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