Once communism began to intimidate the American way of life – the public was never informed how exactly – the National Security Act was established in 1947. Overtly designed to “protect” us from communism, the National Security Agency performed covert attacks against democratically elected socialist and communist leaders. Iran was its first target. The agency wanted to overthrow popular communist leader Mohammad Mosaddeq for the purpose of oil control. The shah, an old Iranian monarch, took over and terrorized the country as we made $18 billion in weapon sales, according to Frank Dorrel’s video compilation “What I’ve Learned about U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World.”
Under the Nixon Administration, the CIA overthrew Chilean Marxist leader Salvador Allende. The CIA denied trying to kidnap Chile’s army chief Rene Schneider in order to prevent Allende from coming to power, though it established a plan to kidnap him and later paid $35,000 to the group that killed him. The only “danger” of Allende, who promised to nationalize the nations copper mines, was that he posed a threat to our business interests in the country, according to CNN.com archives.
We also ran out Jacobo Arbenz, a democratically elected socialist. Before his “sudden death,” he had turned the land, of which royalty owned 75 percent, over to the peasants. We also bombed their capital; an unrecorded thousands died, a project that the CIA called “operation success.”
Our government’s favorite tactic for getting America’s support for foreign agendas is to sensationalize an enemy (our mainstream media is now sensationalizing Hugo Chavez of Venezuela). One way we attempted to do this was Operation Northwoods, a public relations project established to sensationalize Castro and his socialist administration. This project was never “officially” actualized. Sub-projects included mock attacks on Guantanamo Bay, rumors about secret radios, real or simulated sinking of Cuban refugees and the destruction of American aircraft, according to journalist James Bamford. There are also eight reports of attempts to assassinate Castro. One plan included LSD in his cigars. Castro claims we attacked him more than a dozen times.
CIA operative Theodore Shackley, who oversaw Allende’s demise, moved on to secret wars in Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, soon after we were giving up on subduing Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam. They did not attack Vietcong but anyone who didn’t sympathize with Western power, according to Dorrel.
The CIA’s charter gave the agency a vague authority to violate international law. We gained knowledge of many abuses of authority thanks to John Stockwell, a former CIA chief. According to him, 6 million people have died in what he calls the third World War, because we attacked third-world countries instead of sophisticated ones. We also support the abuse of third-world countries by coddling our allies, according to Dorrel.
Suharto’s military regime in Indonesia came to power in 1965 with the support of the CIA. One agent confessed to making a list of people for the regime to kill, as he marked off the list from 1965 to 1967, a half a million to 1 million people were killed.
In 1975, Indonesia invaded East Timor, but only after Suharto got the go-ahead from President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who were both visiting him. Cambodia was our official enemy, so our secretary of state spoke out against this rampant genocide, which was needed.
The numbers of Timorese deaths were larger in proportion, yet were virtually ignored by our media, simply because Indonesia was our official ally. More than one-third of the Timorese were killed, and the military closed the country’s borders to further secure it from journalists, whom they had abused by cutting off genitals and stuffing them in mouths, suffocating them and shooting them – in that order, according to broadcast journalist Amy Goodman in “Genocides in Indonesia and East Timor.”
Let’s not forget the Panama deception. On Dec. 19, 1989, the U.S. secretly mobilized 26,000 troops for a midnight attack, a testing ground for the invasion of Iraq. We focused on Manuel Noriega, whom the CIA has kept on payroll since the ’60s, and whose pay the elder Bush increased, despite evidence of drug trafficking. We focused on him instead of the Panamanian people, who suffered from the attack. Noriega helped us during our covert war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua by supplying us weapons and drug money, according to Dorrel.
One of the most outright lies told to us was the extent of our involvement with Vietnam, which began off the books, when the CIA arrived in the country soon after its revolt from France in 1954. We had 15,000 soldiers there, whom we called “advisers.” The 1964 staged Gulf of Tonkin “attack” gave Johnson an overt excuse to “invade,” a recent confession of the NSA, according to a 2005 New York Times article.
The CIA has invaded country after country: El Salvador, Nicaragua (where we organized secret armies using the Mosquito Indians), Guatemala (where we sent Honduran armies), Taiwan, Tibet (during the Korean conflict) and Congo. Because of these occupational actions, the United States, which contains 5 percent of the world’s population, owns 40 percent of the world’s resources, according to Dorrel.
Is this the spread of democracy? Using the word “communist” in order to plan attacks without the knowledge of Congress? Are we under a presidency or a dictatorship, when Bush says he is above the law and will enforce the Patriot Act even if it is not a law, and when he signs legislation before it has reached Congress, or when he uses intelligence to spy on peaceful antiwar organizations (see “U.S. a Dictatorship?” on YouTube.com)? Or when he is caught paying off reporters $1.6 billion in two years, an illegal practice according to the governmental accounting office?
Soon after 9/11, from which we also did a shoddy job of defending ourselves (the FBI tried several times to warn us of al-Qaeda members in our flight schools, plane hijacking and attacks on the Pentagon, according to cbsnews.com), Bush declared a “war on terrorism,” as if terrorism could be subdued by force (historical evidence, including Clinton’s bombing of Bin Laden’s camps, proves that we cannot force terrorism away, according to historian Howard Zinn).
We are learning that al-Qaeda is an enemy of Iraq, though Bush justified his war plans by telling us that Iraq harbored and supported al-Qaeda. He recently corrected himself simply by denying he made those claims. But we must “stay the course” in order to “protect our freedom,” in a country where minimum wage is a joke next to inflation, where presidential candidates who’ve acquired big money (during Bush’s first election, he made $220 million, Zinn said, while Ralph Nader, the third party, collected money not from big businesses, but from people who supported his cause) will not sympathize with the have-nots and who will cut taxes for the haves.
We have to protect our right to privacy, which the Patriot Act has now superseded. We have to protect our right against unreasonable search or seizure, except our NSA director Michael V. Hayden now explains that warrants are not required as long as he “believes” that intrusion is reasonable, acording to “U.S. a Dictatorship?” We have to protect our freedom of speech, though our current administration illegally pays off the media.
And we have to attack countries that pose a threat, though we really just want to keep that percentage of the world’s resources.
None of this information is new, though for a long time it was kept classified in order to keep America thinking it is morally superior to others. But supporting terrorists or oppressive countries, secretly bombing and invading defenseless civilizations and overthrowing democratically elected leaders are not signs of moral superiority. Neither do these operations protect anything.
As long as we keep believing what the powerful wish us to, that we are “good guys” and therefore deserve to do what we want, we will not look for injustice here or anywhere, and in our minds, we will not be free to seek justice.