.
THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:
by John Stockwell
A lecture given in October, 1987
Part II - Part I Here
I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not
submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow
off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our
censorship laws....
In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was like
a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger,
Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making important
decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and
run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being
done....
When the world's gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game where
everything's owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erased
the board and started over has been to have big world wars, and erase
countries and bomb cities and bomb banks and then start from scratch
again. This is not an option to us now because of all these 52,000
nuclear weapons....
The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing
further almost one third of the countries in the world today....
By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public
record. The 50 covert actions - these are secret, but that has been
leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I
urge you not to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and
tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I could
be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate
yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don't do politics will
be done'. If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out
from the records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank
and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized and excited to do
things that are not in your interest to do....
Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one.
Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan.
We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua....
[When the U.S. doesn't like a government], they send the CIA in, with
its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to tear apart
the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for
putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the
government come to the U.S.'s terms, or the government will collapse
altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind
up with their own choice of people in power.
Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly
textbook-ish. What we're talking about is going in and deliberately
creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market,
where children can't go to school, where women are terrified inside
their homes as well as outside their homes, where government
administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the
hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where
international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If
you ask the state department today what is their official explanation of
the purpose of the Contras, they say it's to attack economic targets,
meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're
attacking a lot more.
To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force
of Somoza's ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the
counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until
we allocated money. We've armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots
on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical
supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we've sent them
in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have
systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges,
government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the
produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer
has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.
If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this,
and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual', that they were
circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with
visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how
you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up
engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it
won't work, things you can do to make a society simply cease to
function.
Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers,
teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators.
You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused
such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the
presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is a
technique that they're using to traumatize the society so that it can't
function.
I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to
understand what your government and its agents are doing. They go into
villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to watch they
castrate the father, they peel the skin off his face, they put a grenade
in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch they
gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for
variety, they make the parents watch while they do these
things to the children.
This is nobody's propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American
witnesses for peace who have gone down there and they have filmed and
photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've
happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and
children. These are the activities done by these contras. The contras
are the people president Reagan calls `freedom fighters'. He says
they're the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the whole
world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.
Read Contra Terror by Reed Brodie [1], former assistant Attorney General
of New York State. Read The Contras by Dieter Eich. [4] Read With the
Contras by Christopher Dickey. [2] This is a main-line journalist, down
there on a grant with the Council on Foreign Relations, a slightly to
the right of the middle of the road organization. He writes a book that
sets a pox on both your houses, and then he accounts about going in on
patrol with the contras, and describes their activities. Read Witness
for Peace: What We have Seen and Heard. Read the Lawyer's Commission on
Human Rights. Read The Violations of War on Both Sides by the Americas
Watch. [15] And there are many, many more documentations of details, of
names, of the incidents that have happened.
Part of a de-stabilization is propaganda, to dis-credit the targeted
government. This one actually began under Jimmy Carter. He authorized
the CIA to go in and try to make the Sandinistas look to be evil. So in
1979 [when] they came in to power, immediately we were trying to cast
them as totalitarian, evil, threatening Marxists. While they abolished
the death sentence, while they released 8,000 national guardsmen that
they had in their custody that they could have kept in prison, they said
`no. Unless we have evidence of individual crimes, we're not going to
hold someone in prison just because they were associated with the former
administration.' While they set out to launch a literacy campaign to
teach the people to read and write, which is something that the dictator
Somoza, and us supporting him, had never bothered to get around to
doing. While they set out to build 2,500 clinics to give the country
something resembling a public health policy, and access to medicines, we
began to label them as totalitarian dictators, and to attack them in the
press, and to work with this newspaper `La Prensa', which - it's finally
come out and been admitted, in Washington - the U.S. government is
funding: a propaganda arm.
[Reagan and the State dept. have] been claiming they're building a war
machine that threatens the stability of Central America. Now the truth
is, this small, poor country has been attacked by the world's richest
country under conditions of war, for the last 5 years. Us and our army -
the death they have sustained, the action they have suffered - it makes
it a larger war proportionally than the Vietnam war was to the U.S. In
addition to the contra activities, we've had U.S. Navy ships supervising
the mining of harbors, we've sent planes in and bombed the capital,
we've had U.S. military planes flying wing-tip to wing-tip over the
country, photographing it, aerial reconnaissance. They don't have any
missiles or jets they can send up to chase us off. We are at war with
them. They have not retaliated yet with any kind of war action against
us, but we do not give them credit with having the right to defend
themselves. So we claim that the force they built up, which is obviously
purely defensive, is an aggressive force that threatens the stability of
all of Central America.
We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing from
Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity, there is
no evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.
We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International
observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have witnessed
in Central America in many years. We said they were fraudulent, they
were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system. Instead we said, the
elections that were held in El Salvador were models of democracy to be
copied elsewhere in the world. And then the truth came out about that
one. And we learned that the CIA had spent 2.2 million dollars to make
sure that their choice of candidates - Duarte - would win. They did
everything, we're told, by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff
the ballot boxes....
I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse Helmes]
calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn't like, he
doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and embarrass the
U.S.
We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to finance
their revolution. This doesn't make sense. We're at war with them, we're
dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union, flying things
back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket ships watching
everything that flies out of that country, and into it. How are they
going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into the U.S.? Not
likely! However, there are Nicaraguans, on these bases in Honduras, that
have planes flying into CIA training camps in Florida, Alabama,
Louisiana, several times a week.
Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that the
CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK. Read The
Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia. For 20 years the CIA was helping
the Kuomantang to finance itself and then to get rich smuggling heroin.
When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had
been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced
them - we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with
crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back
out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the
U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it's
the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state department
started waving this red herring around a couple of years ago, and the
other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the
Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain't true, the
contras are smuggling drugs'.
We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's
happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism' we call
it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television and
says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training terrorists'. We blame
the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today, and there
is misery, because the world's richest nation has set out to create
conditions of misery, and obviously we're bound to have some effect. The
misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it's the result of our
destabilization program. And despite that, and despite some grumbling in
the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got a much higher
percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who's supposed to be
so popular in this country. And all observers are saying that people are
still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.
Now it gets tricky. We're saying that the justification for more aid,
possibly for an invasion of the country - and mind you, president Reagan
has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense Weinberger
began to say that it's inevitable - we claim that the justification is
that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million dollars in arms in
military to make it its big client state, the Soviet bastion in this
hemisphere. And that's true. They do have a lot of arms in there now.
But the question is, how did they get invited in? You have to ask
yourself, what's the purpose of this destabilization program? For this I
direct you back to the Newsweek article in Sept. 1981, where they
announce the fact that the CIA was beginning to put together this force
of Somoza's ex-guard. Newsweek described it as `the only truly evil,
totally unacceptable factor in
the Nicaraguan equation'. They noted that neither the white house nor
the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance of winning. So then they
asked, rhetorically, `what's the point?' and they concluded that the
point is that by attacking the country, you can force the Sandinistas
into a more radical position, from which you have more ammunition to
attack them.
And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet aid to
defend themselves from the attack from the world's richest country, and
now we can stand up to the American people and say, `see? they have all
the Soviet aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's the game plan of the Reagan
Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they have been working on
this since 1981, they have been stopped by the will of the American
people so far, but they're working harder than ever to engineer their
war there.
Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with
Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice. Like the Church
committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had
run several hundred a year, and we'd been in the business of running
covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're talking about 10 to
20 thousand covert actions.
CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are not so
bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a politician some money so he'll
throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on
your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it's
still illegal intervention in other countries' affairs, raising the
question of whether or not we are going to have a
world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going to
be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and brutalize the
weakest, and ignore the laws?
But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about
a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony by CIA
directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case
officers, documents gotten out of the government under the freedom of
information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning
journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and read from
these things, classic CIA operations that we know about, some of them
very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, the Congo,
Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay - the CIA organized the
overthrow of constitutional democracies. Read the book Covert Action: 35
years of Deception by the journalist Godswood. [6]
Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was being
grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the democratic
government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador Allende had been
killed. And he said, `The issues are much too important for the Chilean
voters to be left to decide for themselves'.
We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're doing
against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean war, where
we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in Vietnam, very
much like the one that we're running in Nicaragua today, that tracked us
directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, The Hidden History of the
Korean War by I. F. Stone. [14] Read Deadly Deceits by Ralph McGehee [9]
for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan,
and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam,
Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanka, the
CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The
first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of
the Mesquite indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they
could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El
Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped
form and train the death
squads.
In El Salvador specifically, under the `Alliance for Progress' in the
early 1960's, the CIA helped put together the treasury police. These are
the people that haul people out at night today, and run trucks over
their heads. These are the people that the Catholic church tells us,
have killed something over 50,000 civilians in the last 5 years. And we
have testimony before our Congress that as late as 1982, leaders of the
treasury police were still on the CIA payroll.
Then you have the `Public Safety Program.' I have to take just a minute
on this one because it's a very important principle involved that we
must understand, if we're to understand ourselves and the world that we
live in. In this one, the CIA was working with policeforces throughout
Latin America for about 26 years, teaching them how to wrap up
subversive networks by capturing someone and interrogating them,
torturing them, and then getting names and arresting the others and
going from there. Now, this was such a brutal and such a bloody
operation, that Amnesty International began to complain and publish
reports. Then there were United Nations hearings. Then eventually our
Congress was forced to yield to international pressure and investigate
it, and they found the horror that was being done, and by law they
forced it to stop. You can read these reports -- the Amnesty
International findings, and our own Congressional hearings.
These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according to CIA's
estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the Angolan operation that I
was sitting on in Washington, managing the task force. They add up.
We'll never know how many people have been killed in them. Obviously a
lot. Obviously at least a million. 800,000 in Indonesia alone.
Undoubtedly the minimum figure has to be 3 million. Then you add in a
million people killed in Korea, 2 million people killed in the Vietnam
war, and you're obviously getting into gross millions of people...
We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families out
at night and castrate the father with the children watching, because
they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute teams right
back into our country and do the same thing to us - they're not scared
of us. For slightly different reasons, but also obvious reasons, we
don't do these things in England, or France, or Germany, or Sweden, or
Italy, or Japan. What comes out at you immediately is that these 1 to 3
million direct victims, the dead, and in these other wars, they're
people of the third world. They're people of the Metumba mountains of
the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now the hills of
northern Nicaragua - 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian
army advisors in Nicaragua. We are not killing Cuban advisors. We're not
killing very many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in
Nicaragua are peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA's
chosen battlefield. Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far, far
more Catholics than anything else.
Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua, they do
not come back to the U.S. and click their heels and suddenly become
responsible citizens. They see themselves - they have been functioning
above the laws, of God, and the laws of man - they've come back to this
country, and they've continued their operations as far as they can get
by with them. And we have abundant documentation of that as well. The MH-Chaos
program, exposed in the late 60's and shut down, re-activated by
President Reagan to a degree - we don't have the details yet - in which
they were spending a billion dollars to manipulate U.S. student, and
labor organizations. The MK-ultra program. For 20 years, working through
over 200 medical schools and mental hospitals, including Harvard medical
school, Georgetown, some of the biggest places we've got, to experiment
on American citizens with disease, and drugs.
They dragged a barge through San Francisco bay, leaking a virus, to
measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched a whooping
cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the
community if all the kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the 2 or
3 with weak constitutions that might die in the process. They put light
bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo - make
people have double vision, so you couldn't see straight - and hid
cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when the
trains are zipping past - if everybody has vertigo and they can't see
straight and they're bumping into each other.
Colonel White - oh yes, and I can't not mention the disease
experimentations - the use of deadly diseases. We launched - when we
were destabilizing Cuba for 7 years - we launched the swine fever
epidemic, in the hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs - a
virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.
I'm not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence, that
there is any truth or indication to the rumor that the CIA and its
experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do have it documented
that the CIA has been experimenting on people, with viruses. And now we
have some deadly, killer viruses running around in society. And it has
to make you wonder, and it has to make you worry.
Colonel White wrote from retirement - he was the man who was in charge
of this macabre program - he wrote, `I toiled whole-heartedly in the
vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could a red-blooded
American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the
blessings of the all highest?' Now that program, the MK-ultra program,
was eventually exposed by the press in 1972, investigated by the
Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You can dig up the
Congressional record and read it for yourself.
There's one book called `In Search of the Manchurian Candidate'. It's
written by John Marks, based on 14,000 documents gotten out of the
government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for yourselves.
The thing was shut down but not one CIA case officer who was involved
was in any way punished. Not one case officer involved in these
experimentations on the American public, lost a single paycheck for what
they had done.
The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred
journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business. The
latest flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a half ago.
Lesley Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for
having
been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in
Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create
sympathy for the neutron bomb.
The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books,
paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in it,
the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the
royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A professor
at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA to
write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and
graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its operations on campuses
and build files on students.
And then we have evidence - now, which has been hard to collect in the
past but we knew it was happening - of CIA agents participating, trying
to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this
country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a
Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That man is a
Sandinista lover.' A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate
our elections.
All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.
In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet take-over, we
say. Another big operation in which we said the same thing was Angola,
1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing - Cubans and
Soviets.
Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight because I
wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a copy of that
book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however - please do
not rush out and buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of
my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book you'll be
donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!
If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your
friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to just sort
of put a copy down in your belt...
I don't know what the solution is when a society gets into censorship,
government censorship, but that's what we're in now. Do the rules
change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from the CIA
censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail,
without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for having
violated our censorship laws....
So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying to us,
running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up for our next war, the
Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it, President Reagan
has a fixation on Nicaragua. He came into office saying that we
shouldn't be afraid of war, saying we have to face and erase the scars
of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, `We will do whatever is necessary
to defeat the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRoque, at the Center for Defense
Information in Washington, says this is the most elaborately prepared
invasion that the U.S. has ever done. At least that he's witnessed in
his 40 years of association with our military.
We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big Pine I,
Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenada, Big Pine III. We have troops right
now in Honduras preparing. We've built 12 bases, including 8 airstrips.
Obviously we don't need 8 airstrips in Honduras for any purpose, except
to support the invasion of Nicaragua. We've built radar stations around,
to survey and watch. Some of these ventures have been huge ones.
Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000 troops, rehearsing
the invasion of Nicaragua.
And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of these
evil Communist dictators in Managua, just two days drive from Harlington,
Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way). I saw an ad on TV just
two days ago in which they said that it was just two hours from Managua
to Texas. All of this getting us ready for the invasion of Nicaragua,
for our next war.
Most of the people - 75% of the people - are polled as being against
this action. However, President Eisenhower said, `The people of the
world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are
going to have to give in and give it to them'. But to date, the leaders
never have, they've always been able to outwit the people, us, and get
us into the wars when they've chosen to do so.
People ask, how is this possible? I get this all the time.... Americans
are decent people. They are nice people. And they're insulated in the
worlds that they live in, and they don't understand
and we don't read our history. History is the history of war. Of leaders
of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young men off to
fight.
In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record. We have
over 200 incidents in which we put our troops into other countries to
force them to our will. Now we're being prepared to hate the Sandinistas.
The leaders are doing exactly what they have done time and again
throughout history. In the past we were taught to hate and fight the
Seminole Indians, after the leaders decided to annex Florida. To hate
and fight the Cherokee Indians after they found gold
in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.
In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to
orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got people worked up,
they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people angry enough
that we could go in and do....
We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the
people resisted. But once again, we haven't read our history. Kate
Richards-O'Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the U.S.
are nothing but brutesalles, producing sons to be put in the army, to be
made into fertilizer'. She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war talk.
The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a
tragic mistake.... 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2 million
Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually
stronger in the Pacific basin.
You look around this society today to see if there's any evidence of our
preparations for war, and it hits you in the face....
'Join the Army. Be all that you can be'. Now if there was truth in
advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of
young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their
intestines wrapped around their necks because that's what war is really
all about.
If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they
would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of whom died violent deaths
from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting
itself.
Then you have President Reagan.... He talks about the glory of war, but
you have to ask yourself, where was he when wars were being fought that
he was young enough to fight in them? World War II, and the Korean war.
Where he was was in Hollywood, making films, where the blood was catsup,
and you could wash it off and go out to dinner afterwards....
Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight in a
war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running sloppy, illegal,
un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you'll forgive my
egotism, at that time I was running professional breaking and entering
operations....
What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester
Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft deferment for a physical
disability, and taught physical education in a girls' school in
Switzerland during the war.
Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that `you can always
call cruise missiles back'.... Now, you can call back a B-52, and you
can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile is different.... When it
lands, it goes boom!. And I would prefer that the man with the finger on
the button could understand the difference. This is the man that calls
the MX a peace-maker. This is the man who's gone on television and told
us that nuclear war could be winnable. This is the man who's gone on
television and proposed that we might want to drop demonstration [atom]
bombs in Europe to show people that we're serious people. This is the
man who likens the Contras to the moral equivalents of our own founding
fathers. This is the man who says South Africa is making progress on
racial equality. This is the man who says that the Sandinistas are
hunting down and hounding and persecuting Jews in Nicaragua. And the
Jewish leaders go on TV the next day in this country and say there are 5
Jewish families in Nicaragua, and they're not having any problems at
all. This is the man who says that they're financing their revolution by
smuggling drugs into the U.S. And the DEA says, `It ain't true, it's
president Reagan's Contras that are doing it'....
[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said `If there has to
be a bloodbath then let's get it over with'. Now you have to think about
this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing a bloodbath of
our own youth. There was an outcry of the press, so 3 days later he said
it again to make sure no one had misunderstood him.
Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read The Book of Quotes
[12]. Read On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency [3] by Ronnie Dugger.
It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter that President
Reagan has a fixation on Armageddon. The Village Voice 18 months ago
published an article citing the 11 times that President Reagan publicly
has talked about the fact that we are all living out Armageddon
today....
[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man that
preaches that we should get on our knees and beg for God to send the
rapture down. Hell's fires on earth so the chosen can go up on high and
all the other people can burn in hell's fires on earth. President Reagan
sees himself as playing the role of the greatest leader of all times
forever. Leading us into Armageddon. As he goes out at the end of his
long life, we'll all go out with him....
Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we
destabilizing a third of the countries in the world today when there's
so much instability and misery already?
What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The easiest...
buttons to punch are the buttons of macho, aggression, paranoia, hate,
anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and that's just 2 hours
from San Diego, CA. This gets people excited, they don't think. It's the
pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor. When you get people worked up
to hate, they'll let you spend huge amounts of money on arms.
Read The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills. [11] Read The Permanent War
Complex by Seymour Melman. [10] CIA covert actions have the function of
keeping the world hostile and unstable....
We can't take care of the poor, we can't take care of the old, but we
can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize
Nicaragua....
Why arms instead of schools? .... They can make gigantic profits off the
nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and the paranoia, and the
secrecy. And that's why they're committed to building more and more and
more weapons, is because they're committed to making a profit. And
that's what the propaganda, and that's what the hysteria is all about.
Now people say, `What can I do?'....
The youth did rise up and stop the Vietnam war....
We have to join hands with the people in England, and France, and
Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and China, and India - the
countries that have the bomb, and the others that are trying to get it.
And give our leaders no choice. They have to find some other way to do
business other than to motivate us through hate and paranoia and anger
and killing, or we'll find other leaders to run the country.
Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I've heard her say,
very effectively, `Tell people to get out and get to work on the
problem.... You'll feel better'....
'What can I do?'.... If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see for
yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for yourself. Go to Pantex
on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there. The place where
we make 10 nose-cones a day, 70 a week, year in and year out. He
[Admiral LaRock] said, `I'd tell them, if they feel comfortable lying
down in front of trucks with bombs on them, to lie down in front of
trucks with bombs on them.' But he said, `I'd tell them that they can't
wait. They've got to start tomorrow, today, and do it, what they can,
every day of their lives'.
*****
[1] Reed Brody.
Contra Terror.
??, .
[2] Christopher Dickey.
With the Contras.
??, .
[3] Dugger, Ronnie.
On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency.
McGraw-Hill, 1983.
[4] Eich, Dieter.
The Contras: Interviews with Anti-Sandinistas.
Synthesis, 1985.
[5] Kinzer, Stephan and Stephen Schlesinger.
Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in
Guatemala.
Doubleday, 1983.
[6] Godswood, Roy (editor).
Covert Actions: 35 Years of Deception.
Transaction, 1980.
[7] Kwitny, Jonathon.
Endless Enemies: America's Worldwide War Against It's Own Best
Interests.
Congdon and Weed, 1984.
[8] LaFeber, Walter.
Inevitable Revolutions; The United States in Central America.
Norton, 1984.
[9] McGehee, Ralph.
Deadly Deceits: My Twenty-Five Years in the CIA.
Sheridan Square, 1983.
[10] Melman, Seymour.
The Permanent War Complex.
Simon and Shuster, 1974.
[11] Mills, C. Wright.
The Power Elite.
Oxford, 1956.
[12] ??
The Book of Quotes.
McGraw-Hill, 1979.
[13] Stockwell, John.
In Search of Enemies.
Norton, 1978.
[14] Stone, I.F.
Hidden History of the Korean War.
Monthly Review, 1969.
[15] The Americas Watch.
The Violations of War on Both Sides.
*****
The policy of The Other Americas Radio regarding reproducing this
lecture is that while they would like to see it reproduced and passed
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dollars, and they have other tapes as well) at:
The Other Americas Radio
Programs & News on Latin America.
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Santa Barbara, CA 93102
(805) 569-5381
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