THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:
part II
CIA COVERT OPERATIONS IN CENTRAL AMERICA, CIA
MANIPULATION OF THE PRESS, CIA EXPERIMENTATION ON THE U.S. PUBLIC
by John Stockwell
a lecture given in October, 1987
John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to
leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering
post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret
war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit
before he resigned. Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies, published
by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.
*****
I 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.
They have not retaliated yet with any kind of war action against
us, but we do not give them credit with having the right to defend
themselves. So we claim that the force they built up, which is
obviously purely defensive, is an aggressive force that threatens
the stability of all of Central America.
We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing
from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity,
there is no evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El
Salvador.
We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International
observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have
witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were
fraudulent, they were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system.
Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were
models of democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then
the truth came out about that one. And we learned that the CIA
had spent 2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of
candidates - Duarte - would win. They did everything, we're told,
by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes....
I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse
Helmes] calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn't
like, he doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets
and embarrass the U.S.
We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to
finance their revolution. This doesn't make sense. We're at war
with them, we're dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet
Union, flying things back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes
and picket ships watching everything that flies out of that country,
and into it. How are they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling
planes into the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans,
on these bases in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training
camps in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several times a week.
Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say
that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ
THE BOOK. Read The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20
years the CIA was helping the Kuomantang to finance itself and
then to get rich smuggling heroin. When we took over from the
French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself
by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them - we put
Air America, the CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with crates
marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back
out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin
was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling
drugs, it's the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state
department started waving this red herring around a couple of
years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said
that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and
the DEA said, `it ain't true, the contras are smuggling drugs'.
We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's
happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism'
we call it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on
television and says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training
terrorists'. We blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists
in Nicaragua today, and there is misery, because the world's richest
nation has set out to create conditions of misery, and obviously
we're bound to have some effect. The misery is not the fault of
the Sandinistas, it's the result of our destabilization program.
And despite that, and despite some grumbling in the country, the
Sandinistas in their elections got a much higher percentage of
the vote than President Reagan did, who's supposed to be so popular
in this country. And all observers are saying that people are
still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.
Now it gets tricky. We're saying that the justification for more
aid, possibly for an invasion of the country - and mind you, president
Reagan has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense
Weinberger began to say that it's inevitable - we claim that the
justification is that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million
dollars in arms in military to make it its big client state, the
Soviet bastion in this hemisphere. And that's true. They do have
a lot of arms in there now. But the question is, how did they
get invited in? You have to ask yourself, what's the purpose of
this destabilization program? For this I direct you back to the
Newsweek article in Sept. 1981, where they announce the fact that
the CIA was beginning to put together this force of Somoza's ex-guard.
Newsweek described it as `the only truly evil, totally unacceptable
factor in
the Nicaraguan equation'. They noted that neither the white house
nor the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance of winning.
So then they asked, rhetorically, `what's the point?' and they
concluded that the point is that by attacking the country, you
can force the Sandinistas into a more radical position, from which
you have more ammunition to attack them.
And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet
aid to defend themselves from the attack from the world's richest
country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say,
`see? they have all the Soviet aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's
the game plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua,
they have been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped
by the will of the American people so far, but they're working
harder than ever to engineer their war there.
Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with
Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice. Like the Church
committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that
we had run several hundred a year, and we'd been in the business
of running covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're
talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions.
CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are
not so bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a politician some
money so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one,
or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that.
It may be non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in
other countries' affairs, raising the question of whether or not
we are going to have a
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it
going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate
and brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?
But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a
lot about a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony
by CIA directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written
by CIA case officers, documents gotten out of the government under
the freedom of information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning
journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and
read from these things, classic CIA operations that we know about,
some of them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana,
Chile, the Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay
- the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracies.
Read the book Covert Action: 35 years of Deception by the journalist
Godswood. [6]
Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he
was being grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the
democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador
Allende had been killed. And he said, `The issues are much too
important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves'.
We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're
doing against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean
war, where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action
in Vietnam, very much like the one that we're running in Nicaragua
today, that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the
book, The Hidden History of the Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14]
Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9] for the Vietnam story.
In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the
CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the CIA armed
and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first
thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element
of the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms,
so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua.
In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the
CIA helped form and train the death
squads.
In El Salvador specifically, under the `Alliance for Progress'
in the early 1960's, the CIA helped put together the treasury
police. These are the people that haul people out at night today,
and run trucks over their heads. These are the people that the
Catholic church tells us, have killed something over 50,000 civilians
in the last 5 years. And we have testimony before our Congress
that as late as 1982, leaders of the treasury police were still
on the CIA payroll.
Then you have the `Public Safety Program.' I have to take just
a minute on this one because it's a very important principle involved
that we must understand, if we're to understand ourselves and
the world that we live in. In this one, the CIA was working with
policeforces throughout Latin America for about 26 years, teaching
them how to wrap up subversive networks by capturing someone and
interrogating them, torturing them, and then getting names and
arresting the others and going from there. Now, this was such
a brutal and such a bloody operation, that Amnesty International
began to complain and publish reports. Then there were United
Nations hearings. Then eventually our Congress was forced to yield
to international pressure and investigate it, and they found the
horror that was being done, and by law they forced it to stop.
You can read these reports -- the Amnesty International findings,
and our own Congressional hearings.
These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according
to CIA's estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the Angolan
operation that I was sitting on in Washington, managing the task
force. They add up. We'll never know how many people have been
killed in them. Obviously a lot. Obviously at least a million.
800,000 in Indonesia alone. Undoubtedly the minimum figure has
to be 3 million. Then you add in a million people killed in Korea,
2 million people killed in the Vietnam war, and you're obviously
getting into gross millions of people...
We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families
out at night and castrate the father with the children watching,
because they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute
teams right back into our country and do the same thing to us
- they're not scared of us. For slightly different reasons, but
also obvious reasons, we don't do these things in England, or
France, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan. What comes
out at you immediately is that these 1 to 3 million direct victims,
the dead, and in these other wars, they're people of the third
world. They're people of the Metumba mountains of the Congo, and
the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now the hills of northern Nicaragua
- 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian army advisors
in Nicaragua. We are not killing Cuban advisors. We're not killing
very many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in Nicaragua
are peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA's chosen
battlefield. Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far,
far more Catholics than anything else.
Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua,
they do not come back to the U.S. and click their heels and suddenly
become responsible citizens. They see themselves - they have been
functioning above the laws, of God, and the laws of man - they've
come back to this country, and they've continued their operations
as far as they can get by with them. And we have abundant documentation
of that as well. The MH-Chaos program, exposed in the late 60's
and shut down, re-activated by President Reagan to a degree -
we don't have the details yet - in which they were spending a
billion dollars to manipulate U.S. student, and labor organizations.
The MK-ultra program. For 20 years, working through over 200 medical
schools and mental hospitals, including Harvard medical school,
Georgetown, some of the biggest places we've got, to experiment
on American citizens with disease, and drugs.
They dragged a barge through San Francisco bay, leaking a virus,
to measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched
a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what
it would do to the community if all the kids had whooping cough.
Tough shit about the 2 or 3 with weak constitutions that might
die in the process. They put light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan,
that would create vertigo - make people have double vision, so
you couldn't see straight - and hid
cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when
the trains are zipping past - if everybody has vertigo and they
can't see straight and they're bumping into each other.
Colonel White - oh yes, and I can't not mention the disease experimentations
- the use of deadly diseases. We launched - when we were destabilizing
Cuba for 7 years - we launched the swine fever epidemic, in the
hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs - a virus.
We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.
I'm not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence,
that there is any truth or indication to the rumor that the CIA
and its experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do
have it documented that the CIA has been experimenting on people,
with viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running
around in society. And it has to make you wonder, and it has to
make you worry.
Colonel White wrote from retirement - he was the man who was in
charge of this macabre program - he wrote, `I toiled whole-heartedly
in the vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could
a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage
with the blessings of the all highest?' Now that program, the
MK-ultra program, was eventually exposed by the press in 1972,
investigated by the Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You
can dig up the Congressional record and read it for yourself.
There's one book called `In Search of the Manchurian Candidate'.
It's written by John Marks, based on 14,000 documents gotten out
of the government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for
yourselves. The thing was shut down but not one CIA case officer
who was involved was in any way punished. Not one case officer
involved in these experimentations on the American public, lost
a single paycheck for what they had done.
The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred
journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business.
The latest flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a
half ago. Lesley Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times,
was exposed for having
been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists
in Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would
create sympathy for the neutron bomb.
The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000
books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda
lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the
book and gets the royalties. The latest flap we had about that
was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting
105,000 dollars from the CIA to write a book about the Middle
East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted
by the CIA to run its operations on campuses and build files on
students.
And then we have evidence - now, which has been hard to collect
in the past but we knew it was happening - of CIA agents participating,
trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling
this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing
a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That
man is a Sandinista lover.' A CIA agent going on television, trying
to manipulate our elections.
All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.
In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet take-over,
we say. Another big operation in which we said the same thing
was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same
thing - Cubans and Soviets.
Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight
because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get
a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge
you, however - please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book
because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if
you buy a copy of the book you'll be donating 65 cents to the
CIA. So check it out from your library!
If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with
all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you
want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt...
I don't know what the solution is when a society gets into censorship,
government censorship, but that's what we're in now. Do the rules
change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from the
CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone
to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of
thing - for having violated our censorship laws....
So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying
to us, running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up for our next
war, the Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it,
President Reagan has a fixation on Nicaragua. He came into office
saying that we shouldn't be afraid of war, saying we have to face
and erase the scars of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, `We will
do whatever is necessary to defeat the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRoque,
at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, says this
is the most elaborately prepared invasion that the U.S. has ever
done. At least that he's witnessed in his 40 years of association
with our military.
We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big
Pine I, Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenada, Big Pine III. We
have troops right now in Honduras preparing. We've built 12 bases,
including 8 airstrips. Obviously we don't need 8 airstrips in
Honduras for any purpose, except to support the invasion of Nicaragua.
We've built radar stations around, to survey and watch. Some of
these ventures have been huge ones. Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000
troops, rehearsing
the invasion of Nicaragua.
And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of
these evil Communist dictators in Managua, just two days drive
from Harlington, Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way).
I saw an ad on TV just two days ago in which they said that it
was just two hours from Managua to Texas. All of this getting
us ready for the invasion of Nicaragua, for our next war.
Most of the people - 75% of the people - are polled as being against
this action. However, President Eisenhower said, `The people of
the world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the
world are going to have to give in and give it to them'. But to
date, the leaders never have, they've always been able to outwit
the people, us, and get us into the wars when they've chosen to
do so.
People ask, how is this possible? I get this all the time....
Americans are decent people. They are nice people. And they're
insulated in the worlds that they live in, and they don't understand
and we don't read our history. History is the history of war.
Of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send
the young men off to fight.
In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record.
We have over 200 incidents in which we put our troops into other
countries to force them to our will. Now we're being prepared
to hate the Sandinistas. The leaders are doing exactly what they
have done time and again throughout history. In the past we were
taught to hate and fight the Seminole Indians, after the leaders
decided to annex Florida. To hate and fight the Cherokee Indians
after they found gold
in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas,
New Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.
In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to
orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got people worked
up, they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people
angry enough that we could go in and do....
We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which
the people resisted. But once again, we haven't read our history.
Kate Richards-O'Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women
of the U.S. are nothing but brutesalles, producing sons to be
put in the army, to be made into fertilizer'. She was jailed for
5 years for anti-war talk.
The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that
it was a tragic mistake.... 58,000 of our own young people were
killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our
position wound up actually stronger in the Pacific basin.
You look around this society today to see if there's any evidence
of our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face....
'Join the Army. Be all that you can be'. Now if there was truth
in advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds
of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men
with their intestines wrapped around their necks because that's
what war is really all about.
If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government,
they would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of whom died
violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam
then died in the fighting itself.
Then you have President Reagan.... He talks about the glory of
war, but you have to ask yourself, where was he when wars were
being fought that he was young enough to fight in them? World
War II, and the Korean war. Where he was was in Hollywood, making
films, where the blood was catsup, and you could wash it off and
go out to dinner afterwards....
Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight
in a war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running sloppy, illegal,
un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you'll forgive
my egotism, at that time I was running professional breaking and
entering operations....
What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester
Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft deferment for
a physical disability, and taught physical education in a girls'
school in Switzerland during the war.
Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that `you
can always call cruise missiles back'.... Now, you can call back
a B-52, and you can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile
is different.... When it lands, it goes boom!. And I would prefer
that the man with the finger on the button could understand the
difference. This is the man that calls the MX a peace-maker. This
is the man who's gone on television and told us that nuclear war
could be winnable. This is the man who's gone on television and
proposed that we might want to drop demonstration [atom] bombs
in Europe to show people that we're serious people. This is the
man who likens the Contras to the moral equivalents of our own
founding fathers. This is the man who says South Africa is making
progress on racial equality. This is the man who says that the
Sandinistas are hunting down and hounding and persecuting Jews
in Nicaragua. And the Jewish leaders go on TV the next day in
this country and say there are 5 Jewish families in Nicaragua,
and they're not having any problems at all. This is the man who
says that they're financing their revolution by smuggling drugs
into the U.S. And the DEA says, `It ain't true, it's president
Reagan's Contras that are doing it'....
[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said `If there
has to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with'. Now you have
to think about this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing
a bloodbath of our own youth. There was an outcry of the press,
so 3 days later he said it again to make sure no one had misunderstood
him.
Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read The Book of
Quotes [12]. Read On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency [3] by
Ronnie Dugger. It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter
that President Reagan has a fixation on Armageddon. The Village
Voice 18 months ago published an article citing the 11 times that
President Reagan publicly has talked about the fact that we are
all living out Armageddon today....
[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man
that preaches that we should get on our knees and beg for God
to send the rapture down. Hell's fires on earth so the chosen
can go up on high and all the other people can burn in hell's
fires on earth. President Reagan sees himself as playing the role
of the greatest leader of all times forever. Leading us into Armageddon.
As he goes out at the end of his long life, we'll all go out with
him....
Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we
destabilizing a third of the countries in the world today when
there's so much instability and misery already?
What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The easiest...
buttons to punch are the buttons of macho, aggression, paranoia,
hate, anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and that's
just 2 hours from San Diego, CA. This gets people excited, they
don't think. It's the pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor.
When you get people worked up to hate, they'll let you spend huge
amounts of money on arms.
Read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. [11] Read The Permanent
War Complex by Seymour Melman. [10] CIA covert actions have the
function of keeping the world hostile and unstable....
We can't take care of the poor, we can't take care of the old,
but we can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to
destabilize Nicaragua....
Why arms instead of schools? .... They can make gigantic profits
off the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and the paranoia,
and the secrecy. And that's why they're committed to building
more and more and more weapons, is because they're committed to
making a profit. And that's what the propaganda, and that's what
the hysteria is all about. Now people say, `What can I do?'....
The youth did rise up and stop the Vietnam war....
We have to join hands with the people in England, and France,
and Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and China, and
India - the countries that have the bomb, and the others that
are trying to get it. And give our leaders no choice. They have
to find some other way to do business other than to motivate us
through hate and paranoia and anger and killing, or we'll find
other leaders to run the country.
Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I've heard her
say, very effectively, `Tell people to get out and get to work
on the problem.... You'll feel better'....
'What can I do?'.... If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see
for yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for yourself.
Go to Pantex on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there.
The place where we make 10 nose-cones a day, 70 a week, year in
and year out. He [Admiral LaRock] said, `I'd tell them, if they
feel comfortable lying down in front of trucks with bombs on them,
to lie down in front of trucks with bombs on them.' But he said,
`I'd tell them that they can't wait. They've got to start tomorrow,
today, and do it, what they can, every day of their lives'.
*****
[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.
*****
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