[Peace-discuss] Happy Birthday CIA: Seven Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years

Sun Sep 24 15:55:20 UTC 2017

Another book or opinion from I know not who:
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Send in the Clown: Trump and American Credibility<https://mjw51.wordpress.com/2017/09/24/send-in-the-clown-trump-and-american-credibility/>
by mjw51<https://mjw51.wordpress.com/author/mjw51/>

With all the knicker-twisting going on about how the big baby with the brain of a reptile and his own transplanted anus for a mouth is dribbling the world toward the brink of a possibly nuclear exchange with North Korea, it might be wise to try to remember at least one previous American approach to war even though it's not really a part of anyone's Twitter stream or the all-seeing-all hiding news cycle.

According to David Halberstam, in his monumental pre-Twitter takedown of the notion of meritocracy, the ironically titled "The Best and The Brightest", the sainted John F Kennedy remarked to James Reston, apropos of having had his ass taken to the woodshed over American imperialism by Nikita Kruschev, that he needed to beat up on some little 3rd world country that couldn't be expected to fight back because

“...now we have a problem in trying to make our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.”

[look ma no hands]

Let that sink in while others of our kind are reveling in Ken Burns proto-fascist contention that the Vietnam War was entered into in "good faith". One does not normally associate the brutal slaughter of millions and the near-total destruction of 3 small countries in order to make a nation's power "credible" with anything like "good faith" but, you know, American.

Halberstam's book makes a hash of the currently popular notion that intelligence and an Ivy League education make for better political decisions than knuckle-dragging racist morons like Trump are capable of making. And given that Kennedy and his circle of really smart white men were also profoundly racist, a lot of what passes for "insight" in the era of Trump versus all the smart people is obviously profoundly a-historical and as dumb as the proverbial sackful of hammers.

But I digress.

The bottom line is this: American Presidents and their co-conspirators in the security and defense establishments go to war on a regular basis. And those wars are pretty much always aimed at killing lots of people who aren't white and not part of "The West".

It is also the case they they are often entered into to establish the "credibility of American power", an ever-shifting notion that is, apparently, regularly in need of reconfirmation. And nothing confirms power better than images of little mountains of dead men, women and children of a colour other than American white or black.

You would be hard pressed to find anyone who would question the observation that American power is perceived to be at a very low ebb at the moment; the wailing and the gnashing of teeth over the end of the "liberal global order" can even be heard over the sounds of the record-breaking seven wars that Obama-the-Intelligent conducted during his graceful and educated sojourn in the White House.

It is not so commonly noted but equally clear that yet another invasion of yet another military non-entity like Iraq is not likely to impress anyone the American establishment thinks needs to be impressed with "the credibility of American power". Now that Russia is back on the military intervention circuit and China is transmitting images of its ultra-modern hi-tech weaponry and building military bases in the South China Sea, establishing the "credibility" of American power might take something more along the lines of a limited nuclear exchange with a feisty little rabbit like North Korea.

And who better to establish the innocence of Ken Burns and all those American tax-payers who can't stand being held responsible for the actions of their democratically-elected leaders than Donald "Not My President" Trump, "progressive" America's very own Hitler?

I mean, think about it, once the smoke clears (not the radiation mind you or the global fear and trembling), all Good Americans will be able to blame the war on Evil Clown Trump and most of the dead will be non-white foreigners anyway.

Just the way they like it in the land of the free and home of the brave.

Just the way they blame Bush-Cheney for Iraq and Johnson-Nixon for Vietnam. And hell, they've already forgotten what they did to Korea last time around.

As George Carlin once sagely noted:

What did we do wrong in Vietnam? We pulled out! Huh? Not a very manly<http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllPsychologyIsFreudian> thing to do is it? When you’re fucking people, you gotta stay in there and fuck 'em good. Fuck ‘em all the way, fuck ‘em ‘til the end, stay in there and keep fucking 'em until they’re all dead. We left a few women and children alive in Vietnam and we haven’t felt good about ourselves since!

________________________________
From: Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu>
Sent: Sunday, September 24, 2017 4:26:10 AM
To: David Johnson
Cc: Karen Aram; peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Happy Birthday CIA: Seven Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years

Perhaps a better book than “The Devil's Chessboard” but arguing a similar thesis is Jim Douglass’ "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters” (2010):

"The acclaimed book Oliver Stone called 'the best account I have read of this tragedy and its significance,’ 'JFK and the Unspeakable' details not just how the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy was carried out, but WHY it was done…and why it still matters today.

"At the height of the Cold War, JFK risked committing the greatest crime in human history: starting a nuclear war. Horrified by the specter of nuclear annihilation, Kennedy gradually turned away from his long-held Cold Warrior beliefs and toward a policy of lasting peace. But to the military and intelligence agencies in the United States, who were committed to winning the Cold War at any cost, Kennedy’s change of heart was a direct threat to their power and influence. Once these dark “Unspeakable” forces recognized that Kennedy’s interests were in direct opposition to their own, they tagged him as a dangerous traitor, plotted his assassination, and orchestrated the subsequent cover-up.

"Douglass takes readers into the Oval Office during the tense days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, along on the strange journey of Lee Harvey Oswald and his shadowy handlers, and to the winding road in Dallas where an ambush awaited the President’s motorcade. As Douglass convincingly documents, at every step along the way these forces of the Unspeakable were present, moving people like pawns on a chessboard to promote a dangerous and deadly agenda.

"JFK and the Unspeakable shot up to the top of the bestseller charts when Oliver Stone first brought it to the world’s attention on Bill Maher’s show. Since then, it has been lauded by Mark Lane (author of Rush to Judgment, who calls it 'an exciting work with the drama of a first-rate thriller'), John Perkins (author of 'Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,' who proclaims it is 'arguably the most important book yet written about an American president'), and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who calls it 'a very well-documented and convincing portrait…I urge all Americans to read this book and come to their own conclusions.’”

Optimists believe that a virtuous course for the US government is perverted by conspirators (e.g., Kennedy assassins). Pessimists (realists?) think that that course is already perverse, far above our poor power to add or detract…  —CGE

> On Sep 23, 2017, at 8:19 PM, Carl G. Estabrook <galliher at illinois.edu> wrote:
>
> Chomsky’s "Rethinking Camelot” has  just been republished by Haymarket.
>
> "'Rethinking Camelot' is a thorough analysis of John F. Kennedy's role in the U/S. invasion of Vietnam and a probing reflection on the elite political culture that allowed and encouraged the Cold War. In it, Chomsky dismisses effort to resurrect Camelot—an attractive American myth portraying JFK as a shining knight promising peace, fooled only by assassins bent on stopping this lone hero who wold have unilaterally withdraws from Vietnam had he lived. Chomsky argues that U.S. institutions and political culture, not individual presidents, are the key to understanding U.S. behavior during Vietnam."
>
> —CGE
>
>
>> On Sep 23, 2017, at 8:08 PM, David Johnson via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
>>
>> An excellent complimentary book to Tim Weiner’s “ Legacy of Ashes “ is “ The Devils Chessboard “, which goes into specifics about Allen Dulles and the successes of the CIA in terms of destabilizing lesser devolved countries as well as domestic interference / manipulation  etc., here in the U.S. from the end of World War 2 into the early 1970’s.
>>
>> We should NEVER over estimate our enemy nor under estinate.
>>
>> David J.
>>
>> From: Karen Aram [mailto:karenaram at hotmail.com]
>> Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2017 8:38 AM
>> To: David Johnson
>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] FW: Happy Birthday CIA: Seven Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years
>>
>> Good article, and why many of us, anti-war activists from the past, are often skeptical of individuals who promote violence or counterproductive actions to end war.
>>
>> Tim Weiner's "Legacy of Ashes" is an excellent, well documented history of the CIA, to be recommended to all.
>>
>>
>> From: Peace-discuss <peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net> on behalf of David Johnson via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>> Sent: Saturday, September 23, 2017 8:20:34 AM
>> To: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>> Subject: [Peace-discuss] FW: Happy Birthday CIA: Seven Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Happy Birthday CIA: Seven Truly Terrible Things the Agency Has Done in 70 Years
>>
>>
>> https://www.globalresearch.ca/happy-birthday-cia-seven-truly-terrible-things-the-agency-has-done-in-70-years/5610040
>>
>> By Carey Wedler
>> Global Research, September 22, 2017
>> Activist Post 19 September 2017
>>
>>
>> <image001.jpg>
>> On Monday, President Trump tweeted birthday wishes to the Air Force and the CIA. Both became official organizations 70 years ago on September 18, 1947, with the implementation of the National Security Act of 1947.
>>
>>
>> After spending years as a wartime intelligence agency called the Office of Strategic Services, the agency was solidified as a key player in the federal government’s operations with then-President Harry Truman’s authorization.
>> In the seventy years since, the CIA has committed a wide variety of misdeeds, crimes, coups, and violence. Here are seven of the worst programs they’ve carried out (that are known to the public):
>>
>> 1 – Toppling governments around the world — The CIA is best known for its first coup, Operation Ajax, in 1953, in which it ousted the democratically elected leader of Iran, Mohammed Mossadegh, reinstating the autocratic Shah, who favored western oil interests. That operation, which the CIA now admits to waging with British intelligence, ultimately resulted in the 1979 revolution and subsequent U.S. hostage crisis. Relations between the U.S. and Iran remain strained to this day, aptly described by the CIA-coined term “blowback.”
>> But the CIA has had a hand in toppling a number of other democratically elected governments, from Guatemala (1954) and the Congo (1960) to the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973). The CIA has aimed to install leaders who appease American interests, often empowering oppressive, violent dictators. This is only a partial list of countries where the CIA covertly attempted to exploit and manipulate sovereign nations’ governments.
>> 2 – Operation Paperclip — In one of the more bizarre CIA plots, the agency and other government departments employed Nazi scientists both within and outside the United States to gain an advantage over the Soviets. As summarized by NPR:
>>> The aim [of Operation Paperclip] was to find and preserve German weapons, including biological and chemical agents, but American scientific intelligence officers quickly realized the weapons themselves were not enough.
>>>
>> <image002.jpg>
>> Wernher von Braun (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
>>> They decided the United States needed to bring the Nazi scientists themselves to the U.S. Thus began a mission to recruit top Nazi doctors, physicists and chemists — including Wernher von Braun, who went on to design the rockets that took man to the moon.
>> They kept this plot secret, though they admitted to it upon the release of Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists To America by Annie Jacobsen. In a book review, the CIA wrote that
>>> “Henry Wallace, former vice president and secretary of commerce, believed the scientists’ ideas could launch new civilian industries and produce jobs.”
>> They praised the book’s historical accuracy, noting “that the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, was headed by Kurt Debus, an ardent Nazi.” They acknowledged that
>>> “General Reinhard Gehlen, former head of Nazi intelligence operations against the Soviets, was hired by the US Army and later by the CIA to operate 600 ex-Nazi agents in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany.”
>> Remarkably, they noted that Jacobsen “understandably questions the morality of the decision to hire Nazi SS scientists,” but praise her for pointing out that it was done to fight Soviets. They also made sure to add that the Soviets hired Nazis, too, apparently justifying their own questionable actions by citing their most loathed enemy.
>>
>> 3 – Operation CHAOS — The FBI is widely known for its COINTELPRO schemes to undermine communist movements in the 1950s and anti-war, civil rights, and black power movements in the 1960s, but the CIA has not been implicated nearly as deeply because, technically, the CIA cannot legally engage in domestic spying. But that was of little concern to President Lyndon B. Johnson as opposition to the Vietnam war grew. According to former New York Times journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner, as documented in his extensive CIA history, Legacy of Ashes, Johnson instructed then-CIA Director Richard Helms to break the law:
>> <image003.jpg>
>> Richard Helms (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
>>> In October 1967, a handful of CIA analysts joined in the first big Washington march against the war. The president regarded protesters as enemies of the state. He was convinced that the peace movement was controlled and financed by Moscow and Beijing. He wanted proof. He ordered Richard Helms to produce it.
>>> Helms reminded the president that the CIA was barred from spying on Americans. He says Johnson told him: ‘I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs…’
>>>
>> Helms obeyed. Weiner wrote:
>>
>>> In a blatant violation of his powers under the law, the director of central intelligence became a part-time secret police chief. The CIA undertook a domestic surveillance operation, code-named Chaos. It went on for almost seven years… Eleven CIA officers grew long hair, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.
>>>
>> According to Weiner, “the agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over America.” Because they could not draw a “clear distinction” between the new far left and mainstream opposition to the war, the CIA spied on every major peace organization in the country. President Johnson also wanted them to prove a connection between foreign communists and the black power movement. “The agency tried its best,” Weiner noted, ultimately noting that “the CIA never found a shred of evidence that linked the leaders of the American left or the black-power movement to foreign governments.”
>>
>> 4 – Infiltrating the media — Over the years, the CIA has successfully gained influence in the news media, as well as popular media like film and television. Its influence over the news began almost immediately after the agency was formed. As Weiner explained, CIA Director Allen Dulles established firm ties with newspapers:
>>> Dulles kept in close touch with the men who ran the New York Times, The Washington Post, and the nation’s leading weekly magazines. He could pick up the phone and edit a breaking story, make sure an irritating foreign correspondent was yanked from the field, or hire the services of men such as Time’s Berlin bureau chief and Newsweek’s man in Tokyo.
>>>
>> He continued:
>>
>>> It was second nature for Dulles to plant stories in the press. American newsrooms were dominated by veterans of the government’s wartime propaganda branch, the Office of War Information…The men who responded to the CIA’s call included Henry Luce and his editors at Time, Life, and Fortune; popular magazines such as Parade, the Saturday Review, and Reader’s Digest; and the most powerful executives at CBS News. Dulles built a public-relations and propaganda machine that came to include more than fifty news organizations, a dozen publishing houses, and personal pledges of support from men such as Axel Springer, West Germany’s most powerful press baron.
>>>
>> The CIA’s influence had not waned by 1977 when journalist Carl Bernstein reported on publications with CIA agents in their employ, as well as “more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
>> The CIA has also successfully advised on and influenced numerous television shows, such as Homeland and 24 and films like Zero Dark Thirty and Argo, which push narratives that ultimately favor the agency. According to Tricia Jenkins, author of The CIA in Hollywood: How the Agency Shapes Film & Television, a concerted agency effort began in the 1990s to counteract negative public perceptions of the CIA, but their influence reaches back decades. In the 1950s, filmmakers produced films for the CIA, including the 1954 film adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
>> Researchers Tom Secker and Matthew Alford, whose work has been published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, say their recent Freedom of Information Act requests have shown that the CIA — along with the military — have influenced over 1,800 films and television shows, many of which have nothing to do with CIA or military themes.
>> 5 – Drug-induced Mind control – In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with drugs to determine whether they might be useful in extracting information. As Smithsonian Magazine has noted of the MKUltra project:
>>> The project, which continued for more than a decade, was originally intended to make sure the United States government kept up with presumed Soviet advances in mind-control technology. It ballooned in scope and its ultimate result, among other things, was illegal drug testing on thousands of Americans.
>>>
>> Further:
>>
>>> The intent of the project was to study ‘the use of biological and chemical materials in altering human behavior,’ according to the official testimony of CIA director Stansfield Turner in 1977. The project was conducted in extreme secrecy, Turner said, because of ethical and legal questions surrounding the program and the negative public response that the CIA anticipated if MKUltra should become public.
>>> Under MKUltra, the CIA gave itself the authority to research how drugs could:’ ‘promote the intoxicating effects of alcohol;’ ‘render the induction of hypnosis easier;’ ‘enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture and coercion;’ produce amnesia, shock and confusion; and much more. Many of these questions were investigated using unwitting test subjects, like drug-addicted prisoners, marginalized sex workers and terminal cancer patients– ‘people who could not fight back,’ in the words of Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who introduced LSD to the CIA.
>> Further, as Weiner noted:
>>
>>> Under its auspices, seven prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for seventy-seven consecutive days. When the CIA slipped the same drug to an army civilian employee, Frank Olson, he leaped out of the window of a New York Hotel.
>> Weiner added that senior CIA officers destroyed “almost all of the records” of the programs, but that while the “evidence that remains is fragmentary…it strongly suggests that use of secret prisons for the forcible drug-induced questioning of suspect agents went on throughout the 1950s.”
>>
>> <image004.jpg>
>>
>> Project MKULTRA, the CIA’s Program of Research into Behavioral Modification. Joint Hearing before the Select Committee on Intelligence and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United State Senate, Ninety-Fifth Congress, First Session (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
>> Years later, the CIA would be accused of distributing crack-cocaine into poor black communities, though this is currently less substantiated and supported mostly by accounts of those who claim to have been involved.
>> 6 – Brutal torture tactics — More recently, the CIA was exposed for sponsoring abusive, disturbing terror tactics against detainees at prisons housing terror suspects. An extensive 2014 Senate report documented agents committing sexual abuse, forcing detainees to stand on broken legs, waterboarding them so severely it sometimes led to convulsions, and imposing forced rectal feeding, to name a few examples. Ultimately, the agency had very little actionable intelligence to show for their torture tactics but lied to suggest they did, according to the torture report. Their torture tactics led the International Criminal Court to suggest the CIA, along with the U.S. armed forces, could be guilty of war crimes for their abuses.
>> 7 – Arming radicals — The CIA has a long habit of arming radical, extremist groups that view the United States as enemies. In 1979, the CIA set out to support Afghan rebels in their bid to defeat the Soviet occupation of the Middle Eastern country. As Weiner wrote, in 1979,
>>> “Prompted by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter signed a covert-action order for the CIA to provide the Afghan rebels with medical aid, money, and propaganda.”
>> As Weiner detailed later in his book:
>>
>>> The Pakistani intelligence chiefs who doled out the CIA’s guns and money favored the Afghan factions who proved themselves most capable in battle. Those factions also happened to be the most committed Islamists. No one dreamed that the holy warriors could ever turn their jihad against the United States.
>>>
>> Though some speculate the CIA directly armed Osama bin Laden, that is yet to be fully proven or admitted. What is clear is that western media revered him as a valuable fighter against the Soviets, that he arrived to fight in Afghanistan in1980, and that al-Qaeda emerged from the mujahideen, who were beneficiaries of the CIA’s program. Stanford University has noted that Bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, a prominent Palestinian cleric, “established Al Qaeda from the fighters, financial resources, and training and recruiting structures left over from the anti-Soviet war.” Much of those “structures” were provided by the agency. Intentionally or not, the CIA helped fuel the rise of the terror group.
>> Weiner noted that as the CIA failed in other countries like Libya, by the late 1980s “Only the mujahideen, the Afghan holy warriors, were drawing blood and scenting victory. The CIA’s Afghan operation was now a $700-million-dollar-a-year-program” and represented 80% of the overseas budget of the clandestine services. “The CIA’s briefing books never answered the question of what would happen when a militant Islamic army defeated the godless invaders of Afghanistan,” though Tom Twetten, “the number two man in the clandestine service in the summer of 1988,” was tasked with figuring out what would happen with the Afghan rebels. “We don’t have any plan,” he concluded.
>> Apparently failing to learn their lesson, the CIA adopted nearly the exact same policy in Syria decades later, arming what they called “moderate rebels” against the Assad regime. Those groups ultimately aligned with al-Qaeda groups. One CIA-backed faction made headlines last year for beheading a child (though President Trump cut off the CIA program in June, the military continues to align with “moderate” groups).
>> Unsurprisingly, this list is far from complete. The CIA has engaged in a wide variety of extrajudicial practice, and there are likely countless transgressions we have yet to learn about.
>> As Donald Trump cheers the birthday of an agency he himself once criticized, it should be abundantly clear that the nation’s covert spy agency deserves scrutiny and skepticism — not celebration.
>> Featured image is from the author.
>> The original source of this article is Activist Post
>>
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