village after village. in others the British army simply shot every tenth villager. The colonial authorities estimated that 2,000 Arabs were killed and several hundred hung after being condemned by military courts. Palestine was finally partitioned by the United Nations in 1947. The UN promised "justice" for both Arabs and Jews. Jewish settlers still owned only 6 percent of the land and made up 30 percent of the population. Nevertheless, the UN gave them 55 percent of Palestine. But even this wasn't enough for the Zionists. They set about expanding the borders of the proposed state of Israel. They drove another 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and seized over 80 percent of the land.

Their methods were savage. In April 1948 the village of Deir Yassin was razed to the ground. Of its 400 inhabitants perhaps 50 survived. Eyewitnesses from the Red Cross reported the bodies of children mutiIated by hand grenades. This notorious massacre was carried out by Irgun militia controlled by Menachim Begin, a future Israeli prime minister. "There had been 400 people in this village", noted Jaques de Reynier of the International Red Cross. "About 50 had escaped. All the rest had been deliberately massacred in cold blood." Begin described the impact of the slaughter: "Arabs throughout the country started to flee for their lives."

…When a ceasefire was agreed in 1949, Palestine no longer existed. To seal the process, Israel created the "law of return" which permits any Jew to return" to their "homeland" but keeps Palestinians out. Today Zionists present the terror campaign in the 1940s as a "war of independence" in which a small number of Jews faced the combined might of the Arab states in the region. But tragically the Palestinians were left to fight alone. For the first six months of the fighting Arab rulers did nothing. As the war began Zionist leader Golda Meir was in secret negotiations with King Abdullah of Jordan about carving up the remains of Palestine. The areas that were not annexed by the Zionists were taken by other Arab rulers. Jordan annexed the West Bank and Egypt took Gaza. But Israeli ambitions did not end here. Once more m 1967 the Israelis expanded their borders by occupying the Gaza strip and the West Bank.

Over 300,000 Palestinians fled as a result. Of these 145,000 were refugees uprooted for the second time. Until 1967 around half the Palestinian people lived within the borders of the old Palestine. After 1967 the majority were outside. None of the proposed peace settlements today even question the sanctity of Israel's 1967 borders. Then in 1982 Begin launched a full scale military invasion of Lebanon. Tens of thousands of Palestinians were slaughtered as their refugee camps and then West Beirut were bombed to rubble and overrun. Hospitals were hit with cluster and phosphorous bombs, not by accident but repeatedly. Teenage and adult Palestinian males were blindfolded, bound and taken to an internment camp. Eight years later some are still held hostage by Israel's client militia in southern Lebanon. The climax of the massacre came with the systematic slaughter of unarmed Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. The United States, which had supported Israel throughout the invasion, stood alone alongside Israel at the United Nations in refusing to condemn the massacre…

 Between 1978 and 1982 Israel received 48 percent of all US military aid worldwide, and 35 percent of all US economic aid. American politicians claim they support Israel because of the pressure of the Jewish lobby inside the US. In fact they listen to the lobby only because of the role Israel plays as the US's watchdog in the Middle East. Pp. 5, 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23.

The UN Charter says, its function was not to defend human rights, freedom, democracy and the right to self-determination. Rather it was to act as a fig leaf for the superpowers as they tried to police the world. From day one resolutions passed in the General Assembly of all member nations have been worthless rhetoric unless they were backed by the superpowers sitting on the UN Security Council. The UN could operate only when the United States needed it—for example in the Korean War, the Suez Crisis and now in the Gulf. Without US blessing nothing happened. So 15 years of UN sanctions against the racist regime in Rhodesia achieved nothing, nor did hundreds of UN resolutions condemning Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. pp 25.

R. Bollard, No Blood For Oil, International Socialist Organisation, (undated; c 2001.)

 "Following the end of the US led war on Iraq in 1991, the Kurds in the north…rose up against Saddam. Baghdad brutally suppressed the uprisings, using massive aerial bombardments. US president Bush declared Saddam’s savagery as an ‘internal matter.’"

 "In the northern ‘safe’ zone the Turkish government has regularly bombed Kurds without the US lifting a finger…The US has refused to use its enormous influence to end the growing military cooperation between Turkey and Israel, a direct aim of which is to crush the Kurdish national movement."

 "In early 1995, Turkey attacked Kurdish bases inside Iraq with 35,000 troops, using US supplied weapons, warplanes and tanks….US supplied arms was a violation of international law..

 …re US hypocrisy;…The US claims that "…their objectivity is to protect the Kurds, but the US and its Western allies did not say anything, and did nothing when Iraq. Political and economic interests lie behind every move the US has made so far…" "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 Izrael, Turkey and the dictatorial sheikdoms of the Gulf, particularly Saudi Arabia."

 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.

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NICARAGUA

In I982, we organized an invasion force to try to overthrow the government

of Nicaragua, much along the pattern by which we successfully overthrew

the government of its neighbour, Guatemala, not so many years ago.

Kwitney, J., Endless Enemies, 1986. 405.

Nicaragua, 1978~90. When the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1978it was clear to Washington that they might well be that long-dreaded beast—"another Cuba". Under President Carter, attempts to sabotage the revolution took diplomatic and economic forms. Under Reagan violence was the method of choice. For eight terribly long years, people of Nicaragua were under attack by Washington's proxy army the Contras, formed from Somoza's vicious National Guardsmen and other supporters of the dictator. It was all-out war, aiming to destroy the progressive social and economic programs of the government burning down schools and medical clinics, raping, torturing, mining harbours, bombing and strafing. These were the charming gentlemen Ronald Reagan liked to call "freedom fighters". 148

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Twenty years ago the United States launched a war against Nicaragua. That was a terrible war. Tens of thousands of people died. The country was practically destroyed. Nicaragua did not respond by setting off bombs in Washington. They went to the World Court with a case, the World Court ruled in their favour and ordered the United States to stop its "unlawful use of force" (that means international terrorism) and pay substantial reparations. Well, the United States responded by dismissing the court with contempt and immediately escalated the attack. At that point Nicaragua went to the UN Security council which voted a resolution calling on all states to obey international law. They didn't mention anyone, but everyone knew they meant the United States. Well, the United States vetoed it. Nicaragua then went to the General Assembly which, two years in a row passed a similar resolution with only the United States and Israel opposed.

From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>Wed, 10 Oct 2001 11:01:02 -0500

Subject: Re: Is there a nonviolent response to September 11?

'In Nicaragua, dictator Somoza has been kept in power by the brutal National Guard which operates as both an army and a policing force. The National Guard has had more U.S. training than any other military or police force in the hemisphere on a per capita basis.'

F. M. Lappe and J. Collins, Food First, 1977, 438.

The resignation of the President of Nicaragua, General Somoza, marks the end of a 46-year family dynasty that was installed and sustained and finally undermined with the help of the United States. The Somoza family owned 30% of the land that could be tilled in Nicaragua. Over the years, secured in power by unswerving loyalty to Washington, the Somoza family was able to turn Nicaragua into its personal fiefdom, growing enormously rich, while smothering all opposition in the name of fighting communism.

'Somoza empire; aided and abetted by the U.S.', Sydney Morning Herald, 17^th July, 1979.

US efforts to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua constitutes one of the clearest and most disturbing instances of sustained terrorism. The US. helped to install and maintain the Somaza regime for 46 years, (the Somoza family ended up with 30% of the country's farmland.

Sydney Morning Herald, 17^th July, 1979.)

The Contras were organised by the CIA to attack the Nicaraguan government. "…the documentation of the murder of civilians as standard operating procedure of the Contras was already massive in 1984.27 Former CIA director Stansfield Turner stated to a House subcommittee that US support for the Contras "…would have to be characterised as terrorism…"

A.George, 1991b, In A George, Western State Terrorism, p. 72. For further detail on the Nicaraguan case see D. Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example, Oxfam, 1985, N. Chomsky, Turning the Tide, South End/Pluto, 1985, P. Kornbluh, Nicaragua;The Price of Intervention, Institute for Policy Studies, 1987, H. Sklar, Washington's War on Nicaragua, South End, 1989.

The Contras are a true proxy army, one that has killed thousands of civilians (the war's death toll as of early 1989 was over 29,000, more than half of them civilians), caused the displacement of hundreds of thousands of peasants, and severely damaged the Nicaraguan economy.26 In June 1986, the International Court of Justice ruled that the US's actions were illegal… Congress expressed its concern over the ruling by voting a couple of weeks later for Reagan's $100 million military aid package to the Contras. The administration reaffirmed its belief in the rule of law by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law (11-1, with three abstentions) and by voting against a General Assembly resolution calling for compliance with the Court's rulings (passed 94-3…) p. 83.

A George, The Discipline of Terrorology, In In A. George, Western State Terrorism, Polity, 1991, p. 82-83.

The Nicaraguan Contras were organized by the CIA out of the remnants of Somoza's National Guard. In 1988, with US support, the leadership of the Contras was given over to Colonel Enrique Bermudez, a long-time leader of the National Guard. This did not cause the US mass media to question the "democratic" aim of the "resistance." Shultz's assertion that "The contras in Nicaragua do not blow up school buses or hold mass executions of civilians" will surely go down in history as a classic Big Lie, as the documentation of the murder of civilians as standard operating procedure of the Contras was already massive in l984. See Reed Brody, Contra Terror in Nicaragua (South End, 1985), for 145 sworn affidavits on Contra atrocities against civilians, and other materials. See also Americas Watch's reports on human rights in Nicaragua, which support the same conclusion.

On the long-term terrorist assault on Cuba, see Warren Hinckle and William Turner, The Fish is Red (Harper & Row, 1981); on the attacks on Angola and Mozambique, Hanlon, Beggar Your Neighbors; on the issue more generally, Herman, The Real Terror Network, pp. 62-82, and William Blum, The CIA: A Forgotten History, (Zed Books, 1986), passim.

Former CIA director Stansfield Turner testified before the House Subcommittee on Western Hemispheric Affairs on April 16, 1985, that US organization and support of the Contras would "have to be characterized as terrorism, as state-sponsored terrorism" (quoted in Peter Kornbluh, "The | Covert War," in Thomas Walker (ed.), Reagan Versus the Sandinstas (Westview Press, 1987), p 27).

E. S. Herman and G O'Sullivan, "Terrorism" as Ideology and Cultural Industry, Ch. 3 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991p. 70.

When a Contra supply plane was shot down in October 1986 with an American mercenary on board, it became impossible to suppress the evidence of illegal CIA supply flights to the proxy forces. The Iran- Contra hearings ensued, focusing much attention on these topics.

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p 15.

To select virtually at random from the many cases deemed unworthy of notice, on November 21, 1987, 150 Contras attacked two villages in the southern province of Rio San Juan with 88-mm mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, killing six children and six adults and injuring 30 others. Even cooperatives of religious pacifists who refused to bear arms were destroyed by the US terrorist forces. In El Salvador too, the army attacks cooperatives, killing, raping, and abducting DK members.

The decision of the International Court of Justice in June 1986 condemning the United States for the "unlawful use of force" and illegal economic warfare was dismissed as an irrelevant pronouncement by a "hostile forum" (New York Times). Little notice was taken when the US vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law and voted against General Assembly resolutions to the same effect (with Israel and El Salvador in 1986; with Israel alone in 1987). The guiding principle, it appears, is that the US is a lawless terrorist state and this is right and just, whatever the world may think, whatever international institutions may declare. p 16.The contra war easily qualifies as "state-sponsored terrorism," as former CIA director Stansfield Turner testified before Congress in April, 1985. p 16.

George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991.

"ln Nicaragua the US proxy forces left a trail of murder, torture, rape, mutilation, kidnapping, and destruction, but were impeded , because civilians had an army to defend them. No comparable problems arose in the US client states, where the main terrorist force attacking the civilian population is the army and other state security forces. In El Salvador, tens of thousands were slaughtered in what Archbishop Rivera y Damas in October 1980, shortly after the operations moved into high gear, described as "a war of extermination and genocide against a defenceless civilian population." This exercise in state terror sought "to destroy the people's organizations fighting to defend their fundamental human rights," as Archbishop Oscar Romero warned shortly before his assassination, while vainly pleading with President Carter not to send aid to the armed forces who, he continued, "know only how to repress the people and defend the interests of the Salvadorean oligarchy."'7 The goals were largely achieved during the Reagan administration, which escalated the savagery of the assault against the population to new heights.

A. George, Introduction to In A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p 20-21.

The World Court call for an end to the "unlawful use of force" by voting $100 million of military aid to the US proxy forces in Nicaragua.

From N. Chomsky, International Terrorism; Image and Reality, Ch. 2 in . George, Introduction A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, 27.

( After outlining the conventional view Chomsky puts the alternative position, i.e., that) … both the supply of terrorist activity and the demand for publicity regarding terrorism can be explained mainly in terms of Western interests and policy, not by the actions and plans of the "terrorists." In this version, the primary terrorism is Western in origin, displayed, for example, in the operations of the South African government in its repressions at home and in Namibia, and its cross-border attacks directly or through proxy terrorist forces in Angola, Lesotho, Mozambique, Kenya, and Zimbabwe; in Israeli policy on the West Bank, and its Iron Fist attacks and sponsorship of the South Lebanese army in Lebanon; and in the US organization and support of the Contras and a terrorist army in El Salvador.

N. Chomsky, International Terrorism; Image and Reality, Ch. 2 in . George, Introduction A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p. 16.(Source uncertain; ??Could be from Herman and O'Sullivan, same book.)

History will record that in the 1980s South Africa and the United States jointly waged a terrible but almost invisible war against the innocent peoples of Southern Africa. The war, it will be remembered, engulfed much of the subcontinent and was of almost unprecedented barbarity.

It is certain that this war, whose effects will be felt for decades to come will be bitterly remembered, not just in Africa, but in the entire world. The war has already left terrible scars: a million and a half or more dead, millions displaced from their homes, whole economies in ruins, and/ millions facing starvation and disease.

South Africa has been attacking the front-line states, using every means available to undermine and weaken them. What is not recognized is that the United States Government has played a key role in assisting South Africa. US actions, of course, have been carefully veiled. And when they have been public, they have been carried out under a barrage of propaganda which has apparently succeeded in misleading even the public at home. ..… careful investigation could have uncovered the whole, ugly secret alliance between the US and South Africa; an alliance which, after all, has been fairly visible since Kissinger's National Security Study Memorandum on Southern Africa was made public in 1974.The fact is, however, that journalists, academics, Congressmen, and many others have steadfastly refused to look carefully at the issue.

The South Africans "…launched attacks in mid 1980. The US saw radical change in South Africa as a threat to its interests. The US wanted change there but only gradual change compatible with Western interests." 222

The Reagan administration collaborated with the South Africans ",.. in a policy of covert war against whole populations…". 233.

A select list of US actions is given on pp 235-238, including diplomatic pressure, and threats to withdraw aid. There were 1.5 million deaths related to the war. It is clear, though, that the United States played an important role in Southern Africa during the 1980s, not in "bringing peace," but in making war… the Reagan administration provided money, arms, logistical support, and probably training to UNITA and the MNR …the Reagan administration more or less openly declared a "covert" war on Angola from the beginning of 1986. 245

In the absence of active assistance from the United States, South Africa would not have been able to press as far as it has against the front-line states. It would not have been able, with "plausible deniability," to unleash large surrogate forces against Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. It would never have been able openly to use its airforce and its army as it has. And it might even have had to use economic pressure and its own special forces much more sparingly.

The Reagan administration, therefore, was in part responsible for the death and destruction which has taken place in Southern Africa. 246

During the early 1980s, officials in the front-line states, officials from international aid organizations, a few diplomats, and some commentators repeatedly denounced "South African aggression" in Southern Africa. Yet their denunciations had very little effect: certainly they did not stop South Africa. The reason for this was that South Africa had a powerful patron and partner in the United States, which. was actively helping it to wage unconventional war against the front-line states. 246

"The Reagan Doctrine and the Destabilization of Southern Africa", Sean Gervasi and Sybil Wong, Ch. 9 in A. George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, 1991, p.52.

Under siege by the United States and its Contra proxy army for several years, Nicaragua filed suit in 1984 in the World Court (International Court of Justice), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, located in The Hague, Netherlands, for relief from the constant onslaught, which included mining its harbours. The Court ruled in 1986 that the US was in violation of international law for a host of reasons, stated that Washington "is under a duty  immediately ° cease and to refrain from all such acts [of hostility]"  and "is under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury".

 Anticipating the suit, the Reagan administration had done the decent and right thing: it announced, on April 6, 1984, three days before Nicaragua's filing, that the US would not recognize the World Court's jurisdiction in matters concerning Central America for a two-year period.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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PANAMA

For several years following the American invasion of 1989, with its highly destructive bombing and ground combat, many individual Panamanians tried in various ways to receive compensation for the death or injury of themselves or family members, or the wreckage of their homes or businesses. But their legal claims and suits were met by an implacable US government. 230.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Panama, 1989…Less than two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United I States showed its joy that a new era of world peace was now possible by invading Panama, as Washington's mad bombers struck again. On December 20, 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City was wiped out; 15,000 people were left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting between US and Panamanian forces, 500'something natives dead was the official body count—i.e., what the United States and the new US-installed Panamanian government admitted to. Other sources, examining more evidence, concluded that thousands had died. Additionally, some 3,000 Panamanians were wounded, 23 Americans died, and 324 were wounded.

Question from reporter: "Was it really worth it to send people to their death for this? To get Noriega?" George Bush: "Every human life is precious, and yet I have to answer, yes, it has been worth it." Manuel Noriega had been an American ally and informant for years until he outlived his usefulness. But getting him was hardly a major motive for the attack. Bush wanted to send a clear message to the people of Nicaragua, who had an election scheduled in two months, that this might be their fate if they re-elected the Sandinistas. Bush also wanted to flex some military muscle to illustrate to Congress the need for a large combat-ready force despite the very recent ~ dissolution of the "Soviet threat". The official explanation for the American ouster was Noriega's drug trafficking, which Washington had known about for years and had not been at all bothered by. And they could easily have gotten their hands on the man without wreaking such terrible devastation upon the Panamanian people. 154-5.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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PERU

For more than a decade the US has provided Peru with an unending stream of military advisers and trainers, Navy Seals and Green Berets, all manner of arms and equipment, surveillance flights, radar stations in the Andes, whatever—all to one of the most dictatorial and repressive regimes in the Western Hemisphere, condemned by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch/Americas and State Department Human Rights reports for its medieval prisons, routine torture and other human-rights violations, led by an autocrat named Alberto Fujimori. 160.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Peru, 1965…The US military set up "a miniature Fort Bragg" in the Peruvian jungle and proceeded to wipe out several guerrilla groups, which had arisen in response to the deep~seated poverty of the Peruvian masses. 129(??)

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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PHILIPPINES

Philippines, 1970s-199Os . Another scenario of poverty, social injustice, death squads, torture, etc. Ieading to wide ranging protest and armed resistance...time once again for the US military and CIA to come to the aid of the government in suppressing such movements. In 1987 it was revealed that the Reagan administration had approved a $10 million, two- year plan for increased CIA involvement in the counter-insurgency campaign. The CIA undertook large~scale psychological warfare operations and US military advisers routinely accompanied Philippine troops during their manoeuvers. The Philippines has long bee the most strategic location for US war-making in Asia… 149

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

Philippines, 1945-53 The US military fought against the leftist Huk forces even while the Huks were still fighting against the Japanese invaders in the world war. After the war, the US organized Philippine armed forces to continue the fight against the Huks, finally defeating them and their reform movement. The CIA interfered grossly in elections, installing a series of puppets as president, culminating in the long dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, for whom torture was la spicialite de la maison~ (see Elections chapter). 127

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

SOUTH AFRICA

The CIA collaborated closely with South African intelligence, one of ~the principal focuses being the African National Congress, the leading anti-apartheid organization which had been banned and exiled. The Agency cooperated in suppressing internal dissent, provided specific warnings of planned attacks by the ANC and information about ANC members residing in neighboring countries; on at least one occasion, in Mozambique in 1981, this led to South Africa sending an assassination squad to wipe out the fingered individuals.

The CIA was also responsible for the capture of ANC leader Nelson Mandela. Additionally, for a number of years in the 1970s and 1980s, the US supported South Africa in the UN, and the CIA violated the UN's arms embargo against South Africa (of which the US was a declared supporter by covertly providing the country with weapons and supporting its efforts to militarily determine the political makeup of Southern Africa. 144.

When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February  1990, President George Bush personally telephoned the black South African leader to tell him that all Americans were "rejoicing at his release."

This was the same Nelson Mandela who was imprisoned for most 28 years because the CIA tipped off South African authorities as to where they could find him. On June 10, 1990, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution reported  that an unidentified, retired US intelligence officer had revealed that within hours of Mandela's arrest, Paul Eckel, then a senior CIA operative, had told him: "We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would ft be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups." 215.

After Mandelas release, the White House was asked if Bush would apologize to the South African for the reported US involvement in his arrest at an upcoming meeting between the two men. In this situation, a categorical denial by the White House of any American involvement in the arrest would have. been de rigueur. However, pi spokesman Marlin Fitzwater replied: "This happened during the Kennedy administration...don't beat me up for what the Kennedy people did." 216.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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SOUTH YEMEN

South Yemen, 1979-84. Partly to cater to the wishes of next-door Saudi Arabia, and partly as Cold-War reflex, the US supported paramilitary forces in South Yemen to undermine the government, which was perceived as the proverbial "Soviet satellite", as opposed to North Yemen, which was seen to be the proverbial "pro-Western" good guys. 150

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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SUDAN

The El-Shifa pharmaceutical plant had raised Sudanese medicinal self sufficiency from less than five percent to more than 50 percent, while producing about 90 percent of the drugs used to treat the most deadly illnesses in this desperately poor country. But on August 20, 1998, the United States saw fit to send more than a dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles screaming into the plant, in an instant depriving the people of Sudan of their achievement. Based on a covertly acquired soil sample' Washington claimed that the plant was producing chemical weapons. 231.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

________________________________________________________________

SURINAM

Suriname, 1982-4. A plot was hatched by the United States to overthrow the government because it allegedly was falling into "the Cuban orbit". It was to be an invasion by some 300 men, half US and South American and half Surinamese. The CIA had actually informed Congress of its plan to use a paramilitary force, which President Reagan had authorized. Congress was not enthused, but William Casey and his CIA cowboys went ahead with their planning anyway, and were induced to call it off only after the scheme was discovered by the internal security agency of the Netherlands, the former colonial power in Suriname when it was known as Dutch Guiana. 152

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

 __________________________________________________________________

TURKEY

Washington had been actively supporting Turkey and Indonesia for years in their mailed fist military suppressions, and helped Croatia carry out, and then cover up, its ethnic cleansing of the Krajina Serbs in 1995.86 Turkey, in fact, had nearly threatened to veto the NATO decision that it could act on Kosovo unless Ankara was assured that this policy could never be applied to Turkey's treatment of Kurds. 164

 Washington policymakers, however, have long reserved the unrestrained right; to pour large amounts of money into elections of other countries (including those which also prohibit foreign contributions) and taint the electoral system in numerous other ways, as we shall see below.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

US acquiescence in Turkish treatment of the Kurds. The US claimed that it intervened to help the Kurds, but it gave tacit approval for the Turkish treatment. Washington has "…supported the Ankara regime’s brutal war against the Kurds in southern Turkey."

Blum??

URAGUAY

Uruguay, 1969-72 … The 1960s was the era of the Tupamaros, perhaps the cleverest, most resourceful, most sophisticated, least violent, Robin-Hood-like urban guerrillas the world has ever seen. They were too good to be allowed to endure. A team of American experts arrived, to supply the police with all the arms, vehicles, communications gear, etc. they needed, to train them in assassination and explosives techniques, to teach methods of interrogation cum torture, to set up an intelligence service cum death squad. It was all-out war against the Tupamaros and any suspected sympathizers. The Tupamaros lost. 142

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

____________________________________________________________

VIETNAM

"In Vietnam selected Vietnamese troops were organised into terror squads."

M. McClintock, 1991, "American doctrine and counterinsurgent state terror", in A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991, p. 133.

"…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…" Pilger says this operation was the model for the later terror carried out in Chile and Nicaragua.

Pilger, http://www.theherald.co.ukl/news/archive/;13-9-19101-0-24-43.html

Five days later, President Nixon sent a message to the Prime Minister of North Vietnam in which he stipulated the following: "(1) The Government of the United States of America will contribute to postwar reconstruction in North Vietnam without any political conditions. (2) Preliminary United States studies indicate that the appropriate programs for the United States contribution - -postwar reconstruction of $3.25 billion of grant aid over 5 years."5 Nothing of the promised reconstruction aid was ever paid. Or ever will be. However—deep breath here—Vietnam has been compensating the United States. In 1997 it began to pay off about $145 million ~in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. 229.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

 The Green Berets taught its members who were slated for duty in ~ t Vietnam in the 1960s how to use torture as part of an interrogation.

The notorious Operation Phoenix, set up by the CIA to wipe out the Vietcong infrastructure, subjected suspects to torture. In violation of the Geneva Convention, the US turned prisoners over to their South Vietnamese allies in full knowledge that they would be tortured, American military personnel often being present during the torture.   W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p. 52

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YUGOSLAVIA

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the we conflict is the collective amnesia that appears to have afflicted countless intelligent, well meaning people, who are convinced that the US/NATO bombing took place after the mass forced deportation of ethnic Albanians from Kosovo was well underway; which is to say that the bombing was launched to stop this "ethnic cleansing". In actuality, the systematic forced deportations of large numbers of people did not begin until a few days after the bombing began, and was clearly a reaction to it, born of extreme anger and powerlessness. This is easily verified by looking at a daily newspaper for the few days before the bombing. 165.

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

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ZAIARE/CONGO

The Congo/Zaire, 1966~65, 1977-78.

In June 196Q Patrice Lumumba—legally and peacefully—became the Congo's first prime minister after independence from Belgium. At Independence Day ceremonies before a host of foreign dignitaries, Lumumba called for the nation's economic as well as its political liberation, recounting a list of injustices against the natives by the white owners of the country. The man was obviously a "communist". And obviously doomed, particularly since Belgium retained its vast mineral wealth in Katanga province, and prominent Eisenhower administration officials had financial ties to the same wealth. Eleven days later, Katanga seceded; in September Lumumba was dismissed by the president at the instigation of the United States; and in January 1961 he was assassinated, with CIA involvement, after Eisenhower had requested that Lumumba should depart from this life. There followed several years of civil conflict and chaos and the rise to power in 1965 of Mobutu Sese Seko, a man not a stranger to the CIA. Mobutu went on to rule the country (which he renamed Zaire) for more than 30 years, with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA handlers. The Zairian people lived in abject poverty despite the country's extraordinary natural wealth, while Mobutu became a multibillionaire. In both 1977 and 1978, the Carter administration rushed extensive military aid to Zaire, including airlifting Moroccan troops, to help Mobutu quell rebel uprisings and remain in power. President George Bush was later to remark that Mobutu was "our best friend in Africa". 137-8

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

The democratic experiment had no example in Africa,…so perhaps the sorriest and the most unnecessary, blight on the record of this new era, is that the precedent for it all, the very first coup in postcolonial African history, the very first political assassination, and the very first junking of a legally constituted democratic system, all took place in a major country, and were all instigated by the United States of America.

But the riches … copper, cobalt, and diamond exports … The wealth is being stolen and squandered by a combination of American, European, and Zairian exploiters acting with neither the consent of the Zairian people nor their best interests in mind. P. 100.

The point is that' the government of Zaire is not communist or Soviet-influenced. Nor is it independent. It is one of ours. And the people who make U.S. foreign policy, and the people who elect them, cannot escape the moral or practical responsibility for what that policy does. P.106.

CIA people, from director Allen Dulles on down, thought that Lumumba threatened all Africa, even the world. They couldn't wait to bump him off. For blind arrogance, the most strident Leninists in the Kremlin couldn't take a backseat to these Washington policymakers. Richard Bissell, the CIA's deputy director for plans, recalled later, "The Agency had put top priority, probably, on a range of different methods of getting rid of Lumumba in the sense of either destroying him physically, incapacitating him, or eliminating his political influence."

At first, the U.S. embassy in Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) was a little more restrained. It reported to Washington when Lumumba visited the U.S. on July 6, 1960, "Lumumba is an opportunist and not a communist. His final decision as to which camp he will eventually belong will not be made by him but rather will be imposed upon him by outside forces." But by August 17, even Ambassador Claire Timberlake was recommending that the U.S. instigate a coup to remove Lumumba, though the ambassador didn't specifically recommend killing him.

As for-the men who ran the U.S. government, Under Secretary of State C. Douglas Dillon told the Church Committee that the National Security Council, including President Eisenhower, believed that Lumumba was a "very difficult if not impossible person to deal with, and was dangerous to the peace and safety of the world." How far beyond the dreams of a barefoot jungle postal clerk in 1956, that in a few short years he would be dangerous to the peace and safety of the world! The perception seems insane, particularly coming from the National Security Council, which really does have the power to end all human life within hours;

At the National Security Council, he (Eisenhower) responded to Dulles's announcement with an implicit or explicit order for Lumumba's forceful removal, by assassination if necessary. The exact words weren't recorded. Robert Johnson, NSC staff member from 1951 to 1962, testified before the Church Committee that Eisenhower's words "came across to me as an order for the assassination of Lumumba.... There was no discussion; the meeting simply moved on. I remember my sense of that moment quite clearly because the president's statement came as a great shock to me."

The day after Eisenhower talked to the National Security Council, CIA deputy director Richard Bissell cabled station chief Devlin to go ahead and replace by force the legally constituted government of the Congo — a nation with which the United States was not at war and had no cause to be. 62.

The fledgling Congolese leaders, so desperately needing an example to follow, were being instructed by the world's leading proponent of liberty and democracy on how a political system ought to work: you kill your legally elected rivals and seize power.

This obviously coordinated plot was almost certainly American origin. Though Mrs. Kalb’s cables contain no smoking-gun-type admissions of U.S. responsibility, she reports from other sources that the army takeover was financed by Western governments. Two State Department officials who worked intensely on Congo-Zaire policy have said that the U.S. designed the September 4 coup and selected Mobutu for the job. The State Department's official document, "Analytical Chronology of the Congo Crises," tacitly admits this. The document refers to a plan "to bring about the overthrow of Lumumba and install a pro-Western government." Then it says, "operations under this plan were gradually put into effect by the CIA.

Ambassador Timberlake was exuberant at the collapse of Congolese democracy. ….. and he accurately forecast that the next day Mobutu would kick the Soviet and other East bloc embassies out of the Congo. p.63.

The US sent a hit man, but Lamumba was killed by others. p. 69.

In faraway Lebanon, U.S. marines were patrolling the streets, and occasionally dying. The newspapers said the marines were there to put an end to twenty-five years of bloody civil war, so Lebanon could "get back on its feet" and start a democracy. Nobody seemed to remember that Lebanon's twenty-five years of civil war began when the CIA sabotaged a democracy that was already in place. In I957, the CIA had helped rig an election to load the Lebanese government with Christians, who it believed would better serve American interests. P.3.

In fact, if you analyze Zaire's $6.5 billion in debt, you find that almost none of it arises from anything that much benefited the Zairian people, who are being slowly starved to pay it off. 18

What is happening here is obvious. The bankers have gotten Zaire in hock up to that country's maximum ability to repay, and they are keeping it there.

Every year or so the bankers meet to determine how much more money can be squeezed out of that far-off, pathetic land where most of them personally dread to go. (If occasionally they must, they will conduct their business from

the Intercontinental Hotel and get out. Paris is nicer.)

Zaire is not alone in this. The major banks have actually held weekly or monthly "country meetings," where experts at the home office figure out the maximum debt capacity of each overseas country. Loan officers around the empire are then instructed by cable to persuade the governments to borrow up to that capacity. At the height of this activity, during the 1970s, before most countries reached their capacities, bank officers were paid bonuses .and were promoted, based on how much debt they could sign up. Since the major banks were privy to the same basic information, they were after the same debt capacity. Vice-presidents assigned to foreign offices competed fiercely to find enticing projects to lend on. This still goes on when new capacity is found. Former bank officers and Third World government economists, in interviews, describe the competition in such countries as Indonesia, Brazil, and even Sri Lanka as frenzied at times. p. 18.

Many thousands of Zairians work on plantations owned by big multinational companies, like Unilever, raising coffee, palm oil, sugar, or rubber. For this they are paid $IO to $I3 a month. That is $I20 to $I56 a year. Their wives and children who don't work on the plantation can garden to fill the family table. But generally, workers must promise the plantation-owner that they won't sap their energies raising cash crops. p. 36.

Some menials at the huge Unilever palm oil plantation at Lokutu, about

I20 miles into the bush west of Kisangani, get only $7 a month. Of the 50,000 Zairians Unilever says it employs, about 5,000 work at Lokutu. From their salaries, the company deducts several dollars a month for living quarters.

This means that in cash, menials may get as little as $4 a month, and farmers x $7 to $IO a month. The quarters consist of a 6-by-7-foot room for a single man, a bit more if the employee has a wife and children and can prove they’re his.

… Lumumba's "removal must be an urgent and prime objective," Dulles cabled. He authorized Devlin not only to stage a coup, but to take even more aggressive action if it can remain covert… 65

J. Kwitney, Endless Enemies, Penguin, 1986.

Unsorted Document:

On the US self concept … "The United States is good. We try to do our best everywhere." Madeleine Albright, 1992. "For the world trusts us with power, and the world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be on the side of decency. They trust us to do what's right." George Bush, 1993. When I came into office, I was determined that our country would go into the 21st century still the world's greatest force for peace and freedom, for democracy and security and prosperity.Bill Clinton, 1996. Frontpiece: Most Americans find it difficult in the extreme to accept the proposition that terrorist acts against the United States can be viewed as revenge for Washington's policies abroad. They believe that the US is targeted because of its freedom, its democracy, its wealth. ..We were attacked not for our vices, but for our virtues." Ix. Finally, we have President Clinton: "Americans are targets of terrorism, in part, because we act to advance peace and democracy and because we stand united against terrorism."

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000, p.1.

13. SOME REFERENCES.

There is an extensive literature documenting themes dealt within the above sections. See for example the overviews by

W. Blum, Rogue State; A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, Monroe, Me., Common Courage Press, 2000.

A George, Ed., Western State Terrorism, Cambridge, Polity, 1991.

J. Kwitney, Endless Enemies, Penguin , 1986.

E. S. Herman, The Real Terror Network, Southend Press, 1982,

W. Blum, The CIA; A Forgotten History, London, Zed Books, 1986,

N. Chomsky, Pirates and Emperors, International Terrorism in the Real World, Claremont Research and Publications, 1986,

A. Cockburn, Corruptions of Empire,

N. Chomsky and E. S. Herman, (1979), The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, Sydney, Hale and Iremonger.

N. Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians (South End/Pluto Press, 1983).

E. S. Herman, The Terrorism Industry; The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror, Pantheon, 1989.

R. Falk, Revolutionaries and Functionaries; The Dual Face of Terrorism, Dutton, 1988.

J. Galton, On the Causes of Terrorism and Their Removal, IFDA Dossier, 66, July-Aug, 1988, 29-42.