-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 6, 2007 4:51:23 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Rewritiing History with "Merchandizing" -- Putting a Happy
Face on Pure Evil
"Political theatre," you gotta love it ... Good ol' "super-patriot"
Charlie Wilson (played by lovable Tom Hanks) -- in reality a
defender of the brutal Somoza regime in Nicaragua and doubtless a
sub-rosa moneybags in the Iran-Contra scandal -- and his seductive
partner in "freedom-fighting," Joanne Herring (the winsome Julia
Roberts) -- in actuality a multiply-facelifted "steel magnolia" and
serial widow of Big Oilmen, whose "toga parties" for ultra-rich
rightwing Texans toasted the likes of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos,
the Shah of Iran, and corrupt Middle Eastern dictators ...
Conspicuously absent from the cast lined up by Hollywood's
revisionist propaganda mill, are the real players like Herring-pal
James Baker (global fixer for Big Oil), Dick Cheney, George HW Bush
(CIA head when Wilson arrived), Bill Casey, Ollie North, Mossad
spies, and the entire Iran-Contra crew.
Keep in mind the fact that "Charlie Wilson's War" (in which Charlie
himself made millions that got stuffed into Swiss banks) was just
ONE battle in a larger war that generated "black budget" profits
from drug- and arms-smuggling between Israel and Iran, Israel and
Central America, Israel (via the Russian-Jewish Mafia) and the
collapsing Soviet Union, and even between South America and Europe
(P-2 Lodge, Vatican Bank) -- profits that bankrolled neocon
Fascism's "strategy of terror" worldwide. The proceeds were
laundered by the BCCI, a "trust fund" originally used to finance
"Al Qaeda" but also the preferred bank of Bush's "rogue CIA" cum
global crime org, the "Octopus."
The Largest Covert Operation in CIA History
By Chalmers Johnson
The History News Network
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/19/1024
09 June 2003
The Central Intelligence Agency has an almost unblemished record
of screwing up every "secret" armed intervention it ever undertook.
From the overthrow of the Iranian government in 1953 through the
Bay of Pigs, the failed attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro of
Cuba and Patrice Lumumba of the Republic of Congo, the Phoenix
Program in Vietnam, the "secret war" in Laos, aid to the Greek
colonels who seized power in 1967, the 1973 killing of Salvador
Allende in Chile and Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra war against
Nicaragua, there is not a single instance in which the agency's
activities did not prove acutely embarrassing to the United States.
The CIA continues to get away with this primarily because its
budget and operations have always been secret and Congress is
normally too indifferent to its constitutional functions to rein in
a rogue bureaucracy. Therefore the tale of a purported CIA success
story should be of some interest.
According to the author of the newly released Charlie Wilson's
War, the exception to CIA incompetence was the arming between 1979
and 1988 of thousands of Afghan moujahedeen ("freedom fighters").
The agency flooded Afghanistan with an astonishing array of
extremely dangerous weapons and "unapologetically mov[ed] to equip
and train cadres of high tech holy warriors in the art of waging a
war of urban terror against a modern superpower," in this case, the
USSR.
The author of this glowing account, George Crile, is a veteran
producer for the CBS television news show "60 Minutes" and an
exuberant Tom Clancy-type enthusiast for the Afghan caper. He
argues that the U.S. clandestine involvement in Afghanistan was
"the largest and most successful CIA operation in history" and "the
one morally unambiguous crusade of our time." He adds that "there
was nothing so romantic and exciting as this war against the Evil
Empire." Crile's sole measure of success is the number of Soviet
soldiers killed (about 15,000), which undermined Soviet morale and
contributed to the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the period
from 1989 to 1991. That's the successful part.
However, he never mentions that the "tens of thousands of
fanatical Muslim fundamentalists" the CIA armed are some of the
same people who in 1996 killed 19 American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi
Arabia; bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; blew a
hole in the side of the U.S. destroyer Cole in Aden harbor in 2000;
and on Sept. 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's
World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Today, the world awaits what
is almost certain to happen soon at some airport -- a terrorist
firing a U.S. Stinger low-level surface-to-air missile
(manufactured at one time by General Dynamics in Rancho Cucamonga)
into an American jumbo jet. The CIA supplied thousands of them to
the moujahedeen and trained them to be experts in their use. If the
CIA's activities in Afghanistan are a "success story," then Enron
should be considered a model of corporate behavior.
Nonetheless, Crile's account is important, if appalling,
precisely because it details how a ruthless ignoramus congressman
and a high-ranking CIA thug managed to hijack American foreign
policy. From 1973 to 1996, Charlie Wilson represented the 2nd
District of Texas in the U.S. House of Representatives. His
constituency was in the heart of the East Texas Bible Belt and was
the long-held fiefdom of his fellow Democrat, Martin Dies, the
first chairman of the House Un-American Affairs Committee. Wilson
is 6 feet, 4 inches tall and "handsome, with one of those classic
outdoor faces that tobacco companies bet millions on." He graduated
from the Naval Academy in 1956, eighth from the bottom of his class
and with more demerits than any other cadet in Annapolis history.
After serving in the Texas Legislature, he arrived in Washington
in 1973 and quickly became known as "Good Time Charlie," "the
biggest playboy in Congress." He hired only good-looking women for
his staff and escorted "a parade of beauty queens to White House
parties." Even Crile, who featured Wilson many times on "60
Minutes" and obviously admires him, describes him as "a seemingly
corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was
convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble if it
permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations."
Wilson's partner in getting the CIA to arm the moujahedeen was
Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the
steel workers' town of Aliquippa, Pa. Only in 1960 did the CIA
begin to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from
among what it called "new Americans," meaning such ethnic groups as
Chinese, Japanese, Latinos and Greek Americans. Until then, it had
followed its British model and taken only Ivy League sons of the
Eastern Establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to
nurture a hatred of the bluebloods, or "cake eaters," as he called
them, who discriminated against him. After "spook school" at Camp
Peary, next door to Jamestown, Va., he was posted to Athens, where,
as a Greek speaker, he remained until 1978.
During Avrakotos's time in Greece, the CIA was instrumental in
destroying Greek freedom and helping to turn the country into
probably the single most anti-American democracy on Earth today.
Incredibly, Crile describes this as follows: "On April 21, 1967, he
[Avrakotos] got one of those breaks that can make a career. A
military junta seized power in Athens that day and suspended
democratic and constitutional government." Avrakotos became the
CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels. After the fall of the
colonels' brutally fascist regime, the 17 November terrorist
organization assassinated the CIA's Athens station chief, Richard
Welch, on Dec. 23, 1975, and "Gust came to be vilified in the Greek
radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the
country's many ills." He left the country in 1978 but could not get
another decent assignment -- he tried for Helsinki -- because the
head of the European Division regarded him as simply too uncouth to
send to any of its capitals. He sat around Langley for several
years without work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of
the Afghan program. "If it's really true that you have nothing to
do," McGaffin said, "why not come upstairs? We're killing Russians."
Wilson was the moneybags and sparkplug of this pair; Avrakotos
was a street fighter who relished giving Kalashnikovs and Stingers
to the tribesmen in Afghanistan. Wilson was the more complex of the
two, and Crile argues that his "Good Time Charlie" image was
actually a cover for a Barry Goldwater kind of hyper-patriotism.
But Wilson was also a liberal on the proposed Equal Rights
Amendment and a close friend of the late Congresswoman Barbara
Jordan (D-Texas), and his sister Sharon became chairwoman of the
board of Planned Parenthood.
As a boy, Wilson was fascinated by World War II and developed an
almost childlike belief that he possessed a "special destiny" to
"kill bad guys" and help underdogs prevail over their enemies. When
he entered Congress, just at the time of the Yom Kippur War, he
became a passionate supporter of Israel. After he traveled to
Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee began to steer
large amounts of money from all over the country to him and to
cultivate him as "one of Israel's most important Congressional
champions: a non-Jew with no Jewish constituents." Jewish members
of Congress also rallied to put Wilson on the all-powerful
Appropriations Committee in order to guarantee Israel's annual $3-
billion subsidy. His own Texas delegation opposed his appointment.
Wilson was not discriminating in his largess. He also became a
supporter of Anastasio "Tacho" Somoza, the West Point graduate and
dictator of Nicaragua who in 1979 was swept away by popular fury.
Before that happened, President Carter tried to cut the $3.1-
million annual U.S. aid package to Nicaragua, but Wilson, declaring
Somoza to be "America's oldest anti-Communist ally in Central
America," opposed the president and prevailed.
During Wilson's long tenure on the House Appropriations
Committee, one of its subcommittee chairmen, Clarence D. "Doc"
Long, used to have a sign mounted over his desk: "Them that has the
gold makes the rules." Wilson advanced rapidly on this most
powerful of congressional committees. He was first appointed to the
foreign operations subcommittee, which doles out foreign aid. He
then did a big favor for then-Speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.
(D-Mass.). The chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee
at the time, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), had been caught in the FBI's
ABSCAM sting operation in which an agent disguised as a Saudi sheik
offered members of Congress large cash bribes. O'Neill put Wilson
on the Ethics Committee to save Murtha, which he did. In return,
O'Neill assigned Wilson to the defense appropriations subcommittee
and made him a life member of the governing board of the John F.
Kennedy Performing Arts Center, where he delighted in taking his
young dates.
Wilson soon discovered that all of the CIA's budget and 40
percent of the Pentagon's budget is "black," hidden from the public
and even from Congress. As a member of the defense subcommittee, he
could arrange to have virtually any amount of money added to
whatever black project he supported. So long as Wilson did favors
for other members on the subcommittee, such as supporting defense
projects in their districts, they would never object to his private
obsessions.
About this time, Wilson came under the influence of a remarkable,
rabidly conservative Houston woman in her mid-40s, Joanne Herring.
They later fell in love, although they never married. She had a
reputation among the rich of the River Oaks section of Houston as a
collector of powerful men, a social lioness and hostess to her
fellow members of the John Birch Society. She counted among her
friends Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, dictator and first lady of the
Philippines, and Yaqub Khan, Pakistan's ambassador to Washington,
D.C., who got Herring named as Pakistan's honorary consul for Houston.
In July 1977, the head of Pakistan's army, Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq,
seized power and declared martial law, and in 1979, he hanged
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the president who had promoted him. In
retaliation, Carter cut off U.S. aid to Pakistan. In 1980, Herring
went to Islamabad and was so entranced by Zia and his support for
the Afghan freedom fighters that on her return to the United
States, she encouraged Wilson to go to Pakistan. There he met Zia,
learned about the Afghan moujahedeen and became a convert to the
cause. Once Reagan replaced Carter, Wilson was able to restore
Zia's aid money and added several millions to the CIA's funds for
secretly arming the Afghan guerrillas, each dollar of which the
Saudi government secretly matched.
Although Wilson romanticized the mountain warriors of
Afghanistan, the struggle was never as uneven as it seemed.
Pakistan provided the fighters with sanctuary, training and arms
and even sent its own officers into Afghanistan as advisors on
military operations. Saudi Arabia served as the fighters' banker,
providing hundred of millions with no strings attached. Several
governments, including those of Egypt, China and Israel, secretly
supplied arms. And the insurgency enjoyed the backing of the United
States through the CIA.
Wilson's and the CIA's greatest preoccupation was supplying the
Afghans with something effective against the Soviets' most feared
weapon, the Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunship. The Red Army used it to
slaughter innumerable moujahedeen as well as to shoot up Afghan
villages. Wilson favored the Oerlikon antiaircraft gun made in
Switzerland (it was later charged that he was on the take from the
Zurich-based arms manufacturer). Avrakotos opposed it because it
was too heavy for guerrillas to move easily, but he could not
openly stand in Wilson's way. After months of controversy, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff finally dropped their objections to supplying
the American Stinger, President Reagan signed off on it, and the
"silver bullet" was on its way. The Stinger had never before been
used in combat. It proved to be murderous against the Hinds, and
Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev decided to cut his losses and
get out altogether. In Wilson's postwar tour of Afghanistan,
moujahedeen fighters surrounded him and triumphantly fired their
missiles for his benefit. They also gave him as a souvenir the
stock from the first Stinger to shoot down a Hind gunship.
The CIA "bluebloods" fired Avrakotos in the summer of 1986, and
he retired to Rome. Wilson became chairman of the Intelligence
Oversight Committee, at which time he wrote to his CIA friends,
"Well, gentlemen, the fox is in the hen house. Do whatever you
like." After retiring from Congress in 1996, he became a lobbyist
for Pakistan under a contract that paid him $30,000 a month.
Meanwhile, the United States lost interest in Afghanistan, which
descended into a civil war that the Taliban ultimately won. In the
autumn of 2001, the United States returned in force after Al Qaeda
retaliated against its former weapon supplier by attacking New York
and Washington. The president of the United States went around
asking, "Why do they hate us?"
Crile knows a lot about these matters and presents them in a
dramatic manner. There are, however, one or two items that he
appears unaware of or is suppressing. For the CIA legally to carry
out a covert action, the president must authorize a document called
a finding. Crile repeatedly says that Carter signed such a finding
ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the moujahedeen after
the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Dec. 24, 1979. The truth of
the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six
months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of
his national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try
to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this
sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and
former CIA Director Robert M. Gates says so explicitly in his 1996
memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic
moujahedeen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon
fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The moujahedeen
did the job, but as subsequent events have made clear, they may not
be grateful to the United States.
Mr. Johnson is the author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences
of American Empire and The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy
and the End of the Republic, to be published in January by
Metropolitan Books.
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