The CIA needs to be banned because there is no hope for a fix (Global Research, Canada)

July 27 2010 8 722 2

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirmed the worst fears of its creator, President Harry Truman, who feared that it could turn into an "American Gestapo." It has been there for many years, and there is no hope for its correction. Him story - this 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 fed American presidents so much bad information on so many important issues, broken so many laws, rigged so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many dictators, and murdered and tortured so many innocent people that the pages of its official history seem written in blood instead of ink. People around the world regard the CIA as a disgraceful organization, and that assessment is, to America's shame, largely accurate. Besides, since President Obama has nearly a dozen other major intelligence agencies from which he receives advice and information, what does he need the CIA for? He can take 27000 employees off the federal payroll in one fell swoop, saving taxpayers many billions of dollars and wiping the CIA stain off the American flag.

If you think this is a "radical" idea, think again. What is radical is that we allow a bunch of undercover operatives to run around the world, wreaking havoc, because they have no regard for morality or, for that matter, for the compassion that is an integral part of any great faith. The proposal to drop charges against CIA interrogators, as President Obama calls them (read: torturers), is appalling. These crimes must be stopped, sometime, or they will happen again.

"The CIA had secret interrogation centers before — from 1950 onwards, and they were in Germany, Japan and Panama," writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in his book, Legacy of Ashes, The History of CIA "(Legacy of Dust, or the story of the CIA). Weiner received the Pulitzer Prize for his work in covering the activities of the intelligence community. "It participated in the torture of captured enemies earlier, beginning in 1967, acting in Vietnam as part of the Phoenix program. It had previously kidnapped suspects of terrorism and murder ...", the author notes.

So, in Iran in 1953, as a result of a coup led by the CIA, the Shah was returned to absolute power. This was the beginning, as journalist William Blum writes in his book "Rogue State" (Rogue State) "25-year period of repression and torture; the oil industry of the country was returned to foreign ownership, and the United States and Britain received 40 percent each. " Around the same time in Guatemala, Bloom adds, the conspiracy organized by the CIA "overthrew the democratically elected and progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz. This marked the beginning of the 40-year history of the military junta, death squads, torture, disappearances of people executions and incredible cruelty, the victims of which were more than 200 000 people. Undoubtedly, this was one of the most inhuman chapters in the history of the 20-century. " The mass killings in terms of the number of victims are comparable with the Hitler genocide against Romanian and Ukrainian Jews during the Holocaust. But only a few Americans are aware of this.

Bloom gives other examples of CIA criminal activity. In Indonesia, it attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow the supporter of President Sukarno’s neutrality. The agency planned the assassination of Sukarno, tried to blackmail him with a fake sexual film, and also joined forces with army officers who were displeased with the president, starting a full-scale war against the Indonesian government, in which American pilots who had bombed targets on the ground participated. This attempt, similar to another coup attempt made around the same time in Costa Rica, failed. An attempt by the CIA to destroy President Abdul Kassem in 1960 in Iraq also failed. Other adventures turned out to be more "successful".

In Laos, the CIA participated in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960, creating a 30-strong secret army 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 assassination of Congo's elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, in 000, replacing him with Mobutu Seko. "He ruled with a brutality and corruption so rampant that it shocked even his CIA handlers," Bloom writes.

In Ghana, the CIA organized a military coup against the country's leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of popularly elected President Salvador Allende in 1973, bringing to power the brutal regime of Augusto Pinochet, who destroyed political opponents of 3000 and tortured many thousands of people. In Greece, in 1967, the CIA helped to thwart the elections and supported a military coup, during which 8000 Greeks were killed only during his first month. "Torture, carried out in the most terrible ways, often with the help of equipment supplied from the USA, turned into everyday life," Bloom writes.

In South Africa, the CIA transmitted to the apartheid regime information that led to the arrest of the leader of the African National Congress, Nelson Mandela, who then spent many years in prison. In 1964, in Bolivia, the CIA overthrew President Victor Paz. In Australia, the CIA from 1972 to 1975 transferred millions of dollars to political opponents of the Labor Party. The same thing happened in Brazil in 1962. In 1960, in Laos, the CIA falsified the election results, resulting in a dictator taking power. In the 70s in Portugal, CIA-funded candidates defeated the government on the side of the Labor Party. In the Philippines, the CIA from 1970 to 1990 supported governments that used torture and mass executions against their own people. In 90 in El Salvador, the CIA supported rich people during the civil war that killed 75000 civilians. The list goes on and on.

Of course, the hatred of the American people and the American business community that the CIA generates is enormous. Since the agency operates mostly in secret, most Americans do not know anything about the crimes committed on its behalf. As Chalmers Johnson writes in the book Blowback (Back Flash), Robert Gates, who has now held the post of Secretary of Defense in the Obama administration, for a long time admitted that the American intelligence services began to help the Mujahadin in Afghanistan for six more months before the invasion there in December 1979, the Soviet troops.

As often happened, the CIA responded to a criminal order received from another imperial president who occupied the White House. This time it was 3 July 1979, and the order was given by President Jimmy Carter. The agency received an order to assist the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul in order to provoke the Kremlin to invade. "The CIA supported Osama bin Laden, as well as many other radical fundamentalists from among the Afghan Mujahideen, at least since 1984 of the year," Johnson writes. It helped bin Laden prepare 35000 Arabs for the war in Afghanistan.

Thus, Carter, like his successors in the Bush eldest government - Gates, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell - are all together responsible for the death of 1,8 by a million Afghans, for the appearance of 2,6 by a million refugees, for 10 millions of unexploded mines, since this was a consequence of their decisions, and they are also responsible for the “collateral damage” to the city of New York in September 2001 of the year caused by the very organization they helped create in the years of the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance, "Johnson said. Worse, the Bush-Cheney regime after 11 September did not set any restrictions on the agency’s activities. "They laid the foundations for creating a system of secret prisons, where CIA officers and employees of contracting organizations used a variety of methods, including torture," Weiner wrote. According to some estimates, the CIA in 2006 was held in secret prisons by 14000 people. This is a serious crime against humanity.

That the CIA is completely uninterested in justice and carries out its brutal actions without reason can be seen in its indiscriminate, dragnet-like arrests. "In the year since 11/14, CIA officers have seized more than XNUMX people in more than XNUMX countries," Weiner writes, noting that only XNUMX of those detained "were senior leaders of al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Along with them, the agency has seized hundreds of innocent people who have become ghost prisoners in the war on terror."

As for providing the White House with accurate intelligence information, the work of the CIA became a fiasco. The agency told President Carter that the people of Iran love their Shah — and they are firmly in power. At the same time, any reader of Harper's magazine, which was sold in kiosks for a dollar, could read that his overthrow was inevitable. So it happened. Over the years, the agency began to err more often than to give the correct estimates.

According to the Associated Press, when the Senate claimed in the position of CIA’s new director Leon Panetta, he said that the Obama administration would not prosecute those agency employees "who are involved 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 the execution of clearly criminal orders, which they on all grounds may not carry out.

"Panetta also said the Obama administration would continue the practice of transferring foreign detainees to other countries for interrogation, but only if U.S. officials were assured that the prisoners would not be tortured," the Associated Press article wrote. If the past was just the beginning, how could Panetta be sure that the CIA's goons' counterparts in countries like Egypt and Morocco would stop torturing their prisoners? Why would the CIA snatch people off the streets of Milan and New York and then transport them to those countries if not to torture them? Certainly, it wasn't a gift to the detainees in the form of a trip to the Mediterranean. The CIA's long and almost unrivaled record of reckless disregard for international norms has made it impossible for it to exist.

It will be worse than a misfortune if President Obama continues the inhuman (and illegal) practice of detaining and transporting people to CIA prisons, which President Bill Clinton began, and President Bush has significantly expanded. If the White House thinks that its agents can dodge around the world, seize and torture any person of their choice without a court order, without due observance of the legal procedure, and not be held accountable for their crimes, this only shows one thing: that Americans consider themselves to be the Host Race, which is better than anyone else and is above international law. This is not much different from the philosophy by which the Third Reich of Adolf Hitler arose. It will be the greatest paradox if the American electorate, who rejected racism last year, voted for a constitutional lawyer confirming the criminal views of his predecessor on this kind of activity. Illegal arrests and extraditions must be stopped. CIA needs to ban.