THE INNER WORKINGS OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL AND THE CIA'S COVERT ACTIONS IN ANGOLA, CENTRAL AMERICA AND VIETNAM
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 did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee 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 the
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...
I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date
and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S.
Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this
operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would
meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to
distribute to our forces for us....
What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you
will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically
graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee
has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several
thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was
before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA
has been in business for a total of 37 years.
What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national security
syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press.
We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El
Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so
directly. I'm going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism; that
is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this,
we'll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.
Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another,
already in the public records. You can dig it all out for yourselves, without
coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of the
CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress,
hearings before the Senate Church committee, research by scholars, witness of
people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that we'll be
talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly
conservative. We come from South Texas, East Texas....
I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my background,
to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war, and I took the job
with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest of the
CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the struggle, to
project American values and save the world for our brand of democracy. And I
believed this. I went out and worked hard....
What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ... that nothing we
were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests very much. We
didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the heart
of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the point.
We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our
function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S.
in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry Devlin, a
famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed
in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa division Chief. I
talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving me an
explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make
any sense, we're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people,
and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S. look bad'.
And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, 'you're trying to
think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture,
who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and
the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura,
Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job, and wait
until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you
will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get
to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.'
And I said, 'Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very
powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it on
the American people, saying, 'if you knew what I know about the situation in
Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene.'
I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern. A
formal study was done in the State Department and published internally, highly
classified, called the Macomber [sp?] report, concluding that the CIA had no
business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that our
presence there was not justified, there were no national security interests that
the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn't need to
have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that time.
I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my
life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was
during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being
slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army
ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I
was up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next door, until the families
could come and claim them and take them away for burial.
I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I
reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house - when
I reported this to my bosses, they said, '(1). The post was too important to
close down. (2). They weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because
that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working
with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn't have the
stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.'
But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of
'moral fiber' to
handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn't get another good
job in the CIA, it would be a mark against my career.
So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn't
approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next
2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do this sort of thing
anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the
state department, works with the death squads.
They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually chopping
up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads.
The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people who run
the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the
swimming pool of the villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of
relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at
UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of
what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.
What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the
intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all
about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what I found was that
the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the
corruption in the South Vietnamese army....
Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army.
Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and
sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell
half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the communist forces - that was
their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the
trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.
And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was
no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of
proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a serious problem
because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a
big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the
dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam....
Angola
I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret war
[in Angola in 1975 and 1976].... and what I figured out was that in this job, I
would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this office that
Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the information
about Angola, about the whole world, and I would finally understand national
security. And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not
a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the question was
where did the U.S. government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for
myself in the next big secret war....
I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly
important, threatening information, threatening to our national security
interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA, but
I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national security
complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And so I took the job....
Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I had found
these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite frankly, was
fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were
making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean literally. Senior
ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every one of these
meetings....
You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you've got
Nicaragua.... the basic structure, all the way through including the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led the
way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the Soviets
and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the
fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't gone in first. We put arms
in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in
Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in
the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And
they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering
ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it was not a war that
we could fight. We didn't have interests there that should have been defended
that way.
There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three
movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one. The assistant
secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no bleeding-heart
liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the butcher of
Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work with whoever
eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in Luanda, Tom
Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the
country and the friendliest to the U.S.
We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and proceeded with
our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn't want to be
pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them, they
wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a
walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap
victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans
died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.
Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to
the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To just
about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I put
together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all
over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and military activities into
Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every way
they could to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets
introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over the
world.
Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous
statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and
the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the
conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization
of the conflict.
And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was
originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed this
thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the
press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the
phone and say, 'call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change
overnight, we'll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would
be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create
this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact
responding to our initiatives.
And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA
director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam - he gave
36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were doing
in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and
it's a felony to lie to the Congress.
He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely with
the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them,
giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were staying well
away from them. They were concerned about these white mercenaries that were
appearing in Angola, a very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black
African country, to help you impose your will on that black African country by
killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might
be involved in that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.
We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into
Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about that.
They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said no, and we
were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said
'no, we had
people going in to look at the situation and coming back out'. We had 24 people
sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons, installing
communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody
inside the country.
In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be alive
that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful, or at least
much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they went ahead and
won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the country.
At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the eyes
of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from the CIA
and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes of the
world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's impolitic. We had
hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified with them. And that's
illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We were caught
out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.
After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the
MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be our
friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the MPLA had Gulf oil back in
Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians
protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still
mucking around in Northern Angola.
You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets from
Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians to install
the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn't buy [the Soviet
Union's] Aeroflot.... David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back
and holds press conferences, in which he says that we have no problem doing
business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.
I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know what we'd done
in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate - I got
it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able to take my
story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other
shows.
I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after
having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see what
communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat babies
for breakfast. And I found they don't. I went to Budapest, a country that even
national geographic admits is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to
Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.
I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard
Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see - these were all educated people, and experienced
people - and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to do, they had
rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly to hear them. And then of
course I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against them, I saw us
orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was killed, I
was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things, these indicators,
the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both
acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada in
the near future.
I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book after
book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on the subject of
U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I urge you to read. In
television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they
want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editors select
to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and understand, to
educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for
yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you'll see, the issues are very,
very important.
Nicaragua
I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have
done studies, people who are leading different situations. I went to Nicaragua a
total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted longer and evolved
to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running
something from Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to
the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when you
give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people, and they go
inside a country, to go and talk to the people, who have been shot, or hit, or
blown up....
We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed
since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have been killed in
these things.... Some of them are very, very bloody.
Indonesian
The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who 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!
El Salvado
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 fiancé'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.
*****
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
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 text
bookish.
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 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 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
pay check 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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