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78 KiB
Plaintext
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JOHN STOCKWELL
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THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA
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10 October 1987
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A two-part speech.
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Copyright (C) 1987 The Other Americas Radio
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John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the
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agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in
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Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in
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Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he
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resigned. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published by W.W.
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Norton 1978, is an international best-seller. This is a transcript of
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a lecture he gave in June, 1986.
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The policy of The Other Americas Radio regarding reproducing this
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lecture is that while they would like to see it reproduced and passed
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around as much as possible, they also need money to operate (they are
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not-for-profit). Thus, please pass a copy of this transcript on, and
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if you like the transcript, send a donation to them (the tape costs 13
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dollars, and they have other tapes as well) at:
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The Other Americas Radio
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Programs & News on Latin America.
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KCSB-FM, Box 85
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Santa Barbara, CA 93102
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(805) 569-5381
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For the on-line (electronic) version of this transcription, contact
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toad@nl.cs.cmu.edu on the ARPA network, or retrieve, via FTP, the file
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/usr/toad/text/talk/speech.doc or /usr/toad/text/talk/speech.mss from
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the NL.CS.CMU.EDU vax. Also available as a paper manuscript, or
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digitally on disk. Write to P.O.Box 81795, Pittsburgh, PA 15217.
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PART I
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THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AND THE
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CIA'S COVERT ACTIONS IN ANGOLA, CENTRAL AMERICA AND VIETNAM
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"I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of
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the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star
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generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s
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and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it
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all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from
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which to watch a covert action being done....
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I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and
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verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we
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had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact
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we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes,
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full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa
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and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces
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for us....
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What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the
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problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much
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graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found
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that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of
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covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since
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1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we
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have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been
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in business for a total of 37 years.
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What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national
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security syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S.
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manipulates the press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S.
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is pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua;
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how all of this concerns us so directly. I'm going to try to explain
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to you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what
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Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we'll talk
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about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.
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Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or
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another, already in the public records. You can dig it all out for
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yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based
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on information gotten out of the CIA under the freedom of information
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act, testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church
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committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the
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world who have been to these target areas that we'll be talking about.
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I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative.
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We come from South Texas, East Texas....
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I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my
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background, to believe in everything they were saying about the cold
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war, and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the
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best and the brightest of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out
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into the world, to join the struggle, to project American values and
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save the world for our brand of democracy. And I believed this. I
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went out and worked hard....
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What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ...
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that nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security
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interests very much. We didn't have many national security interests
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in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the heart of Africa. I concluded that I
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just couldn't see the point.
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We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was
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our function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not
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protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking
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with this Larry Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown
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Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He
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was moving into the Africa division Chief. I talked to him in Addis
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Ababa at length one night, and he was giving me an explanation - I was
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telling him frankly, 'sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make any
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sense, we're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting
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people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S.
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look bad'.
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And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, `you're
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trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have
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the big picture, who know what's going on in the world, who have all
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the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they
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decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person
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should be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have
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more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you will
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understand national security, and you can make the big decisions.
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Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.'
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And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a
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very powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan
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has used it on the American people, saying, `if you knew what I know
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about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it's
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necessary for us to intervene.'
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I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared
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my concern. A formal study was done in the State Department and
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published internally, highly classified, called the Macomber [sp?]
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report, concluding that the CIA had no business being in Africa for
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anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not
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justified, there were no national security interests that the CIA
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could address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn't need
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to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa
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at that time.
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I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my
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career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They
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assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75.
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There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a
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slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed.
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Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I
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was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the
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families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.
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I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief.
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When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA
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safe-house - when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The
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post was too important to close down. (2). They weren't going to get
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the man transferred or fired because that would make problems,
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political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the
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operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn't have the stomach
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for the job, that they could transfer me.'
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But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of
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`moral fiber' to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I
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wouldn't get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against
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my career.
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So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff
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that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to
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work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed
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him, and he didn't do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is
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obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department,
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works with the death squads.
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They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're
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actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and
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running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet
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the police chiefs, and the people who run the death squads, and they
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do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the
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villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship.
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And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or
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Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of
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what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.
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What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and
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the intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it
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was all about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what
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I found was that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to
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report about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army....
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Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a
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skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would
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come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could
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pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots
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and M-16's to the communist forces - that was their major supply, just
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as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to
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haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.
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And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it,
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and there was no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could
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provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now
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this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the
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winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a
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sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic
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end of our long involvement in Vietnam....
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I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run
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this secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976].... and what I figured
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out was that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the
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National Security Council, this office that Larry Devlin has told me
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about where they had access to all the information about Angola, about
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the whole world, and I would finally understand national security.
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And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not
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a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the
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question was where did the U.S. government fit into this thing, and I
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had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war....
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I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based
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on truly important, threatening information, threatening to our
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national security interests. If that had been the case, I still
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planned to get out of the CIA, but I would know that the system, the
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invisible government, our national security complex, was in fact
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justified and worth while. And so I took the job.... Suffice it to
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say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I had found
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these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite
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frankly, was fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of
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the NSC in which we were making decisions that were killing people in
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Africa. I mean literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go
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to sleep in nearly every one of these meetings....
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You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you've
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got Nicaragua.... the basic structure, all the way through including
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the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is
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that the U.S. led the way at every step of the escalation of the
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fighting. We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing
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it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would
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have been no war if we hadn't gone in first. We put arms in, they put
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arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in
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Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We
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brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And
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they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were
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covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it
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was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests there
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that should have been defended that way.
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There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA,
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the three movements in the country, to decide which one was the better
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one. The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel
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Davis, no bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the
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business as the butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of
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the conflict and work with whoever eventually won, and that was
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obviously the MPLA. Our consul in Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously
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argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the
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friendliest to the U.S.
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We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and
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proceeded with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends,
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they didn't want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they
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begged us not to fight them, they wanted to work with us. We said
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they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to
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be un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap victory, we would
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make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans died and
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they won the victory that they were winning anyway.
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Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in
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addition to the fact that our rationales were basically false, was
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that we lied. To just about everybody involved. One third of my
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staff in this task force that I put together in Washington, commanding
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this global operation, pulling strings all over the world to focus
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pressure onto Angola, and military activities into Angola, one third
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of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every way they
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could think of, to get stories into the U.S. press, the world press,
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to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets
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introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take
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over the world.
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Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read
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continuous statements of our position to the Security Council, the
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general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and
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Cubans were responsible for the conflict, and that we were staying
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out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.
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And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made
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was originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we
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managed this thing. The state department press person read these
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position papers daily to the press. We would write papers for him.
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Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `call us 10
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minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we'll
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tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would be
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false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to
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create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When
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they were in fact responding to our initiatives.
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And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress.
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This CIA director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in
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Vietnam - he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight
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committees, about what we were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36
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formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it's a felony to lie
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to the Congress.
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He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working
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closely with the South African army, giving them our arms,
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coordinating battles with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and
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armored cars. He said we were staying well away from them. They were
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concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola,
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a very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African
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country, to help you impose your will on that black African country by
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killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was
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concerned we might be involved in that, and he assured them we had
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nothing to do with it.
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We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered
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them into Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied
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to them about that. They asked if we were putting arms into the
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conflict, and he said no, and we were. They asked if we had advisors
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inside the country, and he said `no, we had people going in to look at
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the situation and coming back out'. We had 24 people sleeping inside
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the country, training in the use of weapons, installing communications
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systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody inside
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the country.
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In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people
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would be alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have
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been peaceful, or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning
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when we went in, and they went ahead and won, which was, according to
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our consul, the best thing for the country.
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At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen
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in the eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these
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people from the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S.
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literally and in the eyes of the world with the S. African army, and
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that's illegal, and it's impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries
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and eventually been identified with them. And that's illegal, and
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it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We were caught
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out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.
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After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What
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did the MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said
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they wanted to be our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the
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MPLA had Gulf oil back in Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the
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oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians protected by Cuban soldiers,
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protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in
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Northern Angola.
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You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five
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737 jets from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S.
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technicians to install the radar systems to land and take-off those
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planes. They didn't buy [the Soviet Union's] Aeroflot.... David
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Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press
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conferences, in which he says that we have no problem doing business
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with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.
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I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know
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what we'd done in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam. I wrote my book.
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I was fortunate - I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of
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people read it. I was able to take my story to the American people.
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Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.
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I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in
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earnest, after having been taught to fight communists all my life. I
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went to see what communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if
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they do in fact eat babies for breakfast. And I found they don't. I
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went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits is
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working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his
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theories of social democracy.
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I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and
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Bernard Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see - these were all educated
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people, and experienced people - and they had a theory, they had
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something they wanted to do, they had rationales and explanations -
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and I went repeatedly to hear them. And then of course I saw the
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U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against them, I saw us
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orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was
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killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things,
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these indicators, the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he
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and I were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S.
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would invade Grenada in the near future.
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I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after
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book after book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my
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desk on the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the
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way, I urge you to read. In television you get capsules of news that
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someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news.
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In newspapers you get what the editors select to put in the newspaper.
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If you want to know about the world and understand, to educate
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yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for
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yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you'll see, the
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issues are very, very important.
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I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the
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people who have done studies, people who are leading different
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situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major
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covert action. It lasted longer and evolved to be bigger than what we
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did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from
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Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to the
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leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when
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you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people,
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and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the people, who have
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been shot, or hit, or blown up....
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We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has
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performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people
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have been killed in these things.... Some of them are very, very
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bloody.
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The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who
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was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his
|
|
custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents
|
|
concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied
|
|
elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective
|
|
communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the
|
|
entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist
|
|
party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report
|
|
put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert
|
|
action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these
|
|
things.
|
|
|
|
Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There
|
|
was a covert action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many
|
|
years, with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this
|
|
country, of the evils of communist China, and attacking them, as we're
|
|
doing in Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched against
|
|
them to parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country. And
|
|
this led us directly into the Korean war.
|
|
|
|
U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25
|
|
years, with greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda,
|
|
deceiving the American people about what was happening. Panicking
|
|
people in Vietnam to create migrations to the south so they could
|
|
photograph it and show how people were fleeing communism. And on and
|
|
on, until they got us into the Vietnam war, and 2,000,000 people were
|
|
killed.
|
|
|
|
There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today,
|
|
for the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If
|
|
you're killing 1 to 3 million communists, that's great. President
|
|
Reagan has gone public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a
|
|
pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by
|
|
our national security activities are not communists. They're not
|
|
Russians, they're not KGB. In the field we used to play chess with
|
|
the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional
|
|
football players - we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an
|
|
operation, and then Tuesday you're at a banquet together drinking
|
|
toasts and talking.
|
|
|
|
The people that are dying in these things are people of the third
|
|
world. That's the common denominator that you come up with. People of
|
|
the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the
|
|
Metumba mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and
|
|
now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than
|
|
communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn't
|
|
give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of capitalism.
|
|
|
|
Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If
|
|
you want to get an easy-read of the history of our involvement in
|
|
Central America, read Walter LaFeber's book, Inevitable Revolutions.
|
|
[8] We have dominated the area since 1820. We've had a policy of
|
|
dominion, of excluding other countries, other industrial powers from
|
|
Europe, from competing with us in the area.
|
|
|
|
Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how
|
|
military this has been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we had 5,000 marines
|
|
in Nicaragua for a total of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican
|
|
Republic 4 times. Haiti, we occupied it for 12 years. We put our
|
|
troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6 times, Guatemala once, plus a CIA
|
|
covert action to overthrow the democratic government there once.
|
|
Honduras, 7 times. And by the way, we put 12,000 troops into the
|
|
Soviet Union during that same period of time.
|
|
|
|
In the 1930's there was public and international pressure about our
|
|
marines in Nicaragua....
|
|
|
|
The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the
|
|
puppet, Colonel Armaz in a coup] died violent deaths, and amnesty
|
|
international tells us that the governments we've supported in power
|
|
there since then, have killed 80,000 people. You can read about that
|
|
one in the book Bitter Fruit, by Schlesinger and Kinzer. [5] Kinzer's
|
|
a New York Times Journalist... or Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street
|
|
Journal reporter, his book Endless Enemies [7] - all discuss this....
|
|
|
|
However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into
|
|
this program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the rich,
|
|
and not to the people of the countries involved. And while we were
|
|
doing this, while we were trying, at least saying we were trying, to
|
|
correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the CIA was doing
|
|
its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the police units that are
|
|
today the death squads in El Salvador. With the leaders on the CIA's
|
|
payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.
|
|
|
|
We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and
|
|
Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up
|
|
subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture,
|
|
the way the CIA taught it. Dan Metrione, the famous exponent of these
|
|
things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching
|
|
interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of
|
|
the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right
|
|
times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.
|
|
|
|
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S.
|
|
AID' written on the side, so the people even knew where these things
|
|
came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the
|
|
current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one
|
|
wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and
|
|
you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of
|
|
pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.
|
|
|
|
Now how do you teach torture? Dan Metrione: `I can teach you about
|
|
torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have
|
|
to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.'
|
|
|
|
.... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could
|
|
do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would
|
|
bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for
|
|
the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the
|
|
bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so
|
|
they would be afraid of the police and the government.
|
|
|
|
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the
|
|
women who was in this program for 2 years - tortured in Brazil for 2
|
|
years - she testified internationally when she eventually got out.
|
|
She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the
|
|
people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't
|
|
break mental contact with them the way you could if they were
|
|
psychopath. They were very ordinary people....
|
|
|
|
There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't
|
|
only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other
|
|
people, it's people that do inhuman things to other people. And we
|
|
are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people
|
|
of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this
|
|
plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret
|
|
police, we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these
|
|
programs in our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going on,
|
|
although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like
|
|
it's ok because we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're
|
|
just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered
|
|
and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the
|
|
Gestapo was the people that they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide
|
|
is genocide!
|
|
|
|
Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so.
|
|
And it's a documented fact that the... 14 families there that own 60%
|
|
of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars - it's
|
|
called de-capitalization - and putting it in banks in Miami and
|
|
Switzerland. Mort Halper, in testifying to a committee of the
|
|
Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing politically
|
|
just by investing our money directly in the Miami banks in their names
|
|
and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be
|
|
better off.
|
|
|
|
Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action.
|
|
It's a classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981,
|
|
President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force
|
|
of contras, they're called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters
|
|
who were doing the torture and terror in Nicaragua that made the
|
|
Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out
|
|
the guard. We went back to create an army of these people. We are
|
|
killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in Nicaragua
|
|
but the Congress has leaked to the press - reported in the New York
|
|
Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today,
|
|
CIA covert actions going on around the world today.
|
|
|
|
You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners
|
|
of the troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua,
|
|
the Central American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA,
|
|
with its 50 de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to
|
|
keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to
|
|
hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on
|
|
arms....
|
|
|
|
The Victor Marquetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government
|
|
the right to prepublication censorship of books. They challenged 360
|
|
items in his 360 page book. He fought it in court, and eventually
|
|
they deleted some 60 odd items in his book.
|
|
|
|
The Frank Snep ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the
|
|
right to sue a government employee for damages. If s/he writes an
|
|
unauthorized account of the government - which means the people who
|
|
are involved in corruption in the government, who see it, who witness
|
|
it, like Frank Snep did, like I did - if they try to go public they
|
|
can now be punished in civil court. The government took $90,000 away
|
|
from Frank Snep, his profits from his book, and they've seized the
|
|
profits from my own book....
|
|
|
|
[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which
|
|
makes it a felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret
|
|
agents or to write about their activities in a way that would reveal
|
|
their identities. Now, what does this mean? In a debate in Congress
|
|
- this is very controversial - the supporters of this bill made it
|
|
clear.... If agents Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an
|
|
MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance's head away with LSD,
|
|
it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper
|
|
saying, `watch out for these 2 turkeys, they're federal agents and
|
|
they blew my loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a
|
|
felony what they had done because that's national security and none of
|
|
them were ever punished for those activities.
|
|
|
|
Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been
|
|
banging away at this one ever since. Proposing that every government
|
|
employee, for the rest of his or her life, would have to submit
|
|
anything they wrote to 6 committees of the government for censorship,
|
|
for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking out...
|
|
to keep the American people from knowing what the government is really
|
|
doing.
|
|
|
|
Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive Strikes' bill.
|
|
President Reagan, working through the Secretary of State Shultz...
|
|
almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide them with
|
|
the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists can do their
|
|
terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able to do
|
|
this in this country as well as overseas. It provides that the
|
|
secretary of state would put together a list of people that he
|
|
considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist
|
|
sympathizers. And if your name, or your organization, is put on this
|
|
list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you,
|
|
without any due process of the law and search warrants and trial by
|
|
jury, and all of that, with impunity.
|
|
|
|
Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New
|
|
York Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different
|
|
from Hitler's "night in fog" program', where the government had the
|
|
authority to haul people off at night. And they did so by the
|
|
thousands. And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have
|
|
persisted.... Shultz has said, `Yes, we will have to take action on
|
|
the basis of information that would never stand up in a court. And
|
|
yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But, we
|
|
must have this law because of the threat of international terrorism'.
|
|
|
|
Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'?
|
|
These things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in
|
|
terrorist actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now,
|
|
obviously that's terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways
|
|
with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier,
|
|
mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves.
|
|
Obviously 79 peoples' death is not enough reason to take away the
|
|
protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.
|
|
|
|
But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will
|
|
do the pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in
|
|
the defense department.
|
|
|
|
They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs
|
|
under the McLaren act after World War II, to detain aliens and
|
|
dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done
|
|
with the Japanese people during World War II. They're building 10
|
|
more, and army camps, and the... executive memos about these things
|
|
say it's for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency....
|
|
|
|
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius
|
|
Guiffrida, a friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going about the country
|
|
lobbying and demanding that he be given authority, in the times of
|
|
national emergency, to declare martial law, and establish a curfew,
|
|
and gun down people who violate the curfew... in the United States.
|
|
|
|
And then there's Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement
|
|
officer in the land, President Reagan's closest friend, going around
|
|
telling us that the constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech
|
|
and press, and due process of the law, and assembly.
|
|
|
|
What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're
|
|
determined to take us into a war if we'll permit it... is the Reagan
|
|
revolution.... So he's getting himself some laws so when he puts in
|
|
the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of the American people,
|
|
and put people in jail, and kick in their doors, and kill them if they
|
|
don't like what he's doing....
|
|
|
|
The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away
|
|
our freedoms because they have a charming smile and they were nice
|
|
movie stars one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist
|
|
on our freedoms?' It's up to us - you and I can watch this history
|
|
play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.
|
|
|
|
PART II
|
|
|
|
CIA COVERT OPERATIONS IN CENTRAL AMERICA, CIA MANIPULATION
|
|
OF THE PRESS, CIA EXPERIMENTATION ON THE U.S. PUBLIC
|
|
|
|
I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not
|
|
submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow
|
|
off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our
|
|
censorship laws....
|
|
|
|
In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was
|
|
like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry
|
|
Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA,
|
|
making important decisions and my job was to put it all together and
|
|
make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a
|
|
covert action being done....
|
|
|
|
When the world's gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game
|
|
where everything's owned and nobody can make any progress, the way
|
|
they erased the board and started over has been to have big world
|
|
wars, and erase countries and bomb cities and bomb banks and then
|
|
start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now because of
|
|
all these 52,000 nuclear weapons....
|
|
|
|
The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing
|
|
further almost one third of the countries in the world today....
|
|
|
|
By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public
|
|
record. The 50 covert actions - these are secret, but that has been
|
|
leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I
|
|
urge you not to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here
|
|
and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously
|
|
I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is
|
|
to educate yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don't do
|
|
politics will be done'. If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the
|
|
truth, dig it out from the records, go and see for yourself, then your
|
|
mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized
|
|
and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do....
|
|
|
|
Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous
|
|
one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in
|
|
Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in
|
|
Nicaragua....
|
|
|
|
[When the U.S. doesn't like a government], they send the CIA in,
|
|
with its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to
|
|
tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a
|
|
technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can
|
|
make the government come to the U.S.'s terms, or the government will
|
|
collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the
|
|
thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.
|
|
|
|
Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly
|
|
textbook-ish. What we're talking about is going in and deliberately
|
|
creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market,
|
|
where children can't go to school, where women are terrified inside
|
|
their homes as well as outside their homes, where government
|
|
administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the
|
|
hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where
|
|
international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.
|
|
If you ask the state department today what is their official
|
|
explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it's to attack
|
|
economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of
|
|
course, they're attacking a lot more.
|
|
|
|
To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this
|
|
force of Somoza's ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the
|
|
counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist
|
|
until we allocated money. We've armed them, put uniforms on their
|
|
backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in,
|
|
medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we've
|
|
sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have
|
|
systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges,
|
|
government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so
|
|
the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The
|
|
farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at
|
|
all.
|
|
|
|
If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in
|
|
this, and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual', that
|
|
they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a
|
|
paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society
|
|
to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas
|
|
tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the
|
|
sewage so it won't work, things you can do to make a society simply
|
|
cease to function.
|
|
|
|
Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious
|
|
workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government
|
|
administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced
|
|
in 1984. It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address
|
|
it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use
|
|
terror. This is a technique that they're using to traumatize the
|
|
society so that it can't function.
|
|
|
|
I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to
|
|
understand what your government and its agents are doing. They go
|
|
into villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to
|
|
watch they castrate the father, they peel the skin off his face, they
|
|
put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced
|
|
to watch they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And
|
|
sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these
|
|
things to the children.
|
|
|
|
This is nobody's propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American
|
|
witnesses for peace who have gone down there and they have filmed and
|
|
photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've
|
|
happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women
|
|
and children. These are the activities done by these contras. The
|
|
contras are the people president Reagan calls `freedom fighters'. He
|
|
says they're the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the
|
|
whole world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.
|
|
|
|
Read Contra Terror by Reed Brodie [1], former assistant Attorney
|
|
General of New York State. Read The Contras by Dieter Eich. [4] Read
|
|
With the Contras by Christopher Dickey. [2] This is a main-line
|
|
journalist, down there on a grant with the Council on Foreign
|
|
Relations, a slightly to the right of the middle of the road
|
|
organization. He writes a book that sets a pox on both your houses,
|
|
and then he accounts about going in on patrol with the contras, and
|
|
describes their activities. Read Witness for Peace: What We have Seen
|
|
and Heard. Read the Lawyer's Commission on Human Rights. Read The
|
|
Violations of War on Both Sides by the Americas Watch. [15] And there
|
|
are many, many more documentations of details, of names, of the
|
|
incidents that have happened.
|
|
|
|
Part of a de-stabilization is propaganda, to dis-credit the targeted
|
|
government. This one actually began under Jimmy Carter. He
|
|
authorized the CIA to go in and try to make the Sandinistas look to be
|
|
evil. So in 1979 [when] they came in to power, immediately we were
|
|
trying to cast them as totalitarian, evil, threatening Marxists.
|
|
While they abolished the death sentence, while they released 8,000
|
|
national guardsmen that they had in their custody that they could have
|
|
kept in prison, they said `no. Unless we have evidence of individual
|
|
crimes, we're not going to hold someone in prison just because they
|
|
were associated with the former administration.' While they set out
|
|
to launch a literacy campaign to teach the people to read and write,
|
|
which is something that the dictator Somoza, and us supporting him,
|
|
had never bothered to get around to doing. While they set out to
|
|
build 2,500 clinics to give the country something resembling a public
|
|
health policy, and access to medicines, we began to label them as
|
|
totalitarian dictators, and to attack them in the press, and to work
|
|
with this newspaper `La Prensa', which - it's finally come out and
|
|
been admitted, in Washington - the U.S. government is funding: a
|
|
propaganda arm.
|
|
|
|
[Reagan and the State dept. have] been claiming they're building a
|
|
war machine that threatens the stability of Central America. Now the
|
|
truth is, this small, poor country has been attacked by the world's
|
|
richest country under conditions of war, for the last 5 years. Us and
|
|
our army - the death they have sustained, the action they have
|
|
suffered - it makes it a larger war proportionally than the Vietnam
|
|
war was to the U.S. In addition to the contra activities, we've had
|
|
U.S. Navy ships supervising the mining of harbors, we've sent planes
|
|
in and bombed the capital, we've had U.S. military planes flying
|
|
wing-tip to wing-tip over the country, photographing it, aerial
|
|
reconnaissance. They don't have any missiles or jets they can send up
|
|
to chase us off. We are at war with them. The have not retaliated
|
|
yet with any kind of war action against us, but we do not give them
|
|
credit with having the right to defend themselves. So we claim that
|
|
the force they built up, which is obviously purely defensive, is an
|
|
aggressive force that threatens the stability of all of Central
|
|
America.
|
|
|
|
We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing
|
|
from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity,
|
|
President Reagan hasn't been able to show the world one shred of
|
|
evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.
|
|
|
|
We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International
|
|
observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have
|
|
witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were
|
|
fraudulent, they were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system.
|
|
Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were
|
|
models of democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then the
|
|
truth came out about that one. And we learned that the CIA had spent
|
|
2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of candidates -
|
|
Duarte - would win. They did everything, we're told, by one of their
|
|
spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes....
|
|
|
|
I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse
|
|
Helmes] calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn't
|
|
like, he doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and
|
|
embarrass the U.S.
|
|
|
|
We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to
|
|
finance their revolution. This doesn't make sense. We're at war with
|
|
them, we're dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union,
|
|
flying things back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket
|
|
ships watching everything that flies out of that country, and into it.
|
|
How are they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into
|
|
the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans, on these bases
|
|
in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training camps in
|
|
Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several times a week.
|
|
|
|
Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that
|
|
the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK.
|
|
Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA
|
|
was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich,
|
|
smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their
|
|
intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin
|
|
out of Laos. We replaced them - we put Air America, the CIA
|
|
subsidiary - it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid,
|
|
which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first
|
|
target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If
|
|
anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it's the contras. Now i've
|
|
been saying that since the state department started waving this red
|
|
herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice
|
|
President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were
|
|
smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain't true, the contras are
|
|
smuggling drugs'.
|
|
|
|
We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's
|
|
happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism' we
|
|
call it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television
|
|
and says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training terrorists'. We
|
|
blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today,
|
|
and there is misery, because the world's richest nation has set out to
|
|
create conditions of misery, and obviously we're bound to have some
|
|
effect. The misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it's the
|
|
result of our destabilization program. And despite that, and despite
|
|
some grumbling in the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got
|
|
a much higher percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who's
|
|
supposed to be so popular in this country. And all observers are
|
|
saying that people are still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.
|
|
|
|
Now it gets tricky. We're saying that the justification for more
|
|
aid, possibly for an invasion of the country - and mind you, president
|
|
Reagan has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense
|
|
Weinberger began to say that it's inevitable - we claim that the
|
|
justification is that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million
|
|
dollars in arms in military to make it its big client state, the
|
|
Soviet bastion in this hemisphere. And that's true. They do have a
|
|
lot of arms in there now. But the question is, how did they get
|
|
invited in? You have to ask yourself, what's the purpose of this
|
|
destabilization program? For this I direct you back to the Newsweek
|
|
article in Sept. 1981, where they announce the fact that the CIA was
|
|
beginning to put together this force of Somoza's ex-guard. Newsweek
|
|
described it as `the only truly evil, totally unacceptable factor in
|
|
the Nicaraguan equation'. They noted that neither the white house nor
|
|
the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance of winning. So then
|
|
they asked, rhetorically, `what's the point?' and they concluded that
|
|
the point is that by attacking the country, you can force the
|
|
Sandinistas into a more radical position, from which you have more
|
|
ammunition to attack them.
|
|
|
|
And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet
|
|
aid to defend themselves from the attack from the world's richest
|
|
country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say, `see?
|
|
they have all the Soviet aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's the game
|
|
plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they
|
|
have been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped by the
|
|
will of the American people so far, but they're working harder than
|
|
ever to engineer their war there.
|
|
|
|
Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with
|
|
Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice. Like the Church
|
|
committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had
|
|
run several hundred a year, and we'd been in the business of running
|
|
covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're talking about 10
|
|
to 20 thousand covert actions.
|
|
|
|
CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are not
|
|
so bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a politician some money
|
|
so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false
|
|
speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be
|
|
non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in other countries'
|
|
affairs, raising the question of whether or not we are going to have a
|
|
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going
|
|
to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and
|
|
brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?
|
|
|
|
But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot
|
|
about a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony by CIA
|
|
directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case
|
|
officers, documents gotten out of the government under the freedom of
|
|
information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning
|
|
journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and read
|
|
from these things, classic CIA operations that we know about, some of
|
|
them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the
|
|
Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay - the CIA
|
|
organized the overthrow of constitutional democracies. Read the book
|
|
Covert Action: 35 years of Deception by the journalist Godswood. [6]
|
|
Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was
|
|
being grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the
|
|
democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador
|
|
Allende had been killed. And he said, `The issues are much too
|
|
important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves'.
|
|
|
|
We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're doing
|
|
against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean war,
|
|
where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in
|
|
Vietnam, very much like the one that we're running in Nicaragua today,
|
|
that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, The
|
|
Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14] Read Deadly
|
|
Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the
|
|
Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large
|
|
standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo,
|
|
Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic
|
|
minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in
|
|
Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Mesquite indians, to
|
|
give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight
|
|
against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea,
|
|
Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death
|
|
squads.
|
|
|
|
In El Salvador specifically, under the `Alliance for Progress' in
|
|
the early 1960's, the CIA helped put together the treasury police.
|
|
These are the people that haul people out at night today, and run
|
|
trucks over their heads. These are the people that the Catholic
|
|
church tells us, have killed something over 50,000 civilians in the
|
|
last 5 years. And we have testimony before our Congress that as late
|
|
as 1982, leaders of the treasury police were still on the CIA payroll.
|
|
|
|
Then you have the `Public Safety Program.' I have to take just a
|
|
minute on this one because it's a very important principle involved
|
|
that we must understand, if we're to understand ourselves and the
|
|
world that we live in. In this one, the CIA was working with police
|
|
forces throughout Latin America for about 26 years, teaching them how
|
|
to wrap up subversive networks by capturing someone and interrogating
|
|
them, torturing them, and then getting names and arresting the others
|
|
and going from there. Now, this was such a brutal and such a bloody
|
|
operation, that Amnesty International began to complain and publish
|
|
reports. Then there were United Nations hearings. Then eventually
|
|
our Congress was forced to yield to international pressure and
|
|
investigate it, and they found the horror that was being done, and by
|
|
law they forced it to stop. You can read these reports -- the Amnesty
|
|
International findings, and our own Congressional hearings.
|
|
|
|
These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according to
|
|
CIA's estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the Angolan operation
|
|
that I was sitting on in Washington, managing the task force. They
|
|
add up. We'll never know how many people have been killed in them.
|
|
Obviously a lot. Obviously at least a million. 800,000 in Indonesia
|
|
alone. Undoubtedly the minimum figure has to be 3 million. Then you
|
|
add in a million people killed in Korea, 2 million people killed in
|
|
the Vietnam war, and you're obviously getting into gross millions of
|
|
people...
|
|
|
|
We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families out
|
|
at night and castrate the father with the children watching, because
|
|
they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute teams
|
|
right back into our country and do the same thing to us - they're not
|
|
scared of us. For slightly different reasons, but also obvious
|
|
reasons, we don't do these things in England, or France, or Germany,
|
|
or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan. What comes out at you immediately is
|
|
that these 1 to 3 million direct victims, the dead, and in these other
|
|
wars, they're people of the third world, they're citizens of countries
|
|
that are too small to defend them from United States brutality and
|
|
aggression. They're people of the Metumba mountains of the Congo, and
|
|
the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now the hills of northern Nicaragua
|
|
- 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian army advisors in
|
|
Nicaragua. We are not killing Cuban advisors. We're not killing very
|
|
many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in Nicaragua are
|
|
peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA's chosen
|
|
battlefield. Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far, far
|
|
more Catholics than anything else.
|
|
|
|
Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua, they
|
|
do not come back to the U.S. and click their heels and suddenly become
|
|
responsible citizens. They see themselves - they have been
|
|
functioning above the laws, of God, and the laws of man - they've come
|
|
back to this country, and they've continued their operations as far as
|
|
they can get by with them. And we have abundant documentation of that
|
|
as well. The MH-Chaos program, exposed in the late 60's and shut
|
|
down, re-activated by President Reagan to a degree - we don't have the
|
|
details yet - in which they were spending a billion dollars to
|
|
manipulate U.S. student, and labor organizations. The MK-ultra
|
|
program. For 20 years, working through over 200 medical schools and
|
|
mental hospitals, including Harvard medical school, Georgetown, some
|
|
of the biggest places we've got, to experiment on American citizens
|
|
with disease, and drugs.
|
|
|
|
They dragged a barge through San Francisco bay, leaking a virus, to
|
|
measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched a whooping
|
|
cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the
|
|
community if all the kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the 2
|
|
or 3 with weak constitutions that might die in the process. They put
|
|
light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo -
|
|
make people have double vision, so you couldn't see straight - and hid
|
|
cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when the
|
|
trains are zipping past - if everybody has vertigo and they can't see
|
|
straight and they're bumping into each other.
|
|
|
|
Colonel White - oh yes, and I can't not mention the disease
|
|
experimentations - the use of deadly diseases. We launched - when we
|
|
were destabilizing Cuba for 7 years - we launched the swine fever
|
|
epidemic, in the hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs -
|
|
a virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.
|
|
|
|
I'm not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence, that
|
|
there is any truth or indication to the rumor that the CIA and its
|
|
experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do have it
|
|
documented that the CIA has been experimenting on people, with
|
|
viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running around
|
|
in society. And it has to make you wonder, and it has to make you
|
|
worry.
|
|
|
|
Colonel White wrote from retirement - he was the man who was in
|
|
charge of this macabre program - he wrote, `I toiled whole-heartedly
|
|
in the vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could a
|
|
red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage
|
|
with the blessings of the all highest?' Now that program, the
|
|
MK-ultra program, was eventually exposed by the press in 1972,
|
|
investigated by the Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You can
|
|
dig up the Congressional record and read it for yourself.
|
|
|
|
There's one book called `In Search of the Manchurian Candidate'.
|
|
It's written by John Marks, based on 14,000 documents gotten out of
|
|
the government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for
|
|
yourselves. The thing was shut down but not one CIA case officer who
|
|
was involved was in any way punished. Not one case officer involved
|
|
in these experimentations on the American public, lost a single
|
|
paycheck for what they had done.
|
|
|
|
The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred
|
|
journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business, to
|
|
pump its propaganda stories into our media, to teach us to hate Fidel
|
|
Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, and the Chinese, and whomever. The latest
|
|
flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a half ago. Lesley
|
|
Gelp, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having
|
|
been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in
|
|
Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create
|
|
sympathy for the neutron bomb.
|
|
|
|
The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books,
|
|
paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in
|
|
it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the
|
|
royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A
|
|
professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from
|
|
the CIA to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand
|
|
professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its
|
|
operations on campuses and build files on students.
|
|
|
|
And then we have evidence - now, which has been hard to collect in
|
|
the past but we knew it was happening - of CIA agents participating,
|
|
trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders,
|
|
traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and
|
|
pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on
|
|
Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.' A CIA agent going on
|
|
television, trying to manipulate our elections.
|
|
|
|
All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.
|
|
|
|
In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet
|
|
take-over, we say. Another big operation in which we said the same
|
|
thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the
|
|
same thing - Cubans and Soviets.
|
|
|
|
Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight
|
|
because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a
|
|
copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you,
|
|
however - please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book because
|
|
the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a
|
|
copy of the book you'll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it
|
|
out from your library!
|
|
|
|
If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all
|
|
your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to
|
|
just sort of put a copy down in your belt...
|
|
|
|
I don't know what the solution is when a society gets into
|
|
censorship, government censorship, but that's what we're in now. Do
|
|
the rules change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from
|
|
the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone
|
|
to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing -
|
|
for having violated our censorship laws....
|
|
|
|
So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying to
|
|
us, running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up for our next war, the
|
|
Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it, President
|
|
Reagan has a fixation on Nicaragua. He came into office saying that
|
|
we shouldn't be afraid of war, saying we have to face and erase the
|
|
scars of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, `We will do whatever is
|
|
necessary to reverse the situation in Nicaragua', meaning get rid of
|
|
the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRoque, at the Center for Defense
|
|
Information in Washington, says this is the most elaborately prepared
|
|
invasion that the U.S. has ever done. At least that he's witnessed in
|
|
his 40 years of association with our military.
|
|
|
|
We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big Pine
|
|
I, Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenada, Big Pine III. We have troops
|
|
right now in Honduras preparing. We've built 12 bases, including 8
|
|
airstrips. Obviously we don't need 8 airstrips in Honduras for any
|
|
purpose, except to support the invasion of Nicaragua. We've built
|
|
radar stations around, to survey and watch. Some of these ventures
|
|
have been huge ones. Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000 troops, rehearsing
|
|
the invasion of Nicaragua.
|
|
|
|
And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of these
|
|
evil Communist dictators in Managua, just two days drive from
|
|
Harlington, Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way). I saw
|
|
an ad on TV just two days ago in which they said that it was just two
|
|
hours from Managua to Texas. All of this getting us ready for the
|
|
invasion of Nicaragua, for our next war.
|
|
|
|
Most of the people - 75% of the people - are polled as being against
|
|
this action. However, President Eisenhower said, `The people of the
|
|
world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are
|
|
going to have to give in and give it to them'. But to date, the
|
|
leaders never have, they've always been able to outwit the people, us,
|
|
and get us into the wars when they've chosen to do so.
|
|
|
|
People ask, how is this possible? I get this all the time....
|
|
Americans are decent people. They are nice people. And they're
|
|
insulated in the worlds that they live in, and they don't understand
|
|
and we don't read our history. History is the history of war. Of
|
|
leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young
|
|
men off to fight.
|
|
|
|
In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record. We
|
|
have over 200 incidents in which we put our troops into other
|
|
countries to force them to our will. Now we're being prepared to hate
|
|
the Sandinistas. The leaders are doing exactly what they have done
|
|
time and again throughout history. In the past we were taught to hate
|
|
and fight the Seminole Indians, after the leaders decided to annex
|
|
Florida. To hate and fight the Cherokee Indians after they found gold
|
|
in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas, New
|
|
Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.
|
|
|
|
In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to
|
|
orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got people worked up,
|
|
they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people angry
|
|
enough that we could go in and do....
|
|
|
|
We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which
|
|
the people resisted. But once again, we haven't read our history.
|
|
Kate Richards-O'Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the
|
|
U.S. are nothing but brutesalles, producing sons to be put in the
|
|
army, to be made into fertilizer'. She was jailed for 5 years for
|
|
anti-war talk.
|
|
|
|
The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it
|
|
was a tragic mistake.... 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2
|
|
million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound
|
|
up actually stronger in the Pacific basin.
|
|
|
|
You look around this society today to see if there's any evidence of
|
|
our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face....
|
|
|
|
'Join the Army. Be all that you can be'. Now if there was truth in
|
|
advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of
|
|
young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their
|
|
intestines wrapped around their necks because that's what war is
|
|
really all about.
|
|
|
|
If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government,
|
|
they would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of whom died violent
|
|
deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the
|
|
fighting itself.
|
|
|
|
Then you have President Reagan.... He talks about the glory of war,
|
|
but you have to ask yourself, where was he when wars were being fought
|
|
that he was young enough to fight in them? World War II, and the
|
|
Korean war. Where he was was in Hollywood, making films, where the
|
|
blood was catsup, and you could wash it off and go out to dinner
|
|
afterwards....
|
|
|
|
Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight in a
|
|
war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running sloppy, illegal,
|
|
un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you'll forgive
|
|
my egotism, at that time I was running professional breaking and
|
|
entering operations....
|
|
|
|
What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester
|
|
Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft deferment for a
|
|
physical disability, and taught physical education in a girls' school
|
|
in Switzerland during the war.
|
|
|
|
Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that `you can
|
|
always call cruise missiles back'.... Now, you can call back a B-52,
|
|
and you can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile is
|
|
different.... When it lands, it goes boom!. And I would prefer that
|
|
the man with the finger on the button could understand the difference.
|
|
This is the man that calls the MX a peace-maker. This is the man
|
|
who's gone on television and told us that nuclear war could be
|
|
winnable. This is the man who's gone on television and proposed that
|
|
we might want to drop demonstration [atom] bombs in Europe to show
|
|
people that we're serious people. This is the man who likens the
|
|
Contras to the moral equivalents of our own founding fathers. This is
|
|
the man who says South Africa is making progress on racial equality.
|
|
This is the man who says that the Sandinistas are hunting down and
|
|
hounding and persecuting Jews in Nicaragua. And the Jewish leaders go
|
|
on TV the next day in this country and say there are 5 Jewish families
|
|
in Nicaragua, and they're not having any problems at all. This is the
|
|
man who says that they're financing their revolution by smuggling
|
|
drugs into the U.S. And the DEA says, `It ain't true, it's president
|
|
Reagan's Contras that are doing it'....
|
|
|
|
[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said `If there has
|
|
to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with'. Now you have to think
|
|
about this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing a
|
|
bloodbath of our own youth. There was an outcry of the press, so 3
|
|
days later he said it again to make sure no one had misunderstood him.
|
|
|
|
Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read The Book of
|
|
Quotes [12]. Read On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency [3] by Ronnie
|
|
Dugger. It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter that
|
|
President Reagan has a fixation on Armageddon. The Village Voice 18
|
|
months ago published an article citing the 11 times that President
|
|
Reagan publicly has talked about the fact that we are all living out
|
|
Armageddon today....
|
|
|
|
[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man
|
|
that preaches that we should get on our knees and beg for God to send
|
|
the rapture down. Hell's fires on earth so the chosen can go up on
|
|
high and all the other people can burn in hell's fires on earth.
|
|
President Reagan sees himself as playing the role of the greatest
|
|
leader of all times forever. Leading us into Armageddon. As he goes
|
|
out at the end of his long life, we'll all go out with him....
|
|
|
|
Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we
|
|
destabilizing a third of the countries in the world today when there's
|
|
so much instability and misery already? Why are our leaders now
|
|
taking us into another war? Why are we systematically taught to hate
|
|
and fight other people?
|
|
|
|
What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The
|
|
easiest... buttons to punch are the buttons of macho, aggression,
|
|
paranoia, hate, anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and
|
|
that's just 2 hours from San Diego, CA. This gets people excited,
|
|
they don't think. It's the pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor.
|
|
When you get people worked up to hate, they'll let you spend huge
|
|
amounts of money on arms.
|
|
|
|
Read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. [11] Read The Permanent War
|
|
Complex by Seymour Melman. [10] CIA covert actions have the function
|
|
of keeping the world hostile and unstable....
|
|
|
|
We can't take care of the poor, we can't take care of the old, but
|
|
we can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize
|
|
Nicaragua....
|
|
|
|
Why arms instead of schools? .... They can make gigantic profits off
|
|
the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and the paranoia, and
|
|
the secrecy. And that's why they're committed to building more and
|
|
more and more weapons, is because they're committed to making a
|
|
profit. And that's what the propaganda, and that's what the hysteria
|
|
is all about. Now people say, `What can I do?'....
|
|
|
|
The youth did rise up and stop the Vietnam war....
|
|
|
|
We have to join hands with the people in England, and France, and
|
|
Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and China, and India - the
|
|
countries that have the bomb, and the others that are trying to get
|
|
it. And give our leaders no choice. They have to find some other way
|
|
to do business other than to motivate us through hate and paranoia and
|
|
anger and killing, or we'll find other leaders to run the country.
|
|
|
|
Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I've heard her
|
|
say, very effectively, `Tell people to get out and get to work on the
|
|
problem.... You'll feel better'....
|
|
|
|
'What can I do?'.... If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see for
|
|
yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for yourself. Go to
|
|
Pantex on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there. The
|
|
place where we make 10 nose-cones a day, 70 a week, year in and year
|
|
out. He [Admiral LaRock] said, `I'd tell them, if they feel
|
|
comfortable lying down in front of trucks with bombs on them, to lie
|
|
down in front of trucks with bombs on them.' But he said, `I'd tell
|
|
them that they can't wait. They've got to start tomorrow, today, and
|
|
do it, what they can, every day of their lives'.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[1] Reed Brody.
|
|
Contra Terror.
|
|
??, .
|
|
|
|
|
|
[2] Christopher Dickey.
|
|
With the Contras.
|
|
??, .
|
|
|
|
|
|
[3] Dugger, Ronnie.
|
|
On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency.
|
|
McGraw-Hill, 1983.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[4] Eich, Dieter.
|
|
The Contras: Interviews with Anti-Sandinistas.
|
|
Synthesis, 1985.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[5] Kinzer, Stephan and Stephen Schlesinger.
|
|
Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in
|
|
Guatemala.
|
|
Doubleday, 1983.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[6] Godswood, Roy (editor).
|
|
Covert Actions: 35 Years of Deception.
|
|
Transaction, 1980.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[7] Kwitny, Jonathon.
|
|
Endless Enemies: America's Worldwide War Against It's Own Best
|
|
Interests.
|
|
Congdon and Weed, 1984.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[8] LaFeber, Walter.
|
|
Inevitable Revolutions; The United States in Central America.
|
|
Norton, 1984.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[9] McGehee, Ralph.
|
|
Deadly Deceits: My Twenty-Five Years in the CIA.
|
|
Sheridan Square, 1983.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[10] Melman, Seymour.
|
|
The Permanent War Complex.
|
|
Simon and Shuster, 1974.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[11] Mills, C. Wright.
|
|
The Power Elite.
|
|
Oxford, 1956.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[12] ??
|
|
The Book of Quotes.
|
|
McGraw-Hill, 1979.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[13] Stockwell, John.
|
|
In Search of Enemies.
|
|
Norton, 1978.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[14] Stone, I.F.
|
|
Hidden History of the Korean War.
|
|
Monthly Review, 1969.
|
|
|
|
|
|
[15] The Americas Watch.
|
|
The Violations of War on Both Sides.
|
|
??, .
|