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Veterans Today By Sherwood
Ross
July 24, 2010
 The
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
has confirmed the worst fears of its
creator President Harry Truman that
it might degenerate into “an
American Gestapo.” It has been just
that for so long it is beyond
redemption. It represents 60 years
of failure and fascism utterly at
odds with the spirit of a democracy
and needs to be closed, permanently.
Over the years “the Agency” as it is
known, has given U.S. presidents so
much wrong information on so many
critical issues, broken so many
laws, subverted so many elections,
overthrown so many governments,
funded so many dictators, and killed
and tortured so many innocent human
beings that the pages of its
official history could be written in
blood, not ink. People the world
over regard it as infamous, and that
evaluation, sadly for the reputation
of America, is largely accurate.
Besides, since President Obama has
half a dozen other major
intelligence agencies to rely on for
guidance, why does he need the CIA?
In one swoop he could lop an
estimated 27,000 employees off the
Federal payroll, save taxpayers
umpteen billions, and wipe the CIA
stain from the American flag.
If
you think this is a “radical” idea,
think again. What is “radical” is to
empower a mob of covert operatives
to roam the planet, wreaking havoc
as they go with not a care for
morality or, for that matter, the
tenets of mercy implicit in any of
the great faiths. The idea of not
prosecuting CIA interrogators (i.e.,
torturers), as President Obama has
said, is chilling. These crimes have
to be stopped somewhere, sometime,
or they will occur again.
“The CIA had run secret
interrogation centers
before—beginning in 1950, in
Germany, Japan, and Panama,” writes
New York Times reporter Tim Weiner
in his book “Legacy of Ashes, The
History of The CIA”(Random House).
Weiner has won a Pulitzer Prize for
his coverage of the intelligence
community. “It had participated in
the torture of captured enemy
combatants before—beginning in 1967,
under the Phoenix program in
Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected
terrorists and assassins before…”
In
Iran in 1953, for example, a
CIA-directed coup restored the Shah
(king) to absolute power, initiating
what journalist William Blum in
“Rogue State” (Common Courage Press)
called “a period of 25 years of
repression and torture; while the
oil industry was restored to foreign
ownership, with the US and Britain
each getting 40 percent.” About the
same time in Guatemala, Blum adds, a
CIA-organized coup “overthrew the
democratically-elected and
progressive government of Jacobo
Arbenz, initiating 40 years of
military government death squads,
torture, disappearances, mass
executions, and unimaginable
cruelty, totaling more than 200,000
victims—indisputably one of the most
inhuman chapters of the 20th
century.” The massive slaughter
compares, at least in terms of sheer
numbers, with Hitler’s massacre of
Romanian and Ukranian Jews during
the holocaust. Yet few Americans
know of it.
Blum provides yet other examples of
CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it
attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow
neutralist president Sukarno. It
plotted Sukarno’s assassination,
tried to blackmail him with a phony
sex film, and joined forces with
dissident military officers to wage
a full-scale war against the
government, including bombing runs
by American pilots, Blum reported
This particular attempt, like one in
Costa Rica about the same time,
failed. So did the CIA attempt in
Iraq in 1960 to assassinate
President Abdul Kassem. Other
ventures proved more “successful”.
In
Laos, the CIA was involved in coup
attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960,
creating a clandestine army of
30,000 to overthrow the government.
In Ecuador, the CIA ousted President
Jose Velasco for recognizing the new
Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
The CIA also arranged the murder of
elected Congo Prime Minister Patrice
Lumumba in 1961 and installation of
Mobutu Seko who ruled “with a level
of corruption and cruelty that
shocked even his CIA handlers,” Blum
recalls.
In
Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a
military coup against leader Kwame
Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it
financed the overthrow of elected
President Salvador Allende in 1973
and brought to power the murderous
regime of General Augusto Pinochet
who executed 3,000 political
opponents and tortured thousands
more. In Greece in 1967, the CIA
helped subvert the elections and
backed a military coup that killed
8,000 Greeks in its first month of
operation. “Torture, inflicted in
the most gruesome of ways, often
with equipment supplied by the
United States, became routine,” Blum
writes.
In
South Africa, the CIA gave the
apartheid government information
that led to the arrest of African
National Congress leader Nelson
Mandela, who subsequently spent
years in prison. In Bolivia, in
1964, the CIA overthrew President
Victor Paz; in Australia from
1972-75, the CIA slipped millions of
dollars to political opponents of
the Labor Party; ditto, Brazil in
1962; in Laos in 1960, the CIA
stuffed ballot boxes to help a
strongman into power; in Portugal
in the Seventies the candidates it
financed triumphed over a pro-labor
government; in the Philippines, the
CIA backed governments in the
1970-90 period that employed torture
and summary execution against its
own people; in El Salvador, the CIA
in the Nineties backed the wealthy
in a civil war in which 75,000
civilians were killed; and the list
goes on and on.
Of
course, the hatred that the CIA
engenders for the American people
and American business interests is
enormous. Because the Agency
operates largely in secret, most
Americans are unaware of the crimes
it perpetrates in their names. As
Chalmers Johnson writes in “Blowback”(Henry
Holt), former long-time CIA director
Robert Gates, now Obama’s defense
secretary, admitted U.S.
intelligence services began to aid
the mujahideen guerrillas in
Afghanistan six months before the
Soviet invasion in December, 1979.
As
has often been the case, the CIA
responded to a criminal order from
one of the succession of imperial
presidents that have occupied the
White House, in this instance one
dated July 3, 1979, from President
Jimmy Carter. The Agency was ordered
to aid the opponents of the
pro-Soviet regime in Kabul—aid that
might sucker the Kremlin into
invading. “The CIA supported Osama
bin Laden, like so many other
extreme fundamentalists among the
mujahideen in Afghanistan, from at
least 1984 on,” Johnson writes,
helping bin Laden train many of the
35,000 Arab Afghans.
Thus Carter, like his successors in
the George H.W. Bush government —
Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld,
Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz,
and Colin Powell, “all bear some
responsibility for the 1.8 million
Afghan casualties, 2.6 million
refugees, and 10 million unexploded
land mines that followed from their
decisions, as well as the
‘collateral damage’ that befell New
York City in September 2001 from an
organization they helped create
during the years of anti-Soviet
Afghan resistance,” Johnson added.
Worse, the Bush-Cheney regime after
9/11 “set no limits on what the
agency could do. It was the
foundation for a system of secret
prisons where CIA officer and
contractors used techniques that
included torture,” Weiner has
written. By some estimates, the CIA
in 2006 held 14,000 souls in 11
secret prisons, a vast crime against
humanity.
That the CIA has zero interest in
justice and engages in gratuitous
cruelty may be seen from the
indiscriminate dragnet arrests it
has perpetrated: “CIA officers
snatched and grabbed more than three
thousand people in more than one
hundred countries in the year after
9/11,” Weiner writes, adding that
only 14 men of all those seized
“were high-ranking authority figures
within al Qaeda and its affiliates.
Along with them, the agency jailed
hundreds of nobodies…(who) became
ghost prisoners in the war on
terror.”
As
for providing the White House with
accurate intelligence, the record of
the CIA has been a fiasco. The
Agency was telling President Carter
the Shah of Iran was beloved by his
people and was firmly entrenched in
power in 1979 when any reader of
Harper’s magazine, available on
newsstands for a buck, could read
that his overthrow was imminent—and
it was. Over the years, the Agency
has been wrong far more often than
it has been right.
According to an Associated Press
report, when confirmed by the Senate
as the new CIA director, Leon
Panetta said the Obama
administration would not prosecute
CIA officers that “participated in
harsh interrogations even if they
constituted torture as long as they
did not go beyond their
instructions.” This will allow
interrogators to evade prosecution
for following the clearly criminal
orders they would have been
justified to disobey.
“Panetta also said that the Obama
administration would continue to
transfer foreign detainees to other
countries for questioning but only
if U.S. officials are confident that
the prisoners will not be tortured,”
the AP story continued. If past is
prologue, how confident can Panetta
be the CIA’s fellow goons in Egypt
and Morocco will stop torturing
prisoners? Why did the CIA kidnap
men off the streets of Milan and New
York and fly them to those countries
in the first place if not for
torture? They certainly weren’t
treating them to a Mediterranean
vacation. By its long and nearly
perfect record of reckless disregard
for international law, the CIA has
deprived itself of the right to
exist.
It
will be worse than unfortunate if
President Obama continues the
inhumane (and illegal) CIA
renditions that President Bill
Clinton began and President Bush
vastly expanded. If the White House
thinks its operatives can roam the
world and arrest and torture any
person it chooses without a court
order, without due process, and
without answering for their crimes,
this signifies Americans believe
themselves to be a Master Race
better than others and above
international law. That’s not much
different from the philosophy that
motivated Adolph Hitler’s Third
Reich. It would be the supreme irony
if the American electorate that
repudiated racism last November has
voted into its highest office a
constitutional lawyer who reaffirms
his predecessor’s illegal views on
this activity. Renditions must be
stopped. The CIA must be abolished.
(Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based
public relations consultant and
columnist who formerly reported for
the Chicago Daily News, the New York
Herald-Tribune, and wire services.
Reach him at
sherwoodr1@yahoo.com)
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