CIA
THE CIA: BEYOND REDEMPTION AND SHOULD BE TERMINATED
July 24, 2010 || By Sherwood Ross
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/24/the-cia-beyond-redemption-and-should-be-terminated-2/
The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its
creator President Harry Truman that it might degenerate into "an American
Gestapo." It has been just that for so long it is beyond redemption. It
represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit
of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently.
Over the years "the Agency" as it is known, has given U.S. presidents so
much wrong information on so many critical issues, broken so many laws,
subverted so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many
dictators, and killed and tortured so many innocent human beings that the
pages of its official history could be written in blood, not ink. People the
world over regard it as infamous, and that evaluation, sadly for the
reputation of America, is largely accurate. Besides, since President Obama
has half a dozen other major intelligence agencies to rely on for guidance,
why does he need the CIA? In one swoop he could lop an estimated 27,000
employees off the Federal payroll, save taxpayers umpteen billions, and wipe
the CIA stain from the American flag.
If you think this is a "radical" idea, think again. What is "radical" is to
empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as
they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of
mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA
interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has said, is chilling.
These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur
again.
"The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before-beginning in 1950, in
Germany, Japan, and Panama," writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in
his book "Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA"(Random House). Weiner has
won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the intelligence community. "It had
participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before-beginning in
1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected
terrorists and assassins before."
In Iran in 1953, for example, a CIA-directed coup restored the Shah (king)
to absolute power, initiating what journalist William Blum in "Rogue State"
(Common Courage Press) called "a period of 25 years of repression and
torture; while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the
US and Britain each getting 40 percent." About the same time in Guatemala,
Blum adds, a CIA-organized coup "overthrew the democratically-elected and
progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military
government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and
unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims-indisputably one of
the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century." The massive slaughter
compares, at least in terms of sheer numbers, with Hitler's massacre of
Romanian and Ukranian Jews during the holocaust. Yet few Americans know of
it.
Blum provides yet other examples of CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it
attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow neutralist president Sukarno. It plotted
Sukarno's assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and
joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war
against the government, including bombing runs by American pilots, Blum
reported This particular attempt, like one in Costa Rica about the same
time, failed. So did the CIA attempt in Iraq in 1960 to assassinate
President Abdul Kassem. Other ventures proved more "successful".
In Laos, the CIA was involved in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960,
creating a clandestine army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In
Ecuador, the CIA ousted President Jose Velasco for recognizing the new Cuban
government of Fidel Castro. The CIA also arranged the murder of elected
Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and installation of Mobutu Seko
who ruled "with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA
handlers," Blum recalls.
In Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a military coup against leader Kwame
Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of elected President
Salvador Allende in 1973 and brought to power the murderous regime of
General Augusto Pinochet who executed 3,000 political opponents and tortured
thousands more. In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped subvert the elections and
backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month of
operation. "Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with
equipment supplied by the United States, became routine," Blum writes.
In South Africa, the CIA gave the apartheid government information that led
to the arrest of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who
subsequently spent years in prison. In Bolivia, in 1964, the CIA overthrew
President Victor Paz; in Australia from 1972-75, the CIA slipped millions of
dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party; ditto, Brazil in 1962; in
Laos in 1960, the CIA stuffed ballot boxes to help a strongman into power;
in Portugal in the Seventies the candidates it financed triumphed over a
pro-labor government; in the Philippines, the CIA backed governments in the
1970-90 period that employed torture and summary execution against its own
people; in El Salvador, the CIA in the Nineties backed the wealthy in a
civil war in which 75,000 civilians were killed; and the list goes on and
on.
Of course, the hatred that the CIA engenders for the American people and
American business interests is enormous. Because the Agency operates largely
in secret, most Americans are unaware of the crimes it perpetrates in their
names. As Chalmers Johnson writes in "Blowback"(Henry Holt), former
long-time CIA director Robert Gates, now Obama's defense secretary, admitted
U.S. intelligence services began to aid the mujahideen guerrillas in
Afghanistan six months before the Soviet invasion in December, 1979.
As has often been the case, the CIA responded to a criminal order from one
of the succession of imperial presidents that have occupied the White House,
in this instance one dated July 3, 1979, from President Jimmy Carter. The
Agency was ordered to aid the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in
Kabul-aid that might sucker the Kremlin into invading. "The CIA supported
Osama bin Laden, like so many other extreme fundamentalists among the
mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at least 1984 on," Johnson writes, helping
bin Laden train many of the 35,000 Arab Afghans.
Thus Carter, like his successors in the George H.W. Bush government - Gates,
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, and Colin
Powell, "all bear some responsibility for the 1.8 million Afghan casualties,
2.6 million refugees, and 10 million unexploded land mines that followed
from their decisions, as well as the 'collateral damage' that befell New
York City in September 2001 from an organization they helped create during
the years of anti-Soviet Afghan resistance," Johnson added. Worse, the
Bush-Cheney regime after 9/11 "set no limits on what the agency could do. It
was the foundation for a system of secret prisons where CIA officer and
contractors used techniques that included torture," Weiner has written. By
some estimates, the CIA in 2006 held 14,000 souls in 11 secret prisons, a
vast crime against humanity.
That the CIA has zero interest in justice and engages in gratuitous cruelty
may be seen from the indiscriminate dragnet arrests it has perpetrated: "CIA
officers snatched and grabbed more than three thousand people in more than
one hundred countries in the year after 9/11," Weiner writes, adding that
only 14 men of all those seized "were high-ranking authority figures within
al Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency jailed hundreds of
nobodies.(who) became ghost prisoners in the war on terror."
As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence, the record of
the CIA has been a fiasco. The Agency was telling President Carter the Shah
of Iran was beloved by his people and was firmly entrenched in power in 1979
when any reader of Harper's magazine, available on newsstands for a buck,
could read that his overthrow was imminent-and it was. Over the years, the
Agency has been wrong far more often than it has been right.
According to an Associated Press report, when confirmed by the Senate as the
new CIA director, Leon Panetta said the Obama administration would not
prosecute CIA officers that "participated in harsh interrogations even if
they constituted torture as long as they did not go beyond their
instructions." This will allow interrogators to evade prosecution for
following the clearly criminal orders they would have been justified to
disobey.
"Panetta also said that the Obama administration would continue to transfer
foreign detainees to other countries for questioning but only if U.S.
officials are confident that the prisoners will not be tortured," the AP
story continued. If past is prologue, how confident can Panetta be the CIA's
fellow goons in Egypt and Morocco will stop torturing prisoners? Why did the
CIA kidnap men off the streets of Milan and New York and fly them to those
countries in the first place if not for torture? They certainly weren't
treating them to a Mediterranean vacation. By its long and nearly perfect
record of reckless disregard for international law, the CIA has deprived
itself of the right to exist.
It will be worse than unfortunate if President Obama continues the inhumane
(and illegal) CIA renditions that President Bill Clinton began and President
Bush vastly expanded. If the White House thinks its operatives can roam the
world and arrest and torture any person it chooses without a court order,
without due process, and without answering for their crimes, this signifies
Americans believe themselves to be a Master Race better than others and
above international law. That's not much different from the philosophy that
motivated Adolph Hitler's Third Reich. It would be the supreme irony if the
American electorate that repudiated racism last November has voted into its
highest office a constitutional lawyer who reaffirms his predecessor's
illegal views on this activity. Renditions must be stopped. The CIA must be
abolished.
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations consultant and columnist
who formerly reported for the Chicago Daily News, the New York
Herald-Tribune, and wire services. Reach him at sherwoo...@yahoo.com )
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http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/24/the-cia-beyond-redemption-and-should-be-terminated-2/
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State of National Intelligence - John McLaughlin - fmr. CIA Director
10.07.20 video:
http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/id/228896
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GovCog/message/62
John McLaughlin talked about the scope and efficacy of America's
intelligence agencies as James Clapper's confirmation hearing to become the
next director of National Intelligence was to take place later that day. He
also responded to the Washington Post "Top Secret Government" series, and
responded to telephone calls and electronic communications.
@timemark 22:14 Caller re: 'Intelligence Business' VS 'Public Service'
@timemark 34:56 Caller re: CIA's Reprehensible History / Need To Abolish CIA
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Director of National Intelligence Nomination Hearing
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GovCog/message/61
