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As always, Caveat Lector.
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<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:505773">The truth about CIA propaganda
</A>
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Subject: The truth about CIA propaganda
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The Unapoet)
Date: Thu, Mar 11, 1999 3:00 AM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Ralph McGehee, former CIA analyst in Vietnam:
http://come.to/CIABASE
"Essentially the CIA stopped all accurate info on Vietnam while
conducting a propaganda campaign to keep us in this war that was
unwinnable. If we are to avoid further "Vietnams"
we need a good, reliable, trustworthy intelligence service."
"In my experience, the CIA pulled the United States into the Vietnam
War and kept it there with false intelligence and propaganda. The CIA
rejected all reality about the war in its intelligence while
constructing and maintaining a Gobbel's-like Big Lie."
"The CIA is not now nor has ever been a central intelligence agency.
It is the covert action arm of the president's foreign policy
advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign
governments while reporting "Intelligence" justifying those
activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as
soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy.
Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility,
and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies."
Ralph McGehee, CIABASE Home Page
----------------------------------------------------
Richard Manning http://i.am/expatriate
As a former NYC teacher (P/T), Youth Board Gang Worker and Police
Dep't Detective (Special Frauds Bureau) who went to Vietnam in 1967 as
a Plans and Operations Officer with the CIA : I confirm what Hackworth
says is the absolute truth concerning the wholehearted selfishness of
our 'leadership', BOTH military and civilian. The exceptions were,
like Hackworth, those few, most rare, men who had the moral courage to
put honest loyalty to America and humane values for the slaughtered
Vietnamese BEFORE their personal whims, vices, crimes AND careers.
Vietnam was unusual, for it was a most SENSUAL, and SEXY, war for the
upper-echelon leadership; not just the average high tech violence done
to so many another yellow-skinned (or brown or black) inferiors in our
history.
Most of the above leadership in Vietnam were - besides being moral
cowards - also physical cowards who never had to defend themselves or
their men with a weapon facing our 'enemy'. This double cowardice is
the 'why?' behind their support of a techno war; one using twice the
total WW-II tonnage of bombs against a 3rd World country - an agrarian
country with almost no industry and few viable military targets; and
none to speak of after 1968.
Due to this, Hackworth's comments should be understood as even more
strongly applicable to the US Navy and US Air Force - push-button jet
jockeys dropping everything from napalm, cluster bombs, white
phosphorus, chemicals and high explosives on an almost exclusively
civilian population. Returning afterwards to their hot showers, clean
white sheets and Playboy R & R machismo hobbies. Hackworth may have
been an officer but he was something much more than a grunt with
shoulder insignia, for in facing the enemy on the ground he learned
the truth, and then had the wholly GREATER moral courage it takes to
step out of line and tell it to the people he really served - the US
public. It takes that kind of hero to go around his disloyal military
brass and his dishonest Presidents.
Least we forget, let's not leave out the CIA : for it was their Col.
Lansdale and his illegal and totally immoral coterie of little boys
playing top secret spooky games who actually started the war
beginning in 1954. We must remember, it was the CIA, using mostly
detached military personell, who invaded and attacked the Vietnamese,
both North and South. Neither the so-called 'north'
Vietnamese nor the old Viet Minh in the 'south' ever did anything
against America or any American until they had been tortured and
assassinated to the tune of over 200,000 dead and wounded (by
1960), mostly civilians with the wrong sympathies.
So there were only a very few, like Hackworth, McGehee and I
(presuming to put myself in their good company), who had the awareness
and balls to go against the Pentagon's and The Company's
lies and cover ups and murder and torture while we were in-country.
Richard Manning
Ass't Operations Officer, Phan Thiet; Plans Officer, Nha Trang; Op &
Plans Officer, Ba Ngoi (Cam Ranh)
------------------------------------------------------------------
How the Vietnam War Affected Me
By David Hackworth
(America's most decorated living soldier)
The Vietnam War scarred me more severely than any of the eight Purple
Hearts I'd received during almost eight years of combat. Up to
Vietnam, I'd always been a Don Quixote-like idealist who
believed that those who served our country as professional military
officers did so only from the point of view of DUTY, HONOR, AND
COUNTRY. But during Vietnam I finally got a look inside
the inner circle of the Army's top brass -- and witnessed corruption
and evil so great it broke my heart and arc-lighted my belief system.
In Vietnam, I also discovered that most of those at the top were
concerned only with themselves, and few senior leaders understood the
nature of the war or had a clue about the impossible mission
with which they had tasked their soldiers. Most generals and colonels
were there only to get combat command assignments and the right glory
medals that would punch their ticket. Few cared about
their men or the mission, most cared only about clawing their way up
the promotion ladder. All but the brain-dead among them knew that it
was a bad, unwinnable war that had no military objective;
yet not one serving general stood tall and told the American people
this truth. Instead, they just went-along-to-get-along, lining up our
young men to become the pulverized filler for bodybags.
After observing this obscenity first-hand in the trenches of Vietnam
for almost five years, I told the American people -- while in uniform
and from Vietnam -- that the war was not winnable, they were
being lied to and we should get out now. This act caused a General
William Westmoreland-led counter-attack to destroy my credibility. The
generals and their synchophants employed every dirty
trick in their slimey attempt to silence me (for details, see About
Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior, Simon & Schuster 1989). They
had to prove that I was wrong and they were right, and in
so doing they violated every principle that makes America a free land.
Disgusted with the US Army and disillusioned with my country, which my
forefathers had settled in 1622, I went to Australia in self-exile.
There, I made a new life and tried to forget Vietnam, but I
couldn't shake that nightmare. It wouldn't go away not only because of
bad dreams but also because Westmoreland and his followers launched a
deceptive campaign of disinformation to rewrite the history of the
Vietnam War. Their propaganda insisted that we lost the war not
because of their poor leadership, but because of: THE PEACENIKS, THE
COMMIE PRESS AND THE WEAK-KNEED POLITICIANS. They started the lie: "We
won all the battles, but THEY lost the war."
I knew this was a lie, and this lie is what caused me to write About
Face so that present and future generations would know and learn from
the truth. Since About Face was published and I began my
new career as a defense reporter, I sadly discovered that most of
today's senior military leaders' values are frighteningly similar to
these generals of the Vietnam era who sold their men and their
country down the bloody drain. Most of the present crop of senior
leadership are all into ME, ME, ME -- which explains the Somalias,
Haitis, and Bosnias (for more details see Hazardous Duty,
William Morrow 1996).
For most of the 2.5 million Americans who fought there, Vietnam was a
bad trip. For me, it became the launching pad of the journey I'm still
on today -- to do everything in my power not to let that sort
of bloodbath happen again.
Vietnam gave me a new mission: To speak the truth and not let my
children or your children or our country be doomed to repeat the
horror, the waste and the futility of Vietnam.
Thus began my crusade to wake up the American people.
David Hackworth Home Page
http://www.hackworth.com
Johnny Asia
Common Sense Almanac
http://come.to/commonsense
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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