The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its creator, President Harry Truman, who feared that it might be reborn as the "American Gestapo." It has been it for many years, and there is no hope for its correction. Its history is the history of 60 years of failures and fascism, and this department is in complete contradiction with the spirit of democracy, in connection with which it must be closed, closed forever.
Over the years, the "agency," as it is called, has passed on so much erroneous information to American presidents on so many important issues, violated so many laws, rigged so many elections, overthrew so many governments, funded so many dictators, killed and tortured so many in what innocent people, that the pages of his official history seem to be written in blood, and not in ink. The CIA is viewed by people around the world as a shameful organization, and such an assessment, to the shame of America, is mostly accurate. In addition, since President Obama has almost a dozen other major intelligence agencies from which he receives advice and information, why does he need the CIA? It could strip 27,000 employees from the federal payroll in one fell swoop, saving taxpayers billions of dollars and wiping the CIA smudge off the American flag.
If you think this is a "radical" idea, think again. It smells like radicalism that we allow a crowd of undercover operatives to dart around the world, wreaking havoc and chaos, since they do not think about morality, or, for that matter, about mercy, which is an integral part of any great faith. The proposal to drop charges against CIA investigators, as President Obama (read, executioners) calls them, is terrifying. These crimes must somehow and sometime be stopped, otherwise they will repeat again.
"The CIA has had secret interrogation centers before - since 1950, and they were in Germany, Japan and Panama," writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book "Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA "(Legacy of the Ashes, or the history of the CIA). Weiner received the Pulitzer Prize for his work covering the intelligence community. "It participated in the torture of captured enemies before, starting in 1967, acting in Vietnam under the Phoenix program. It has abducted terrorist and murder suspects before …", the author notes.
For example, in Iran in 1953, as a result of a coup led by the CIA, the Shah was again returned to absolute power. This marked the beginning, as journalist William Blum writes in his book Rogue State, "a 25-year period of repression and torture; the country's oil industry was returned to foreign ownership, and the United States and Britain received 40 percent each. " Around the same time, in Guatemala, Bloom adds, a CIA-organized conspiracy "overthrew the democratically elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz. This marked the beginning of a 40-year history of military junta, death squads, torture, executions and incredible atrocities, which killed more than 200,000 people. This was undoubtedly one of the most inhuman chapters in the history of the 20th century. " The massacres in terms of the number of victims are comparable to Hitler's genocide against Romanian and Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust. But few Americans know about it.
Bloom cites other examples of the CIA's criminal activities. In Indonesia, it tried in 1957-58 to overthrow the supporter of neutrality, President Sukarno. The agency plotted Sukarno's assassination, tried to blackmail him with a fake sexually explicit film, and joined forces with disgruntled army officers to launch a full-scale war against the Indonesian government, involving American pilots who bombed targets on the ground. This attempt, similar to another coup attempt made around the same time in Costa Rica, failed. Also failed was the CIA's attempt to assassinate President Abdul Kassem in Iraq in 1960. Other adventures turned out to be more "successful".
In Laos, the CIA participated in coup attempts in 1958, 1959 and 1960, creating a secret army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In Ecuador, the CIA overthrew President Jose Velasco because he recognized the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro. The CIA also orchestrated the 1961 assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, replacing him with Mobutu Seko. "He ruled the country with such brutality, with such rampant corruption, that it shocked even his CIA handlers," Bloom writes.
In Ghana, the CIA staged a 1966 military coup against the country's leader, Kwame Nkrumah; in Chile, it financed the 1973 overthrow of popularly elected President Salvador Allende, bringing to power the brutal Augusto Pinochet regime that killed 3,000 political opponents and tortured many thousands. In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped disrupt elections and backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month alone. "Torture, carried out in the most horrific ways, often with US-supplied equipment, has become a daily routine," Bloom writes.
In South Africa, the CIA passed on information to the apartheid regime that led to the arrest of the leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, who then spent many years in prison. In 1964, the CIA overthrew President Victor Paz in Bolivia. In Australia, the CIA donated millions of dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party from 1972 to 1975. The same thing happened in Brazil in 1962. In 1960, the CIA rigged elections in Laos, bringing a dictator to power. In the 1970s, CIA-sponsored candidates defeated the Labor government in Portugal. In the Philippines, from 1970 to 1990, the CIA supported governments that used torture and mass executions against their own people. In El Salvador in the 1990s, the CIA supported wealthy people in a civil war that claimed the lives of 75,000 civilians. The list goes on and on.
The CIA's hatred of the American people and American business circles is undoubtedly enormous. Because the agency operates largely in secret, most Americans are unaware of the crimes committed on its behalf. Chalmers Johnson, longtime CIA chief Robert Gates and now the Obama administration's secretary of defense, writes in Blowback that American intelligence services began helping the mujahideen in Afghanistan six years earlier. months before the invasion there in December 1979 by Soviet troops.
As has often happened, the CIA responded to a criminal order from the next imperial president to occupy the White House. This time it happened on July 3, 1979, and the order was given by President Jimmy Carter. The agency was ordered to provide assistance to opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul - in order to provoke the Kremlin to invade. "The CIA has supported Osama bin Laden, as well as many other radical Afghan mujahideen fundamentalists, since at least 1984," Johnson writes. It helped Bin Laden prepare 35,000 Arabs for the war in Afghanistan.
Thus, Carter, like his successors in the Sr. Bush government - Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell - "collectively bear some responsibility for the death of 1.8 million Afghans, for the appearance of 2, 6 million refugees, for 10 million unexploded mines as a result of their decisions; they are also responsible for the "collateral damage" to the city of New York in September 2001, caused by the very organization they helped create during the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance. " Johnson notes. To make matters worse, the Bush-Cheney regime did not impose any restrictions on the agency's activities after 9/11. "They laid the foundations for a secret prison system where CIA officers and contractors used a variety of methods, including torture," Weiner wrote. According to some estimates, the CIA held 14,000 people in secret prisons in 2006. This is the most serious crime against humanity.
The fact that the CIA is not at all interested in justice, and that it carries out its brutal actions absolutely without reason, can be understood if you look at the arrests carried out by it indiscriminately, like a net. "In the year since the 9/11 attacks, CIA officers seized more than 3,000 people in over 100 countries around the world," Weiner writes, noting that only 14 of the detainees "were high-ranking officials from al-Qaeda and its affiliates. with them, the agency grabbed hundreds of innocent people who became ghost prisoners in this war on terror."
As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence information, here the work of the CIA was a complete fiasco. The agency told President Carter that the people of Iran love their shah - and are firmly in power. At the same time, any reader of Harper's magazine, which was sold at kiosks for a dollar, could read that his overthrow was imminent. And so it happened. Over the years, the agency began to make mistakes more often than to give correct estimates.
According to the Associated Press, when the Senate confirmed the new CIA director Leon Panetta, he said the Obama administration would not prosecute those agency staff "who engage in harsh interrogations, even if they are torture, if they do not go beyond the scope of their job descriptions ". This will allow investigators to avoid punishment for carrying out clearly criminal orders that they, on all grounds, may not comply with.
"Panetta also said that the Obama administration will continue the practice of transferring foreign detainees to other countries for interrogation, but only if US officials are confident that prisoners will not be tortured," wrote the Associated Press article. If the past is just the beginning, how can Panetta be confident that fellow CIA thugs in countries like Egypt and Morocco will stop torturing their prisoners? Why did the CIA even kidnap people on the streets of Milan and New York and then transport them to these countries, if not for torture? Of course, this was not a gift for the arrested in the form of a trip to the Mediterranean. With its long and almost unrivaled history of reckless disregard for international norms, the CIA has deprived itself of its right to exist.
It would be worse than misfortune if President Obama continues the inhuman (and illegal) practice of arresting and transporting people to CIA prisons, which was started by President Bill Clinton and President Bush expanded significantly. If the White House thinks that its agents can dart around the world, grab and torture any person of their choice without a court order, without due observance of legal procedure, and not be held accountable for their crimes, then this indicates only one thing: that Americans consider themselves a Master Race that is superior to all others and above international law. This is not much different from the philosophy behind Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. It would be the greatest paradox if an American electorate who rejected racism last year voted for a constitutional jurist confirming his predecessor's criminal views on this kind of activity. Illegal arrests and extraditions must be stopped. The CIA must be banned.
