-Caveat Lector- http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/local/4728490.htm
IF YOU WANT to check up on the Washington Post's affection for the CIA, not to mention its attraction to politically perverted role models, check out its obituary section. Just a few weeks after giving the notorious Richard Helms false nobility in an obituary, it sent off another egregious CIA figure, Theodore Shackley, with even more misleading kudos. J.Y. Smith wrote: "Theodore G. Shackley, 75, a retired associate deputy director for clandestine operations of the CIA whose career took him from the streets of Berlin to the jungles of Laos and Vietnam, died of cancer Dec. 9 at his home in Bethesda. In the context of an agency and a profession whose watchwords are secrecy and deception, Mr. Shackley was a legendary figure. He was known as 'the godfather of secret warriors.' He was a three-time recipient of the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the agency's highest honor." While Smith admitted that Shackley was controversial - a common Post synonym for a bad sort it likes - there was no sense of the true destructive, deceitful, murderous, and counter-productive life that Shackley led - including his involvement with the pointlessly unsuccessful attempts to kill Castro, the disastrous secret war in Laos with its resultant heroin trade to the U.S., and the unpunished international war crime known as the Phoenix program. He was likely also involved in the October Surprise and in helping Oliver North and George Bush Sr. establish what became a CIA guns and drugs operation out of Mena Arkansas. In a more balanced piece in the Miami Herald, Carol Rosenberg noted: "In Miami, he directed an ambitious anti-Castro propaganda and paramilitary campaign, and as a sign of its significance, Shackley would later say that he commanded the third-largest navy in the Caribbean -- only the United States and Cuba had more vessels than the CIA station chief's flotilla." [CAROL ROSENBERG, MIAMI HERALD - "In Laos, Shackley helped run a secret war using local tribes people, and at the end of that campaign the tribe was decimated," said David Corn, author of the 1994 book, Blond Ghost: Ted Shackley and the CIA's Crusade. "Shackley was in some ways the archetype of the Cold War covert bureaucrat. He took orders from above . . . running secret wars, undermining democratically elected governments, compromising journalists and political opponents overseas . . . and made them a reality,"Corn said. Shackley also ran Latin American operations out of CIA headquarters in 1973 when Gen. Augusto Pincohet led a coup in Chile that toppled the elected government of President Salvador Allende. "He was not the mastermind of the clandestine operations of presidents and CIA directors. He was the implementer," Corn said. 'And in doing so, he avoided the moral questions that accompanied such actions and embodied the `ends justify the means' mentality of America's national security establishment."] Ralph McGehee, a former CIA officer, has described the Phoenix operation as "originally designed to 'neutralize,' that is assassinate or imprison, members of the civilian infrastructure of the [Vietnamese] National Liberation Front. Phoenix offices were set up from Saigon down to the district level. . . The original Phoenix concept was quickly diluted, for two main reasons: (1) pressure from the top to fill numerical quotas of person to be neutralized; (2) difficulties at the bottom of identifying NLF civilian infrastructure, who were often indistinguishable from the general population, and the near impossibility of proving anyone membership in the NLF. The result was vastly to increase the numbers of innocent persons rounded up and imprisoned, indiscriminately murdered, and brutally tortured in an effort to show results . . . Between 1968 and 1972 hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilians were rounded up and turned over to the Vietnamese police for questioning. Such interrogation has usually been marked by brutal torture." While the Post mentions Shackley retiring during the Carter administration - he was really fired - it describes CIA chief Stansfield Turner's effort to reform the agency and get rid of its barbarian cowboys as "drastically reducing the clandestine service." The Post does admit that "by the end of the decade, Mr. Shockley's career appeared to have hit a dead end, in part because of dealings he had with Edwin P. Wilson, a former CIA agent who illegally sold explosives to Libya." In fact, the well-meaning Carter-Turner effort had serious blowback, for people like Shackley didn't really retire; they just became freelancers who returned to haunt the country during the Iran-Contra era. The Post's claim that "he had a minor and tangential role in the Iran-contra scandal that rocked the Reagan administration" illustrates that while Shackley may be dead, disinformation thrives. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. 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