John Stockwell quotes

John Stockwell quotes
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And we are responsible for doing these things on a massive basis, to people of the world today. We do it in a way that gives us plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a secret police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs in our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though the information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's okay because we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just as responsible for these ONE TO THREE MILLION PEOPLE we've slaughtered, and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that they slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide !! The Secret Wars of the CIA Excerpts from a talk by John Stockwell

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'. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

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....[1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

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. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

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. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

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'. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

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.

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. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

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. [1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

... in 1965 the CIA organized an operation to discredit the Communist party in Indonesia. Their strategy was to make the party appear to be secretly planning a violent takeover of Indonesian society. The truth was that the Indonesian Communist Party was doing quite well to obtain representation in the Indonesian government through the democratic process. That was what made it so threatening to the United States. They simply could not have an example of legitimate and successful participation by the Communists in the democratic process.
    The techniques of the Indonesian destabilization were classic: CIA agents planted caches of arms that would then be "found" by Indonesian police under the watchful eye of the alerted media. Along with the arms would be all kinds of forged documents proving that the Communists were fomenting a violent uprising. Propaganda agents planted stories in the media, inflaming the mistrust of the Communists. Others gave speeches. The situation heated up until some generals in the Indonesian army were killed, and the boil of tension burst. The Indonesian army went after the Communists and the people they felt traditionally supported the Communists. The result was a bloodbath that the New York Times described in terms half a million to a million and a half dead. The Australian secret service, closer to Indonesia, put the figure at closer to two million-the rivers were clogged with the bodies of the dead.
    In the summer of 1990, the U.S. State Department acknowledged that it had indeed delivered lists of names, of people who were subsequently killed, to the Indonesian government.
    The CIA's own internal reporting estimated that 800,000 people had been killed. The organization published a cover story through the Library of Congress that the Communist Party had supported a classic insurrection, which the army had put down. However, internal CIA reports cited the operation as a classic success in which they had targeted the world's thirdlargest Communist Party and aided the Indonesian army by providing thousands of names of suspected individuals and completely eliminated from the face of the earth not only the party, but the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia who tended to support the Communists. Simply put, this is a classic case of genocide that was engineered by the CIA and cited as a model to be copied elsewhere....Secret Third World Wars

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....[1987 Lecture] THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA: by John Stockwell

"A man ... an officer who had addressed my training class at the "Farm" in 1965 ... opened up in a surprisingly long way , referring to an adventure in Lumumbashi, driving about town after curfew with Patrice Lumumba's body in the trunk of his car, trying to decide what to do with it. Five years later I found this man in an Asian post, the chief of station ... And in 1974 I found him again, in a European station..." The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Two million people had been killed [in Vietnam]. The equivalent of a 500-pound bomb had been dropped on the country for every citizen. Ninety-thousand tons of carcinogenic and toxic materials had been dropped on the country, some of which would poison it for decades to come. We were returning to the "World" to continue our lives, while leaving our Vietnamese cohorts behind The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

We created and left behind [in Nicaragua] a National Guard with officers trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests. This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

...the Cambodian people knew that they were being bombed; it was no secret to them. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do to stop the bombing. However, the people of the United Stares could stop the bombing, or at least raise an effective protest of it. Hence, it was vital to President Nixon that the bombing remain secret here at home. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

... the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations... all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

...the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

...stirring up deadly ethnic and racial strife has been a standard technique used by the CIA. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Nothing illustrates the power to rationalize cynicism as well as the Public Safety Program, also called the Office of Public Safety. For about twenty-five years, the CIA, working through the Agency for International Development, trained and organized police and paramilitary officers from around the world in techniques of population control, repression, and torture. Schools were set up in the United States, Panama, and Asia, from which tens of thousands graduated. In some cases, former Nazi officers from Hitler's Third Reich were used as instructors. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The major economic impetus behind the Third World War ... is the production of arms. Every day $3 billion worth of weapons is bought and sold. So-called defense corporations are making 20-25 percent profit. In the 1980s, the United States spent a total of $2.5 trillion (at least those were the announced figures, the total was probably much greater) on the largest arms buildup perhaps in the history of the world and certainly of any country during peacetime. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. According to studies published in the Washington Post, 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

This was the continuation of a post-World War II system, dominated by what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex." The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. According to studies published in the Washington Post, 53 cents of every dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Taking smoothly over from the arcade games, which are nearly all violent, our society feeds its youth on the great military conditioning program of football, complete with the captain (coach), the sergeant (quarterback), and troops. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The lesson of the runaway arms race, with its giant expenditures on the military, is that the nation has gone deeply, irreversibly into debt, and every conceivable social service is being sacrificed. We cannot afford guns and butter. To pay for the arms race the nation has to cut thousands of social programs, ... The nation cannot go wild on military expenditures and also afford to care for old people, poor people, disabled people, farmers, or students. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

... the United States has plummeted, relative to the rest of the industrialized world, from its pinnacle of wealth and economic strength. Twenty-five percent of the people in this country are now functionally illiterate. We are sixth in the world in terms of the percentage of children in school; seventh in life expectancy; tenth in quality of education; tenth in quality of life standards; and twentieth in infant mortality. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Conservative intellectuals admit the harshness of U.S. counter-revolutionary activities but argue that they are necessary.... They know that people die by the thousands in these activities, but claim that they are nevertheless necessary to maintain U.S. security and the U.S. standard of living. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The First Amendment does not require anyone to publish the truth. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA." The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

... the CIA [has] been running thousands of operations over the years. ... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations-all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The current War on Drugs, with its broad rationales for aggressive response, police action, and stringent new laws, has quickly replaced the old anti-Christ of Communism in the hearts and minds of the national security establishment. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves.The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

... the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

The military has ... seen its budget restored, to an all-time high, and it has ...new rationales for continued dominance of U.S. society. The Third World is the new enemy, effectively replacing the Cold War rationales for militarism. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.
    Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.
    Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."
    Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.
    One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.
    The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.
    Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country. The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.