John Stockwell
The Secret Wars of the CIA
[The Other Americas Radio; A two-part speech.]
John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency
and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the
task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and
was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell's book "In Search
of Enemies", published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.
This is a transcript of a lecture he gave in June, 1986.
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"The Inner Workings of the National Security Council and the
CIA's Covert Actions in Angola, Central America and Vietnam"
I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee 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 the
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....
I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date
and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S.
Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this
operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would
meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to
distribute to our forces for us....
What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you
will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically
graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church
committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran
several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert
action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a
year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.
What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national security
syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the
press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into
El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so
directly. I'm going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism;
that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In
doing this, we'll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central
American war.
Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another,
already in the public records. You can dig it all out for yourselves, without
coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of
the CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress,
hearings before the Senate Church committee, research by scholars, witness of
people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that we'll be
talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly
conservative. We come from South Texas, East Texas....
I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my background,
to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war, and I took the
job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest of
the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the
struggle, to project American values and save the world for our brand of
democracy. And I believed this. I went out and worked hard....
What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ... that nothing
we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests very much. We
didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the
heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the point.
We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our
function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the
U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry Devlin,
a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him
killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa division
Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving
me an explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'sir, you know, this stuff
doesn't make any sense, we're not saving anybody from anything, and we are
corrupting people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S.
look bad'.
And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, you're trying to
think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture,
who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret information,
and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in
Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your
job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that
point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big
decisions. Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.
And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very
powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it
on the American people, saying, `if you knew what I know about the situation
in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to
intervene.'
I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern.
A formal study was done in the State Department and published internally,
highly classified, called the Macomber [sp?] report, concluding that the CIA
had no business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that
our presence there was not justified, there were no national security
interests that the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself.
We didn't need to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in
Africa at that time.
I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my
life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It
was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no cease-fire. Young men
were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South
Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next
to my compound. I was up-country in Tay-ninh. They were laid out next door,
until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.
I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I
reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house -
when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The post was too important
to close down. (2). They weren't going to get the man transferred or fired
because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at
working with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn't
have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.'
But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber'
to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn't get another
good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against my career.
So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn't
approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the
next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do this sort
of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the
CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.
They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually
chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over
their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the
people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them
beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized
kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to
school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the
horrors of what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.
What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the
intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all
about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what I found was
that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the
corruption in the South Vietnamese army....
Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton
army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a
month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then
he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the communist
forces - that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He
could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul
heroin.
And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there
was no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds
of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a serious problem
because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a
big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the
dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam....
I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret
war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976].... and what I figured out was that in this
job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this
office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the
information about Angola, about the whole world, and I would finally
understand national security. And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know.
I knew the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard
way. But the question was where did the U.S. government fit into this thing,
and I had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war....
I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly
important, threatening information, threatening to our national security
interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA,
but I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national
security complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And so I took the
job.... Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I
had found these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite
frankly, was fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of the NSC in
which we were making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean
literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every
one of these meetings....
You can change the names in my book [about Angola] and you've got
Nicaragua.... the basic structure, all the way through including the mining
of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led
the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the
Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was
escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't gone in
first. We put arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered
with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban
army troops. We brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban
army. And they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we
were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it
was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests there that should
have been defended that way.
There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three
movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one. The
assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no
bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the
butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work with
whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in
Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified
to run the country and the friendliest to the U.S.
We brushed these people aside, forced Nat Davis to resign, and proceeded with
our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn't want to be
pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them,
they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted
a walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap
victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000
Africans died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.
Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to
the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To just
about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I put
together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all
over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and military activities into
Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every
way they could think of, to get stories into the U.S. press, the world press,
to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets
introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over
the world.
Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous
statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and
the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the
conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the
militarization of the conflict.
And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was
originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed this
thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to
the press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call
him on the phone and say, `call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation
could change overnight, we'll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four
paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on
events, to create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola.
When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.
And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA
director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam - he gave
36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were
doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are
perjury, and it's a felony to lie to the Congress.
He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely
with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with
them, giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were
staying well away from them. They were concerned about these white
mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a very sensitive issue, hiring
whites to go into a black African country, to help you impose your will on
that black African country by killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The
Congress was concerned we might be involved in that, and he assured them we
had nothing to do with it.
We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into
Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about that.
They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said no, and we
were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said `no, we
had people going in to look at the situation and coming back out'. We had 24
people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons, installing
communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody
inside the country.
In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be
alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful, or
at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they
went ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the
country.
At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the
eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from the
CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes
of the world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's impolitic.
We had hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified with them. And
that's illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We
were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.
After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the
MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be
our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the MPLA had Gulf oil back in
Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians
protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were
still mucking around in Northern Angola.
You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets
from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians to
install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn't buy
[the Soviet Union's] Aeroflot.... David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa
and comes back and holds press conferences, in which he says that we have no
problem doing business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.
I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know what we'd
done in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate
- I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able
to take my story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots
of other shows.
I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after
having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see what
communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat
babies for breakfast. And I found they don't. I went to Budapest, a country
that even national geographic admits is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to
talk to Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.
I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard
Coard and Phyllis Coard, to see - these were all educated people, and
experienced people - and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to
do, they had rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly to hear them.
And then of course I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against
them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he
was killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things,
these indicators, the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he and I
were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade
Grenada in the near future.
I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book after
book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on the subject
of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I *urge you to read*.
In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what
they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editors
select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and
understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and
articles for yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you'll see, the
issues are very, very important.
I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have
done studies, people who are leading different situations. I went to
Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted
longer and evolved to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a
chance, after running something from Washington, to go to a country that was
under attack, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and
see what happens when you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or
bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the people,
who have been shot, or hit, or blown up....
We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed
since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have been killed
in these things.... Some of them are very, very bloody.
The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in
that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that
operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model
operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it
eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also
eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the
communist party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's
report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert
action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.
Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a covert
action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many years, with a
propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country, of the evils
of communist China, and attacking them, as we're doing in Nicaragua today,
with an army that was being launched against them to parachute in and boat in
and destabilize the country. And this led us directly into the Korean war.
U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years, with
greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda, deceiving the American
people about what was happening. Panicking people in Vietnam to create
migrations to the south so they could photograph it and show how people were
fleeing communism. And on and on, until they got us into the Vietnam war, and
2,000,000 people were killed.
There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the
past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you're killing 1
to 3 million communists, that's great. President Reagan has gone public and
said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem,
though, is that these people killed by our national security activities are
not communists. They're not Russians, they're not KGB. In the field we used
to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like
professional football players - we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an
operation, and then Tuesday you're at a banquet together drinking toasts and
talking.
The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world.
That's the common denominator that you come up with. People of the third
world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Mitumba mountains
of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of
northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists
than communists. Most of them couldn't give you an intelligent definition of
communism, or of capitalism.
Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If you want
to get an easy-read of the history of our involvement in Central America, read
Walter LaFeber's book, "Inevitable Revolutions" . We have dominated the area
since 1820. We've had a policy of dominion, of excluding other countries,
other industrial powers from Europe, from competing with us in the area.
Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how military this has
been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for a total
of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican Republic 4 times. Haiti, we occupied
it for 12 years. We put our troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6 times,
Guatemala once, plus a CIA covert action to overthrow the democratic
government there once. Honduras, 7 times. And by the way, we put 12,000
troops into the Soviet Union during that same period of time.
In the 1930's there was public and international pressure about our marines in
Nicaragua....
The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the puppet,
Colonel Armas in a coup] died violent deaths, and amnesty international tells
us that the governments we've supported in power there since then, have killed
80,000 people. You can read about that one in the book "Bitter Fruit", by
Kinzer and Schlesinger. Kinzer's a New York Times Journalist... or Jonathan
Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter, his book "Endless Enemies" all
discuss this....
However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this
program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the rich, and not to the
people of the countries involved. And while we were doing this, while we were
trying, at least saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and
Latin America, the CIA was doing its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming
the police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With the
leaders on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.
We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin America
for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating
people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan
Mitrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in
Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the
master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the
right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID'
written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from.
They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine
enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth
and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the
individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can
register.
Now how do you teach torture? Dan Mitrione: `I can teach you about torture,
but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your
hands and try it yourselves.'
... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie
there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors
and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And
when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the
streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and
the government.
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who
was in this program for 2 years - tortured in Brazil for 2 years - she
testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most
horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were
not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't break mental contact with them the way
you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people....
There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only Gestapo
maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it's people
that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing
these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it
in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create
a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let "them" go and
run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going
on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it's
ok because we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're just as
responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered and for all the
people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that
they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!
Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so. And it's
a documented fact that the... 14 families there that own 60% of the country
are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars - it's called de-capitalization
- and putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort Halperin, testifying
to a committee of the Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing
politically just by investing our money directly in the Miami banks in their
names and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be
better off.
Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It's a
classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981, President Reagan
allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they're
called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture and
terror in Nicaragua that made the Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the
dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army of these
people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in
Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked to the press - reported in the New York
Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today, CIA
covert actions going on around the world today.
You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the
troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua, the Central
American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50
de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to keep the world
unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the
establishment spend any amount of money on arms....
The Victor Marchetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right
to prepublication censorship of books. They challenged 360 items in his 360
page book. He fought it in court, and eventually they deleted some 60 odd
items in his book.
The Frank Snepp ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to
sue a government employee for damages. If s/he writes an unauthorized account
of the government - which means the people who are involved in corruption in
the government, who see it, who witness it, like Frank Snepp did, like I did -
if they try to go public they can now be punished in civil court. The
government took $90,000 away from Frank Snepp, his profits from his book, and
they've seized the profits from my own book....
[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it a
felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret agents or to write
about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities. Now, what
does this mean? In a debate in Congress - this is very controversial - the
supporters of this bill made it clear.... If agents Smith and Jones came on
this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance's head away
with LSD, it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper
saying, `watch out for these 2 turkeys, they're federal agents and they blew
my loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a felony what they had
done because that's national security and none of them were ever punished for
those activities.
Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been banging
away at this one ever since. Proposing that every government employee, for
the rest of his or her life, would have to submit anything they wrote to 6
committees of the government for censorship, for the rest of their lives. To
keep the scandals from leaking out... to keep the American people from
knowing what the government is really doing.
Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive Strikes' bill. President
Reagan, working through the Secretary of State Shultz... almost 2 years ago,
submitted the bill that would provide them with the authority to strike at
terrorists before terrorists can do their terrorism. But this bill...
provides that they would be able to do this in "this" country as well as
overseas. It provides that the secretary of state would put together a list
of people that he considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or
terrorist sympathizers. And if your name, or your organization, is put on
this list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you,
without any due process of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and
all of that, with impunity.
Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York Times
columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from Hitler's
"night and fog" program', where the government had the authority to haul
people off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And President Reagan
and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz has said, `Yes, we will have
to take action on the basis of information that would never stand up in a
court. And yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But,
we must have this law because of the threat of international terrorism'.
Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'? These
things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist
actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that's
terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving; we
kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping ways in
Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples' death is not
enough reason to take away the protection of American citizens, of due process
of the law.
But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the
pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the defense
department.
They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under the
McCarran act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents in the next
war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese people during
World War II. They're building 10 more, and army camps, and the... executive
memos about these things say it's for aliens and dissidents in the next
national emergency....
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius Guiffrida, a
friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going about the country lobbying and demanding
that he be given authority, in the times of national emergency, to declare
martial law, and establish a curfew, and gun down people who violate the
curfew... in the United States.
And then there's Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement officer in
the land, President Reagan's closest friend, going around telling us that the
constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press, and due process
of the law, and assembly.
What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're determined to
take us into a war if we'll permit it... is the Reagan revolution.... So he's
getting himself some laws so when he puts in the troops in Nicaragua, he can
take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their
doors, and kill them if they don't like what he's doing....
The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our freedoms
because they have a charming smile and they were nice movie stars one day, or
are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our freedoms?' It's up to
us - you and I can watch this history play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.
========================================================================
"CIA Covert Operations in Central America, CIA Manipulation of the
Press, CIA Experimentation on the U.S. Public"
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 Brody former assistant Attorney General of New
York State. Read "The Contras" by Dieter Eich. Read "With the Contras" by
Christopher Dickey. 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. 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" . The 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, President
Reagan hasn't been able to show the world one shred of 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 Helms] 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
Kuomintang 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. 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. Read "Deadly Deceits" by Ralph McGehee 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 Lanca, 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 Miskito 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, has 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 police forces 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 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 citizens of
countries that are too small to defend them from United States brutality and
aggression. They're people of the Mitumba 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, to pump its
propaganda stories into our media, to teach us to hate Fidel Castro, and Ho
Chi Minh, and the Chinese, and whomever. The latest flap or scandal we had
about that was a year and a half ago. Leslie 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 campusses 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 reverse the situation in
Nicaragua', meaning get rid of the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRocque, 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, Grenedara, 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 2 days' drive from Harlingen, 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 2 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"; "On
Reagan: The Man and the Presidency" 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? Why are our leaders now taking us into another war? Why are
we systematically taught to hate and fight other people?
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. Read "The Permanent War Complex"
by Seymour Melman. 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 LaRocque]
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,