Frantz Fanon
24th November 2009, 14:38
to begin with:
The US maintains to this day over a dozen direct dependencies, the largest of which is Puerto Rico. Its military forces are active over most of the globe: at last audit about 226 countries have US military troops, 63 of which host American bases, while only 46 countries in the world have no US military presence - a projection of military power that makes the Roman, British, and Soviet empires pale in comparison. The bulk of this document will deal with what is alternatively referred to as "neo-colonialism", "hegemony", "proxy rule", or "informal empire": roughly, a system of "dual elite" political rule, in which domestic elites (the proxy) recieve backing from (are dependent on - to varying degrees) a foreign elite, and in return protect (to varying degrees) the foreign power's interests in the country (security, economic, or domestic political interests). This is, at least, the framework within which I use the terms - as it is generally accepted by students of history. To take an explanation cited by Ariel Cohen as "One of the more successful attempts made to create a coherent theory of empires" in Russian Imperialism:
"Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire."
--Michael Doyle, Empires
As a point of reference formal American imperialism begins (or not - one would have to completely ignore the genocide of the native population, African and Native-American slavery, rapid and continuous expansion of the national borders through war, rapid and continuous expansion of mercantilism through war and the threat of war, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the mid 1800s mercantilist state established in Nicaragua, etc.) with the aquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. It's a good point to remember how that war started: part hoax, part sensationalized, war mongering "journalism", and of course much talk about the brutality of the enemy and the necessity of our intervention on behalf of the suffering - in this case on behalf of the Cubans and their savage treatment at the hands of the tyrannical Spaniards: much better for them to suffer at our hands.
Old habits die hard.
For the sake of what has become a very very poor attempt at brevity, or in recognition of the precedent set by the Nuremberg Tribunal and principles laid out under the UN charter, these notes will mostly focus on post-WWII history - though it would seem imperative to include interventions that fly in the face of the popular misconception that the United States ended its imperial project at the end of the Spanish-American war. There were military involvements during the 1890s by the USG in Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Hawaii, Nicaragua, China, Korea, Panama, Samoa, in extremely brutal labour conflicts within the nation, and something akin to a war on working Americans waged by the National Association of Manufacturers that will otherwise go undiscussed. The Phillipines makes a decent representative example of the US' first official exercise in colonial imperialism and formal empire
, also referred to as "civilizational imperialism" - a project we're presently repeating.
"Lest this seem to be the bellicose pipedream of some dyspeptic desk soldier, let us remember that the military deal of our country has never been defensive warfare. Since the Revolution, only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country has ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war. And at the rate our armed forces are being implemented at present, the odds are against our fighting one in the near future."
--Major General Smedley D. Butler, America's Armed Forces: 'In Time of Peace', 1935.
1898-1914: The Phillipines
U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."
Major Littleton W. T. Waller: How young?
Smith: Ten years and up.
--Exchange on October 1901, quote from the testimony at Smith's court martial by the New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902). General Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, was popularly known as "Hell Roaring Jake" or "Howling Wilderness".
The "Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation" of the McKinley presidency in 1899 annouced America's intention to be the benevolent dictator over various foreign nations that just happened to all be filled with ruthless, pagan savages.
In a savage conflict America repressed the Filipino independence movement. As in most cases of massacre on the part of the US the number of casualties remains a matter of debate; in this instance 5,000 (of some 120,000 involved) Americans killed with additional casualties later due to disease contracted in the Phillipines, but anywhere between 16,000-20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000-600,000 civilian Filipino deaths resulted due to the war, war induced famine, disease, and multiple atrocities, but one would be mistaken to describe the conflict as characterized by brutality. The US continued occupying the Phillipines for another 48 years.
US military involvement in the Phillipines continues to this day, much to the advantage of foreign investors, who continue to maintain economic hegemony. US troops may not enjoy their stay quite as much as the last time, nor as the first time.
1903-1936: Panama
US indirectly runs Panama through a surrogate after managing its seccession from Columbia.
1904-1978: Dominican Republic
In 1904 the USG takes control of Dominican customs houses by force to collect on international debts, shortly thereafter signing a treaty, with the DR essentially at gun point, ratifying the debt relationship.
Between 1916 and 1924 the US occupies and rules the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter General Rafael Trujillo takes control of the country with the National Guard that was created and put under his control by the USG before its exit. During the 30s Trujillo wiped out some 30,000 Dominicans and Haitians in an effort to make his side of the island 'more white'. Trujillo recieved US backing until the mid 1950s, when he was finally placed under economic sanctions for attempting to assassinate the president of Venezuela. A few years later the USG began supporting the conservative opposition to overthrow him, successfully assassinating him in 1961, out of fear that the liberal Constitutionalist opposition would get to it first. Trujillo's son Ramfi was escorted out of the country by the US military.
In 1963 USG-backed militants remove the recently elected president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch - a centrist liberal - to "prevent another Cuba". Two years later Lyndon Johnson sent 22,000 US Marines to land on the island and take control of the country for 17 months after falling sugar prices and political conflict stirred an uprising against the new regime of Donald Reid Cabral. The Marines assist in supressing the rebellion, killing over 4,000 Dominicans and solidifying conservative control over the country, leading to the reinstatement of Trujillo-frontman turned Washington-frontman Joaquin Balaguer, who dragged the country into a nightmare of political violence, electoral fraud, and death squad activity that, by and large, eliminated any possible political opposition to the regime - minus one or two times when Balaguer's masters in Washington yanked his leash for the cameras. The USG continued lavishing military support onto the regime throughout the waves of terror.
1915-1934: Haiti
US occupies and administers Haiti for 19 years.
A collection of Nation articles on the occupation of Haiti.
Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940
1912-1979: Nicaragua
A sort of defacto American colonial holding during the mid 19th century - per the East India Company model of a private corporation taking control of a foreign nation with state assistance - US Marines occupy Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933.
In 1927 US Marines enter into a protacted struggle with the guerilla forces of Augusto Sandino, eventually suffering their first defeat against a third world insurgency.
Afterwards, the USG arms, trains, and otherwise props up the barbarous, nepotistic Somoza dictatorship and the National Guard, which holds on to dictatorial power until the Sandinista revolution of 1979.
1917-1920: Russian Civil War
The "cold" war begins with the Allied intervention in Russia and backing of the White armies.
1932-1972: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
399 african american sharecroppers are denied treatment for syphilis as part of a US government medical study in 1932. Exposed by the press in 1972, the government finally shuts down the program over 30 years after a cure was discovered.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee.
Center for Disease Control timeline of the study.
1936: Objective history ends.
Doubt being the prerogative of one who seeks truth.
1936-1958: America
The Federal Housing Administration - a mortage insurance program that helped millions of American families to develop their own property, accumulate capital, and lift them into the middle-class - became an effective state-mandated ghettoization program under blankly racist standards that prevented black neighborhoods and families from recieving the development assistance that their taxes otherwise helped pay for. Likewise, housing deeds included 'restrictive covenants' that prohibited blacks from occupying homes in white neighborhoods, until a 1948 Supreme Court ruling was implemented in 1950 that ruled such contracts unconsistutional. Similar policies excluded most black workers from Social Security coverage and agricultural assistance programs.
These policies re-inforced the status quo on the ground - the racist municipal and business practices of the dominate culture - lifting white America further above its black counterpart while encouraging urban decay and racial segregation. In terms of home ownership the gap between white and black home ownership jumped by 5.5% during the life of the program and left cities highly polarized between underdeveloped inner-city black neighborhoods and highly developed white suburbs. The black home ownership rate doesn't reach the white rate of 1900 until 1970. Fair housing legislation was passed in 1968 but subsequent court rulings show that individual acts of similar discrimination continued well into the present.
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, by James W. Loewen.
1940: The McCollum Memo.
In which, arguably, President Roosevelt's plan to provoke a Japanese attack is outlined.
1942-1945: Japanese-American internment.
1945-1974: Greece.
"Fuck your parliament and your constitution."
--President Johnson to Greek Ambassador, Alexander Matsas, June 1964.
The USG creates the Greek secret police (KYP) and backs military coups in 1949, 1967 and 1973. Dictatorships ruled with US backing during the periods of 1949-1952 and 1967-1974.
Under the ostensible rubric of defending Greece from Soviet aggression the US takes over British efforts to destroy the Greek left, establishing a brutal rightwing dictatorship. Since the original intervention of the Truman Doctrine the USG continued attacking Greece, overthrowing the elected government twice more when Greeks had the terminity to elect governments without Washington's approval.
One apology for this brand of imperialistic hubris is that the 1948 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia fueled fears in the US government of various nefarious Soviet plots seen and unseen, demanding action. We defer to the US government as to the reality of such fears:
The Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia in 1948 therefore flowed logically from the inauguration of the Marshall Plan program, and was confidently predicted by United States government observers six months in advance of the event.
It is clear from the above that the sudden consolidation of Communist power in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was not a sign of any "new Soviet aggressiveness" and had nothing to do with any Soviet decision to launch its military forces against the West.
--George Kennan; Report to the US Dept of State from American Embassy in Moscow, September 8, 1952
Whether US leaders believed their own delusions about the Kremlin or not, it's difficult to lend such pretentions much credit by the time of 1967 coup. As Kennan comments in the Moscow Embassy report, "The attempt to portray the outside world as menacing, whether or nor it actually was so at any given moment, has been part of the stock in trade of Soviet rule." He does not shrink from making the same observation about the West.
But perhaps the easiest question to answer is whether a defense against Communist dictatorships required uncritical moral, political and material support for proto-fascist dictatorships - a highly dubious assumption, and an expensive one in this instance, costing some 150,000 lives. Alternatively one could - for instance - try promoting democracy and human rights.
NSC 68: Fact and Fancy
Who Killed George Polk?
Tying Greece to the West, by Mogens Pelt, 2006.
1945-1960s: China. Tibet. Taiwan.
With their capacity to defend themselves in part defining them as the "second world" the USSR and communist China benefit from little direct Western intervention in the post-war period. Mao, like other Communist leaders, was a close ally during the WWII, and was more effective in organizing resistance to the Japanese Empire than Chiang Kai-Shek because - to paint with a broad brush - Marxist euphimisms played better with peasant serfs long repressed by Chiang's army than reactionary feudal-nationalist doctrines.
During the post-war assemblage of the United Nations China was officially inducted, but the USG officially recognized Kai-Shek's exiled dictatorship in Taiwan as the legitemate government of China (US sponsorship of Kai-Shek lasted for decades, and it was he who cast China's vote in favor of the Korean war on the United Nations Security Council), as compared to Mao's insane dictatorship in China. By at least one count Kai-Shek's US-supported efforts to remain in power cost some 18 million lives, on par with Mao's campaigns to retain power after the revolution, excluding the horrendous famines he unknowingly presided over.
In an attempt to discredit Mao's China the US funnels covert economic aid and directs reforms in Taiwan, working with Kai-Shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo, instituting land reform and providing guidance in modern farming techniques and technology while heralding it as an example of the "free market". The successful development program, which lasted for about ten years, was then used as propaganda, absurdly, for market liberalization elsewhere in the third world - though the US continued to overthrow governments that attempted to institute similar land reforms, as they were indicative of "Communist sympathies" and "Soviet direction".
Amid this diplomatic rivalry between Taiwan and China the US and China were vying over Tibet, with the Chinese-incited Marxist rebellion stirring under the Tibetian aristocratic religious order and the CIA organizing and funding counter-revolutionary groups to compete with competing Red groups, having no better idea to sell, let alone any idea how to intervene productively in the madness swallowing China and, through it, Tibet. It doesn't seem unlikely that the USG would have happily supported the 1950 invasion of Tibet had Chinese Nationalists - who had already made failed efforts to re-aquire Tibet - won the civil war.
No stone among the remaining empires to be left unturned or uncontested. So it goes.
Two perspectives on Tibet: Chinese dissident Wang Lixiong, and a response by Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya.
CIA Dope Calypso
1945-1952: South Korean Occupation, Cheju Island, the Korean War
"If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot"
--Ambassador John J. Muccio to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
The USG, with Japanese and South Korean collaborators (under Syngman Rhee - a Korean-American chosen by Chiang Kai Shek to preside over South Korea - curtesy Washington DC), slaughtered one third of the population of Cheju Island in anti-communist purges during the occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1949. The repression of the population by US, ROK, and Japanese forces purged anywhere between 100,000 and 800,000 'suspected leftists' in the civillian population.
Among other things the anti-communist policy of the USG and the cooperation against the formation of an independent, unified Korea by both Soviets and Americans lead to the North Korean invasion on June 25th, 1950. During the war the USG deliberately targetted civillians caught in the war path, and with some 4 million casualties between all players in the war well over half were civillian casualties.
After the war the anti-Communist doctrine of the USG and Taiwanese governments lead to forced "voluntary" repatriation, where Chinese POWs were terrorized and tortured if they volunteered for repatriation to mainland China.
"Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. ...
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to 'be liked' or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague, and for the Far East, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
--George Kennan, A Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1948.
The historical record suggests that Kennan - for all his somewhat more sound advice on East Asia: the warning of overextension and admittal of US political failure (meaning the simple inability to offer an alternative to Communism that had any popular appeal, despite the existence of numerous alternatives that would undermine Soviet influence but not, per the stated goal, maintain economic disparities) - was largely ignored except on this particular point, as "our unsound commitments" to China continued in Taiwan for many decades. At least until 1979 when the Chinese government was finally formally recognized and given - in what I suppose would be considered sound commitment - backing in the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The USG has continued "interfering in the internal affairs" of the Phillipines up to the present by propping up one cooperative despot after another, and directly assisting in the repression of internal rebellions. Nevermind that the US more than overstretched itself in Vietnam. The USG did, however, manage dealing in "straight power concepts" to a surreal and terrible degree, and has had little discernable trouble maintaining its "position of disparity".
1945-1994: Vietnam: "Remember! Only you can prevent forests."
"nobody ever told us they were human"
--Lt. Calley, My Lai hearings. 'Calley Pleads for Understanding', New York Times, March 31, p. 1
We might begin with the CIA's orchestration in 1952 of a dramatic terrorist bombing in the center of Saigon that was blamed on communist forces to stir American rage against Agent 19, creating political support for the US to become the primary financer of the French war in Indochina until the US takes the entire project over in 1961, when Kennedy sends in the first US ground advisers, who almost immediately begin taking over the fighting for a corrupt Diem regime. Similar incidents, such as the Gulf of Tonkin, are repeated to generate support for ramping up the scale of American intervention.
In a campaign that is probably best described as institutionalized genocide some 1 million Vietnamese combatants and 2-4,000,000 South East Asian civillians (DRV statistics, including Laos and Cambodia) were killed during this US stage of the war (estimated anywhere between 10-20% of the population), with over half the Vietnamese casualties inflicted in South Vietnam, the ostensible protectorate of the United States. Likewise the US managed to kill some 17,000 US troops - one third of all US casualties were reportedly caused by American-deployed landmines and unexploded cluster ordinace.
The CIA's Phoenix program lead to the extra-judicial assassinations of some 20-40,000 civillians alone - or "suspected Communists", nevermind the hundreds of thousands that were subjected to brutal interrogations and internment in American re-education camps. Military intelligence programs differed little in their essential brutality, including torture by field telephone. In violation of international law, among other things, the US utilized chemical warfare (sarin per operation Tailwind is largely discredited, VX perhaps remains a possibility, and massive amounts of toxins - the carcinogen Agent Orange comes to mind - were dumped into the Vietnamese ecosystem, defoliating vast swathes of the country) and scorched earth policies which afflicted not only US and Vietnamese soliders, the former of whom were awarded damages for the exposure, but caused massive civilian casualties and harm that continue to this day, as unexploded ordance and damage to the gene pool caused by chemical agents take their slow toll:
The Vietnamese government estimates 500,000 children have been born with birth defects caused by contamination with Agent Orange and two million suffered cancers and other ill effects - innocent victims of a chemical intended to harm plant life, not humans. But unlike the American soldiers who sprayed the defoliant, they have never received compensation.
--The Independent, "Agent Orange: the legacy of a weapon of mass destruction", 4/3/2006.
The main thrust of this violence was directed towards South Vietnam, who we were purportedly there to protect, or whatever it is we were purpotedly doing; protecting America from Vietnam, I suppose, against their plan to sail over in rafts and crush us with sheer numbers. To have Michael Lind tell it I'm supposed to believe that the NLF's refusal to surrender makes them responsible for the victims of US invasion. So far as Soviet involvement is concerned Ilya Gaiduk argues that Russia was partly responsible for the war due to their lack of actual involvement, however that works. US involvement in Vietnam increased neighboring alliances with the Soviets and forced the Vietnamese into a position of dependency on China and the USSR (they had, after WWII, sought alliances and support from the US to preserve their independence from the French and the Chinese - the latter position eventually lead to their alliances with the Soviets). The Sino-Soviet split in 1960 resulted in China becoming a US ally after the end of the war in 1975, at which point Vietnam turned even further to the Soviets for support against the traditional Chinese hegemony over the region.
The US paid for the French campaign between 1945 to 1954 before taking it over directly, beginning a US phase in the Vietnam wars that lasted until 1975. After the end of direct US involvement in Vietnam the US continued waging the conflict for almost two decades afterward. In 1979 China invaded Vietnam with US backing when the USG deployed the carrier Constellation to the Gulf of Tonkin to deter a Soviet response, and gave diplomatic and political backing for the Chinese action - to "teach the ex-colony a lesson" for deposing the pro-Chinese, genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. During the invasion the Chinese destroyed the dikes and canals that formed key components to agrarian production and with them much of the country's rice reserves, inducing food shortages exacerbated at the same time by the US-led blockade on the country that, incidentally, lasted until 1994.
In 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, former leader of the NLF, took control of the CP and persued market policies and attempted to re-integrated Vietnam into the world economic system. The latter was prevented by successive administrations, which continued the embargo and blocked Western access to - to quote Eisenhower - "the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs": tin, tungsten, rubber plantations, "and so on".
This curious justification for the war was self-fulfilling: when a population elected a communist (Ho Chi Mihn) with 90% of the vote (an early result that was never called into question) who was extremely friendly towards - and a former operative of - the US, the response was to wage an invasion until, against impossible odds, the population expelled the invader. After the war, which was - by Eisenhower's own lame admission - in part to secure access to raw materials, the response of the invaders was to turn around and block access to those materials with no discernable, rational goal (to "teach Vietnam a lesson"?) for 25 years. The pathology of blind anti-Communism prevented a Western response that quite easily could have curbed a Communist regime's worst excesses and defects by working with a country and its elected leaders that were considerably pro-American, and surprisingly still are.
To prevent Communist atrocities - as the justification for the war was argued even as it was waged - was clearly no long term committment. During the normalization process of the early 1990s the subject of human rights was conspiciously absent, as before and as after. The familiar justifications of spreading humane values such as liberty, justice, and life with military force were entirely absent from post-war relations, when they might have been persued in a nonviolent manner.
Thusly there is the generally acknowledged fact that "In the years since we lost the war, we have won it." In consideration that the French had already bailed on the war as a hopeless enterprise in the mid 50s, that the British told Washington in 1954 that "None of us in London believe that intervention in Indonchina can do anything" (Eden to Dulles, April 25th, refusing Eisenhower's request for British support of the US-French war) and made further efforts to end the war in 1967. Our allies were by and large opposed to the war. The only realistic conclusion is that the war, the deaths of millions upon millions of innocents and the ensuing rise of repressive security states throughout the region due to meaningless destructive games amongst imperial powers, was never in any way justified.
Whoever can sort out the logic behind this insanity wins a cookie.
The US never paid reparations to Vietnam - let alone Cambodia or Laos - although the Paris Agreement Nixon signed in 1973 specified in Article 21 $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid for the DRV. As Gabriel Kolko described the post-war relationship in 1982:
To state ... that Vietnam wishes to be dependent on Soviet aid ignores entirely its intensive efforts during 1976-1978 to establish economic ties with the West via loans, aid, and investments - efforts it has not abandoned. Its present dependence on the USSR is the consequence of a conscious US and Chinese policy which Assistant Secretary of State John H. Holdridge summed up last June 8: "It is important to keep the Vietnamese isolated politically and economically, and there is agreement on that score."
Agent 19 has yet to receive commendations from the US for his resistance against the Japanese during World War II.
"About the war in Vietnam, all I have to say is [...inaudible...] and that's all I have to say about the war in Vietnam."
--Forrest Gump
Betrand Russell's International Warcrimes Tribunal on Vietnam, 1967.
Tiger Force: Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.
Dellums House Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam, 1971.
Winter Soldier Investigation, 1971, or "When We Were Psychos"
THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES, Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. 1971. Armed Forces Journal.
The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition
Vietnam declassification project
NSA materials on the Pentagon Papers, related links from the VVA and Anthony Russo's website.
1,000 combat veterans gone public.
Dissing Vietnam
MIA Facts
Hanoi Jane
Phillips Jones Griffith, Agent Orange: "collateral damage"
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
The Disquieted American
Ed Moise's Bibliography of the Vietnam War
1945-Present: Projection of American Nuclear Power
1946-1954: Phillipines
After taking control of the Phillipines during WWII the US disarms the largest Filipino anti-Japanese guerilla movement, the Hukbalahap, and installs Manuel Roxas, a Japanese collaborator that General MacArthur pardoned, to run the new government. Roxas' government issues an amnesty for collaborators, bans peasant political organizing, refuses to seat opposition congressmen, and directs a campaign of repression throughout the country.
Formal independence is granted to the Phillipines shortly thereafter, with provisions for a large and perpetual American military presence and special privelidges for American business. Roxa's failed policies, however, lead to the resurgence of the Huk movement.
Roxas and his successor Quirino continue those same policies, using US aid primarily to enrich themselves and wage US supported violence to suppress the Huks. The USG begins supporting Ramon Magsaysay by 1950, who, assisted to power by American Colonel Lansdale, manages to use large quantities of economic aid and political reforms, including land reform, to undermine the primary grievances of the Huk movement, which eventually subsides.
However, Magsaysay and his successors fail to implement long term reforms that could resolve the country's problems and extreme poverty, leading later to further popular unrest, a new insurgency, and another US supported strongman and kleptocrat by the name of Ferdinand Marcos.
1946-1996: Marshall Islands.
Nuclear testing during Operations Crossroads, Sandstone, Greenhouse, Ivy, Castle, Redwing, and Hardtack involved over 60 known atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Enewetak and Bikini. The testing involved USG imposed exile for thousands of islanders to neighboring atolls, hundreds of whom suffered from radiation poisoning and other exposure related diseases, and dozens committed suicide admidst the derilect conditions of their displacement. The USG could have decided to do anything to avoid this constant string of fiascos at little relative expense (how's an army-engineered ocean-side community in SoCal on a cushy government stipend sound, while we nuke your motherland?): it chose to do nothing.
Also affected by radiation poisoning were Japanese fishermen on a boat called the Lucky Dragon - in part inspiring the Non-Proliferation Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union six years later - and a number of US military personel.
The IEER has apparently estimated the excess deaths from atmospheric testing on all sides and related fallout between 1940-2000 to be 430,000.
Memorandum for Mr. Herter, remembering Nagasaki.
1949-1961: Burma
General Li Mi retreats with his army of Chinese nationalists into Burma during Chinese civil war. The US, supporting retreating KMT forces elsewhere, also backs Li Mi's army, which continues to make incursions into China.
1948-1976: Italy.
The Congressional Pike Report, as leaked uncensored to the Village Voice and thusly abandoned by the House in embarassment (the Church Committee was the parallel intelligence review in the Senate), revealed that the since 1948 the USG spent over $65 million dollars (including some Marshall Plan aid) interfering in Italian elections, joining Moscow in support of European anti-communism, by way of neo-fascists and known terrorists.
According to Tim Weiner [Legacy of Ashes, p.298] "every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in Italy" was backed by the CIA.
Interference in Italy included buying every election from 1948 to 1972 and destroying [search for "Federico Romero", also discussed here] the anti-fascist resistance that had organized powerful unions and worker committees in its fight against Germany, coming to dominate northern Italy shortly after WWII, threatening the old order, and so the USG reaction. Anti-left violence continued well beyond world war two, into the 70s, with CIA backing for the Gladio
. Gladio operations were formed throughout Western Europe, for example in Norway (exposed in '78 when an associated arms cache was discovered), which included the operation to track suspected communists as part of the intelligence service.
Similar actions were taken against anti-nazi resistance groups in other liberated territories, for example in Germany, where an average of $6 million was spent supporting the Nazi intelligence network of General Reinhard Gehlen until he was replaced by the CIA in 1954. Related support for Nazis, including giving them safe harbor in the US, was the basis for Operation Paperclip.
Italy and the Cold War [pdf]
The Guardian: Terrorists 'helped by CIA' to stop rise of left in Italy.
The Pavelic Papers: the "Ratline", US support for Nazi war criminals.
1948-1956: Peru
Elected APRA government overthrown by Legion of Merit award winner and "CIA pawn" Manuel Odria.
1949: Syria
CIA agent Miles Copeland manipulated elections prior to the CIA backing a military coup against the elected government of Syria, establishing Colonel Al-Zaim's military dictatorship who was promised de facto recognition by the USG. CIA assists in repression of political opposition.
1949-1953: Ukraine
Organizational and material support for Ukrainian resistance movement.
1949-1976: Thailand
After the war in Thailand - the only state in Southeast Asia to support the Japanese war against the allies - the US supports the Thai military (some $2 billion from 1949-1969), leading to Phibun Songkhram reaquiring dictatorial control after a brief exile to Japan in 1949. With a cooperative military junta in total control of Thailand the US was able to use it as a major base of operations from which to mount its attacks on neighboring Southeast Asian countries throughout its involvement in the Vietnam wars.
USG later supports a military coup in 1976, precipitated by the Thammasat Massacre (carried out by forces that had previously been trained by the CIA) and followed by arrests of over 10,000 students, academics, politicians, and labor activists.
The US role in Thailand has been described in detail by the CIA agent that lead the Thailand counter-insurgency program to new heights,
1950-?: Congress for Cultural Freedom/International Association for Cultural Freedom
The locus for a broad cultural black-op, the CIA founds the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 under project QKOPERA, and with support from various foundations and through relationships within the AFL-CIO and media, use it to organize and disseminate propaganda supporting American foreign policy goals. One of the less trivial offenses committed against humanity in this octopus of inanity was a vast criminal conspiracy to impose Abstract Expressionist painting on a distracted world that had enough problems without it.
1950: Puerto Rico
Independence rebellion crushed in Ponce.
1950-1952: Albania
The US and UK send teams of "free Albanians" to infilitrate and establish paramilitary organizations within Albania to topple Enver Hoxha. The missions are compromised by Kim Philby, a Soviet assett at the head of the British operation
.
1950-1952: Poland
Backing for Polish Freedom and Independence Movement.
1950s: Japan
After reimposing the old leadership and imposing a new constitution on defeated Japan the US continues to interfere in this new "democracy":
In Japan, in order to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls, which seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party. We helped bring wartime Minister of Munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and financing a rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty.
--Chalmers Johnson
1950s-1970s: United States
USG performs chemical and biological weapons tests on US citizens in over 230 US cities and use "hundreds of thousands of military personnel" as human guinea pigs, often without their knowledge or consent.
The 1994 Rockefeller Report on Biological Experimentation on US military.
1950-1975: Spain
US suppports Franco's fascist, anti-semitic dictatorship in Spain which had been responsible executing some 40,000 political prisoners after defeating Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, during which he executed another 100,000.
President Truman begrudgingly begins dealing with Franco in 1950, sending him some $62 million in aid. Eisenhower sends him $1.5 billion. Successive US administrations are openly supportive of Franco's regime until his death in 1975.
1952-1959: Cuba
Coup overthrows elected government of Carlos Prio Socorras. Fulgencio Batista's ruthless regime and his secret police force, the Buro de Represion Actividades Communistas (BRAC) - created by the CIA in 1956 - tortures and kills thousands with US assistance.
Before January 1959, Cuba's economy was dominated by US interests, which owned 40% of the sugar production, including seven of the ten largest estates, 90% of the telephone and electricity utilities, the oil refineries, most of the mining industry, and some of the banks.
--Oxfam International, Going Against the Grain: Agricultural Crisis and Transformation
1952-1992: South Korea
After the Korean war the USG re-installs and backs the autocracy of Syngman Rhee until 1960, when the CIA flies Rhee and $20 million in government funds to Hawaii to protect him from the population. Chang Myong is then elected for an unnaturally brief nine-month term, when in 1961 further unrest and the USG supported military coup and dictatorship of Japanese collaborator and suspected commie General Park Chung He overthrows Chang's Second Republic.
Elected to office in 1963, Park later declares martial law in 1972, suspending democracy indefinitely. He also creates the KCIA, an organization 370,000 strong by its third year of existence, the head of which shot Park in the head in 1979. See: Koreagate.
With Chung He's timely passing the South Korean government nevertheless remains on Washington's leash, with another military coup in 1980 by General Chun Doo Hwan, and in 1980 the USG - under Carter - authorized his massacre at Kwangju of pro-democracy activists [2]. The following year Reagan was honoring Doo Hwan for his "commitment to freedom".
South Korean democracy finally takes on some semblance of reality in 1992. General Doo Hwan and his successor Roe Tae Woo were later convicted for mutiny and high treason.
1953: Costa Rica
Attempted overthrow of Jose Figueres.
1953-1979: Iran
The nationalist parliament in Iran nationalizes British oil concessions that were reaping 88% of the profits from the Iranian oil industry. It had offered the British 25% of the profits, rather than 88%, and the British responded by imposing a blockade on Iran and freezing Iranian assets. British embassies are closed, and so the British make proposals to Truman to intervene.
Truman, whose administration considered Prime Minister and Time 'Man of the Year' Mohammed Mossadegh a nationalist and an anti-communist, rejects the proposal, believing the enlargement of the middle-class made possible by the liberal oil nationalization would protect Iran from communism. When Eisenhower takes office the British repeat the proposal, but Ike's Sec. of State John Foster Dulles and the Director of Plans in the CIA Allen Dulles happen to be partners in the lawfirm Sullivan and Cromwell, which coincidentally is the legal counsel for Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Eisenhower is sold a trumped up anti-communist story (also trumped up in the press by the CIA, as was common: see MOCKINGBIRD) and sends Kermit Roosevelt to the American Embassy in Iran to foment a coup as part of Operation AJAX and overthrow Iran's Prime Minister and liquidate the elected Iranian parliament.
The underlying Cold War justification was that because Mossadegh was supported by, among others, the communist Tudeh Party, which had supported Mossadegh's social reforms when resisted by conservative clerics, and so Mossadegh must therefore be Communust: this 'logic', of course, wasn't. The declassified CIA records suggest the opposite: it's apparent that Mossadegh preconditioned a spring 1953 contract with Count Della Zonca (an Italian hauling Iranian oil) on a guarantee that no oil be sold to the Eastern bloc, and with most of the oil continuing to be sold through AIOC the British would effectively have control over the rest of it - essentially an anti-communist contract. The CIA cable on March 31st, 1953 says quite plainly that the "Communists did not create the crisis nor are they playing a significant role in its outcome". Hence a CIA directed plot was necessary to deepen the crisis, improving the insignificant Communist position, and thus make it appear necessary to disband all democratic institutions in favor of years of state violence and terror against anyone who would resist the Shah.
The Shah's dictatorship introduces one of the more totalitarian regimes of the third world, but the British oil concessions became a largely American oil consortium and the day was won for Democracy: the Shah's SAVAK police (organized by US intelligence) proceeded to brutalize, repress, divide, isolate, and torture the Iranian population for a quarter of a century until he was exiled in 1979 by Khomeini's Islamic Republic, which did more of the same, supported in turn by tons of US arms, initially funnelled through Israel, via Carter and Reagans' "illegal-arms-for-CIA-operatives" and "illegal-arms-for-an-illegal-war-in-Nicaragua" deals.
The support of the Shah helped polarize much of Iranian society against the West. Relations, which began to warm in the 90s, have otherwise remained antagonistic. The recent hex cast upon Iran by George the II probably isn't helping.
This is a suitable place to interject a discussion on why oil matters, and why, if we want the oil, we don't just go and take it.
The October Surprise, "Then there are the inexplicable arms sales to Iran after the Reagan administration took over, which some journalists have estimated to be worth several billion dollars", with Kevin Phillips.
The Seized CIA Documents
PBS timeline of US-Iran relations.
National Security Archives: the Iran Coup
Two reports on CIA training SAVAK in torture.
Lifting the Veil
Mansour Farhang and William Dorman, The US Press and Iran, 1988.
Human Rights Watch - Iran
1953: Segue: explosion of the first Russian hydrogen bomb; Destalinization begins; the McCarthy Era
With varying degress of success liberalization programs are undertaken in Soviet Russia and its satellites to undo the worst of the persisting crimes of Stalin's regime. Most, but not all, political prisoners are rehabilitated, religious freedoms expand, and the use of torture reduced. In 1956 Krushchev delivers a limited but accurate enough condemnation of Stalin and Lysenko to the Party. Military suppression of protests against the state and people's movements, vast state censorship, partocracy, militarism, Soviet economic hegemony, and other forms of control for the most part continue - ie. the political life of citizens begins to bear - lacking in violent purges and religious intolerance, torture, famine, and personality cults - more resemblance to that in the US than in China. After 1964 and Brezhnev's rise to power the decline in repression reverses somewhat, and cultural and political dissidence meets with forceful "damage control".
Around the same time in the United States a concerted propaganda campaign is waged to whip up anti-communist hysteria, causing a purge of much of the State Department as numerous diplomats and experts are accused baselessly of 'communist sympathies', to be replaced by comparatively uninformed, ideological wingbats who go on a rampage across the globe in search of enemies to destroy. The effects of McCarthyism on foreign policy makers prolonged a relatively quick and painless three month war on the Korean penninsula, when accepting an armistice would have been seen as "soft on communism", and turned it into a three year long massacre that killed millions. Similarly discussion of Vietnam turns from one of French colonialism to one of "communist expansionism", leading to the deaths of millions, and so on, one massacre after another.
Soviet Archives Exhibit
McCarthy Hearings, 1953-54
1953-1996: Guatemala
"We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent."
--General H?ctor Gramajo, 1980s Guatemalan Minister of Defense, interview with Harvard International Review, cited here
United Fruit Co., aka Chiquita Banana, and the CIA lobby the Eisenhower administration to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz, who attempted to institute land reforms that threatened United Fruit's extortion of Guatemalan agriculture, and expanded on the ideal of democracy to end disenfranchizement of communist sympathizers at the table of government. The Eisenhower administration and CIA, apparently in confusion about what democracy means, prompty organized a botched assassination attempt on Arbenz, trained and armed a military regime to take over, and lent military assistance to the counter-revolution. The ensuing civil war lasted 40 years and left some 160,000 dead and 40,000 "disappeared" (in 1999 there was some light cast on the fate of the disappeared).
"The social and economic programs of the elected government met the aspirations" of labor and the peasantry, and "inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self-interest of most politically conscious Guatemalans. Worse still, the government of Guatemala had "become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail."
So therefore a military solution was necessary. It went on for 40 years, and its left the same culture of terror as in Central American neighbors.
--Chomsky, summarizing internal US documents discussing the communist threat in Guatemala, Kiva Auditorium, NM. A similar quote from the linked essay by Streeter is attributed to the State Department, discussing regional stability for Honduras and El Salvador; quote attributed citation by Gjeijeses, Shattered Hope, p 152.
CIA veteran Ralph McGee has compiled a list of non-classified reports of CIA activities in Guatemala, with the CIA Seal of Approval. A talk of his is available at montclair.edu in which he discusses briefly the CIA's recruitment of rejects from the NFL. John Stockwell has given the same sort of testimony about Angola.
In addition to death squad activity, executions, rape, and torture, US government suppression of the murder of an American, etc., US backed goons engaged in scorched earth campaigns. While US military aid was halted in 1990, the CIA continued its own funding for another 5 years until reports in the US press made the funding public.
Guatemalan suffering continues to this day:
UN Truth Commission on Guatemala: "during the period from 1981 to 1983 these acts descended to the level of genocide directed against elements of the country's indigenous Mayan population".
Human Rights Watch - Guatemala
Amnesty Int. - Guatemala
National Security Archive - Guatemala: Corroberating US documents declassified under FOIA.
NSA - US-Guatemalan policy documents: including a 1982 accusation by the U.S. Embassy that Amnesty International, the Washington Office on Latin America, the Network in Solidarity with Guatemala and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission are supporting Guatemalan Communism because of their reports on human rights abuses in Guatemala - which have since been confirmed by declassified documents.
Guatemalan Baby Organ Farming: the Myth and Legend and the indication of the "general mood"
1954-1965: Pakistan
US military aid to Pakistan helps reinforce the military's position in society and assists it in seizing power in 1958. Overconfident in the strength of its US backing, Pakistan blunders into a war with India in the mid 60s. This and shifts in alignment towards China result in LBJ issuing an arms embargo on Pak and India in 1965, producing a cease-fire. The embargo weakens shortly there-after, and under Nixon military aid resumes, to genocidal effect.
1955-1958: Indonesia - Operation HAIK
"No wonder Sukarno doesn't like us very much. He has to sit down with people who tried to overthrow him." - President Kennedy, 1961
The CIA interfers in Indonesia's first parliamentary elections since it acquired independence from the Netherlands in 1945 by providing $1 million to the Masjumi Party against Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta's Nationalist Party. Sukarno, who had lead the independence movement, wins the elections. Enraged by Sukarno's "unity through diversity" policy, which allowed the communist PKI to run (and consistently lose) in elections, the CIA advocates for a military coup, culminating in President Eisenhower issuing an order on September 25th, 1957 for Sukarno's overthrow.
By early 1958 the CIA established a revolutionary government on Sumatra and Sulawesi that calls for uprisings against the government. The US-trained and armed Indonesia military destroys the rebel base a week later, even recieving maps of the islands from the US military attache in Jakarta, who was unaware of the CIA operation. In March the US State Department, under John Foster Dulles, publically echoes the calls for uprisings against Sukarno, declaring that "all-out Communist despotism is taking over". Overrun, the CIA assets are evacuated to saftey by the US navy in April.
In late April the CIA started sending warplanes to strike military and civilian targets. These sorties killed hundreds. When the Indonesian military downed one of the craft and captured the pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, revealing the direct American involvement in the war, the CIA was forced to shut down the operation. Al Pope was sentenced to death (released in August 1962) and his capture demonstrated that rumors of American involvement in the attempted overthrow were true, making the dire predictions about Sukarno's loyalties entirely self-fulfilling, leading eventually to further US intervention and the massacres of 1965.
Subversion as Foreign Policy, Audrey and George Kahin, 1997.
1956-Present: The US government strikes back: COINTELPRO; Operation CHAOS, MOCKINGBIRD, House Pike Report, Senate Church Committee Report.
Of roughly 20,000 people investigated by the FBI solely on the basis of their political views between 1956-1971, about 10 to 15% were the targets of active counterintelligence measures per se. Taking counterintelligence in its broadest sense, to include spreading false information, it's estimated that about two-thirds were COINTELPRO targets. Most targets were never suspected of committing any crime.
--COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story
Harkening back to the first red scare and the Palmer raids after World War I, the US government moves to target its real enemies: US citizens.
The FBI assisted right-wing hate groups in carrying out bombings, shootings, murder, and other assorted manifestations of violence against activist groups, as exemplified by the siege at Pine Ridge, South Dakota (1973-76) and the Greensboro Massacre (1979).
The CIA was utilized for the same ends, spying on the student movement, collecting information on some 300,000 Americans, distributing LSD to unwitting participants, American and foreign, as part of MKULTRA (leading in one case to the 1953 death of Dr. Frank Olson). It included enticing heroin addicts to use the drug in return for heroin (part of the long history of CIA involvement with the drug trade) and testing it on "unwitting subjects in social situations". All records pertaining to MKULTRA were destroyed by the order of CIA director Richard Helms in 1973, so what these findings from the Church Committee entail exactly we'll never fully know.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD is a well documented program in which the CIA made (and continues to make) infiltrations into domestic media organizations, as well as creating front organizations poising as media groups, giving the intelligence community a high level of influence and occasional instances of direct control in the "free press". This is what democracies do in lieu of having direct state control over media, and one can readily observe that it's a far more effective policy in guiding public opinion and covering up state secrets, since the citizen is left unaware that any influence is being exerted, or if he is he is left unaware of when. Of course, since these activities are never verified by the government until decades after they happen anybody claiming that such activities continue are easily labelled as cranks, as was the case for most instances of covert activity listed in this document - such is to be expected, and I make no claims that such activity continues, but it's a safe assumption. And god forbid, they even have their hands in the establishment left, whatever one makes of that, the arguement is that it keeps them "anti-conspiracist" - a position I would argue is also in keeping with simple rational behavior, by virtue of occam's razor.
Likewise, the CIA has entered into a similar relationship with academics.
Government intelligence services in general often being conspicious, rotten fucks, leading rational, sane people into the bowels of paranoia when government secrecy prevents the public from knowing the full extent and details of operations that targetted US citizens, leaving fear, manufactured or not, to fully disembowel the credibility of people who have reasonable questions but choose instead to fill the gaps in themselves with mindwasting conjecture.
A related segue to this discussion is to address the chamber of horrors that can be the US prison system, just consider George Hansen and "diesel thereapy", who blames the abuse on "government tyranny and liberal treachery".
It's almost enough to suggest that the US government has been involved in a conspiracy to promote the spread of conspiracy theory.
Diesel Therapy & George Hansen resources
Recent COINTELPRO activities.
'Free Speech Zones'.
Inventory of MKULTRA documents.
1956-1976: Jordan
Average of $750,000/year paid personally to King Hussein. After disclosure of payments in 1976 USG claims payments ceased.
1957-1975: Laos.
CIA organizes one coup a year between 57 and 65. Then it bombs the fuck out of Laos for the next decade. Left behind were some 500,000 corpses, and unexploded bomblets from cluster bombing that kill or maim hundreds to thousands a year. Over 87,000 square miles of Laos countryside remains infested by unexploded ordinance and landmines as of 2002, :
Laos is mainly affected by unexploded ordnance (UXO) dating back to the Indochina War, especially the period from 1964 to 1973, when it is estimated that more than two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos. Fifteen of the country.s eighteen provinces are significantly affected by UXO; the most heavily contaminated provinces are Savannakhet, Xieng Khouang, Saravane and Khammouane.[7] Over 85 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and UXO seriously constrains the livelihood and food security of large sections of the population.
--International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Laos Country Report, 2003.
The US government made little or no effort to help with ordnance clearing projects until 1996.
1957-1986: Haiti
US supports 30 years of rule by the Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti. Rule was transferred from Francois Duvalier to his son Jean-Claude in 1971, who now resides comfortably in France. Our nepotistic friends massacre some 40-60,000 political opponents and torture countless more.
The relationship was not without its early complexities. Used as a base for attacks against Cuba in the early 60s, the Kennedy administration reduces some aid and has the CIA make wavering attempts towards overthrowing the regime between 1962 and 1968. The CIA - observing that the regime had "crushed all opposition and destroyed almost all Haitian institutions" - concludes in the end that Duvalier must be propped up against the threat of a devastated and demoralized general population. Even while supporting coup attempts by Haitian exiles in the US they assist the regime against coup attempts by non-exiled Haitians.
The Duvalier Regime in Haiti, David Nicholls.
The Duvalier Dictatorship, Brenda Plummer.
1957: Syria
The UK and US governments approve a plan to stage fake incidents to excuse invasions by neighboring pro-Western Arab countries, in an effort to install a government that "would probably need to rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power".
The plan is abandoned after Syria's neighbors refuse to go along with the project.
1958-1973: Cambodia
The Khmer Serei movement is not a genuine part of the Cambodian political life. It is an external organization covertly supported by the Thai and South Vietnamese governments with the object of overthrowing the Sihanouk regime. Its chief methods are subversion and terrorism.
--British Embassy, Phon Phem, April 22, 1966
Cambodian minorities from southwestern Vietnam and Thailand's Surin province making up Son Ngoc Thanh's Khmer Serei movement are supported by the CIA and used to wage cross-border attacks against the Cambodian army in order to pressure Prince Sihanouk into a stronger pro-Western alliance through SEATO. The operation fails, making Sihanouk more popular and more resolute in his determination to maintain neutrality. The attacks also bog down the small Cambodian army along the Thai border, forcing Shihanouk to seek assistance from China, which is then used by the CIA to justify continuing support for the Khmer Serei's attempts to undermine the government.
By 1964 US Special Forces, on loan to the CIA, are joining in the cross-border raids from South Vietnam as "advisors" along with South Vietnamese Army units. On top of the initiation of US bombing raids on Cambodia, Shihanouk breaks off relations with the US in the spring of 1965. The steady escalation of US bombing, ostensibly to target communist Vietnamese forces, leads to one of the largest and most destructive bombing campaigns in history, as the order came down for an escalation of the attacks by Henry Kissinger, "Anything that flies on anything that moves".
"The fact is that the United States dropped three times the quantity of explosives on Cambodia between 1970 and 1973 than it had dropped on Japan for the duration of World War II. Between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of high explosives rained down on Cambodia; that is more than one billion pounds. This is equivalent to some 15,400 pounds of explosives for every square mile of Cambodian territory. Considering that probably less than 25 percent of the total area of Cambodia was bombed at one time or another, the actual explosive force per area would be at least four times this level."
--The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, Craig Etcheson, 1984
American support for the ouster of Sihanouk (viewed by the rural populace as the father of the country), in a coup by General Lon Nol and the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops in April 1970 prompted a backlash that strengthened support for the insurgent Khmer Rouge (KR) guerrillas.
--Phil Robertson, Foreign Policy in Focus, December 1997.
The data released by Clinton shows the total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history.
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia, 2006
The CIA estimated that the US bombing campaign killed some 600,000 Cambodians, but between four years of US bombing, the Khmer Rouge's self-immolation of the country from 1975-1979, the 1979 Vietnam invasion, and a mass famine induced by the destruction of farm land, cluster bombs effectively mining tracts of countryside (even now a continuing problem, with over 400 casualties from unexeploded ordnance in 2002), the flood of refugees fleeing from US bombing to urban centers that could not sustain the population, and later a US-led blockade after 1979 (except for Khmer Rouge-lead groups opposing the new government, which the US "tilted" towards), nobody really knows how many died to what by whose hand.
Cambodian Neutrality and the United States, George Kahin, 2002.
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia.
International Committee to Ban Landmines, Cambodia Country Report 2003
1958: Lebanon
CIA funds election campaign of Camille Chamoun, quoted from the NYT, 3/31/1997:
In Lebanon in 1957, the CIA supported Christian parties with U.S. government money and donations by American oil companies that wanted to insure a friendly government in Lebanon, a pivotal Middle Eastern country. Wilbur Crane Eveland, a CIA officer, later described driving his gold and white DeSoto onto the grounds of President Camille Chamoun's residence in Beirut and delivering political payoffs. "Throughout the elections, I traveled regularly to the presidential palace with a briefcase full of Lebanese pounds, then returned late at night to the embassy with an empty twin case" to be replenished with CIA money, Eveland wrote in "Ropes of Sand" in 1980, a history of American policy failures in the Middle East.
Shortly thereafter 14,000 marines occupy Lebanon to repress dissidents opposing Chamoun's government, intervening in a small civil war to prop him up.
1959: Iraq
Saddam Hussein, working as a CIA asset, makes his first botched attempt on the life of Iraq's nationalist leader Gen. Abdel Karim Qassim.
1959-Present: Cuba
Continuing an old feud, that being that Cuba is United States territory and not Cuban, the USG has continued intervening on it's own behalf in Cuba. With the overthrow of the US imposed and supported Batista dictatorship the CIA starts directing bombing raids from US soil, manned by exiled Cubans, against Cuba. The Cuban government sought redress in the UN in 1960, and the CIA bungled attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro 6 times between 1961 and 1963. The US ordered Britain not to provide arms to Cuba, forcing it to eventually seek aid from the Soviet Union, providing a pretext for further intervention. Direct support for sabatoge and terror attacks continue until 1966, including the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, strafing attacks on beach-side resorts, contamination of agricultural imports, and even attacks on British cargo ships.
In 1969 Nixon restarted the terror campaign, directing greater aid from the CIA and allowing exile groups to carry out attacks on Cuban targets from US soil with impunity, leading eventually to the bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people. These operations continue up until the present, with the FBI arresting Cuban infiltrators of US-based exile groups that engage in anti-Cuban terrorism: after being told about their presence by Cuban counter-terrorism officials in an effort to cooperate in anti-terror campaigns, such as those instigated by Bay of Pigs veteran Luis Posada Carriles.
US embargos, continuing long past the end of the cold war, strangle the Cuban economy and deprive all but the highest American elites of fine Cuban cigars. To be fair to Cuba - and it's unlikely that this has much to do with Castro's administrative "genius" - it rates somewhere around 3rd or 4th in the Western hemisphere on basic human development indicators, its infant mortality rate is in fact lower than that of the United States. On human rights it's useful to compare notes on Cuba versus the United States and the top recipient in the hemisphere of US military aid, Columbia, before trying to explain or justify USG policy against Cuba as a response to Castro's human rights abuses.
US-directed biological warfare against Cuba.
Operation NORTHWOODS
638 Ways to Kill Castro
1960-1963: Ecuador
According to a book by ex-CIA agent Philip Agee, the CIA staged a Communist takeover of Ecuador before backing a military coup, ousting elected President J. M. Velasco Ibarra, and again in 1963 the government of Carlos Julio Arosemena. Agee now lives in Cuba and is accused of being a "KGB shill", which all around is probably better for the health than staying in the US and being a CIA target.
1960-1971: Turkey
CIA assists Turkish Military Intelligence (MIT) in designing plans for mass arrests and repression of political opposition from 1960-69. In 1971 the CIA assists a military coup, and the plans are carried out, leading to the arrests and torture of 4,000 "suspects" in a single night.
1960-Present: Congo
Shortly after the Congo wins its independence from the brutal rule of Begium
- which received support from the USG - the USG assists in assassination attempts of the newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (including one attempt via a viral agent, delivery courtesy Sidney Gottlieb), bringing the former European colony into the US "sphere of dominance" under the USG backed reign of Joseph Mobutu Sese-Seko. As an informal colony of a troika between Belgium (for prestige), France (for trade), and the US (resource exploitation and supporting reactionary forces in neighboring states), the backers of Mobutu's regime set about some 37 years of supporting a brutal despot and kleptomaniac, leaving the Congo drownd in $12 billion of international debt. International propping of the regime continued well beyond IMF advisor Erwin Blumenthal's exposing the kleptocracy in 1982 and the IMF's and World Bank's continued support of it because of Western dominance in those organizations. Funds supplied by Western kickbacks and aid were used by Mobutu to bribe off select military, familial, and regional elites in order to maintain his position in the country.
After his rise to power Mobutu proceeded to rape and brutalize the country and its citizens. Replaced by Laurent Kabila and then his son Joseph Kabila, things still aren't looking any better. Part of a general juggling and inadvertent discombobulation of African "nations" (artificial constructs based on the generally arbitrary borders established and afterwards maintained by "exiting" colonial powers) between world powers the Soviet role was "largely rhetorical". Saner imperial powers might have entered into an Anti-Circus-Ring Pact.
In 1964 the CIA provided air support for Mobutu, Cyril Adoula, and Moise Tshombe in Katanga, against Lumumba supporters in Stanleyville.
During the 1970s the USG and France organized military support for Mobutu during rebel invasions from Angola into Shaba.
Whatever finger-waving one might direct upon various outside actors, the IMF and WB institutions that are subsidiaries to Western interests, the problems of a corrupt and repressive state supported by them, and a helpless, repressed, and disorganized society, one has to admit that "the disaster had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference. ... Zaire's free fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad." (Foreign Affairs, 2001)
The US maintains to this day over a dozen direct dependencies, the largest of which is Puerto Rico. Its military forces are active over most of the globe: at last audit about 226 countries have US military troops, 63 of which host American bases, while only 46 countries in the world have no US military presence - a projection of military power that makes the Roman, British, and Soviet empires pale in comparison. The bulk of this document will deal with what is alternatively referred to as "neo-colonialism", "hegemony", "proxy rule", or "informal empire": roughly, a system of "dual elite" political rule, in which domestic elites (the proxy) recieve backing from (are dependent on - to varying degrees) a foreign elite, and in return protect (to varying degrees) the foreign power's interests in the country (security, economic, or domestic political interests). This is, at least, the framework within which I use the terms - as it is generally accepted by students of history. To take an explanation cited by Ariel Cohen as "One of the more successful attempts made to create a coherent theory of empires" in Russian Imperialism:
"Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social, or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire."
--Michael Doyle, Empires
As a point of reference formal American imperialism begins (or not - one would have to completely ignore the genocide of the native population, African and Native-American slavery, rapid and continuous expansion of the national borders through war, rapid and continuous expansion of mercantilism through war and the threat of war, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous peoples, the mid 1800s mercantilist state established in Nicaragua, etc.) with the aquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Phillipines after the Spanish-American War of 1898. It's a good point to remember how that war started: part hoax, part sensationalized, war mongering "journalism", and of course much talk about the brutality of the enemy and the necessity of our intervention on behalf of the suffering - in this case on behalf of the Cubans and their savage treatment at the hands of the tyrannical Spaniards: much better for them to suffer at our hands.
Old habits die hard.
For the sake of what has become a very very poor attempt at brevity, or in recognition of the precedent set by the Nuremberg Tribunal and principles laid out under the UN charter, these notes will mostly focus on post-WWII history - though it would seem imperative to include interventions that fly in the face of the popular misconception that the United States ended its imperial project at the end of the Spanish-American war. There were military involvements during the 1890s by the USG in Argentina, Chile, Haiti, Hawaii, Nicaragua, China, Korea, Panama, Samoa, in extremely brutal labour conflicts within the nation, and something akin to a war on working Americans waged by the National Association of Manufacturers that will otherwise go undiscussed. The Phillipines makes a decent representative example of the US' first official exercise in colonial imperialism and formal empire
, also referred to as "civilizational imperialism" - a project we're presently repeating.
"Lest this seem to be the bellicose pipedream of some dyspeptic desk soldier, let us remember that the military deal of our country has never been defensive warfare. Since the Revolution, only the United Kingdom has beaten our record for square miles of territory acquired by military conquest. Our exploits against the American Indian, against the Filipinos, the Mexicans, and against Spain are on a par with the campaigns of Genghis Khan, the Japanese in Manchuria and the African attack of Mussolini. No country has ever declared war on us before we first obliged them with that gesture. Our whole history shows we have never fought a defensive war. And at the rate our armed forces are being implemented at present, the odds are against our fighting one in the near future."
--Major General Smedley D. Butler, America's Armed Forces: 'In Time of Peace', 1935.
1898-1914: The Phillipines
U.S. Brig. Gen. Jacob H. Smith: "I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States."
Major Littleton W. T. Waller: How young?
Smith: Ten years and up.
--Exchange on October 1901, quote from the testimony at Smith's court martial by the New York Evening Journal (May 5, 1902). General Smith, a veteran of the Wounded Knee massacre, was popularly known as "Hell Roaring Jake" or "Howling Wilderness".
The "Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation" of the McKinley presidency in 1899 annouced America's intention to be the benevolent dictator over various foreign nations that just happened to all be filled with ruthless, pagan savages.
In a savage conflict America repressed the Filipino independence movement. As in most cases of massacre on the part of the US the number of casualties remains a matter of debate; in this instance 5,000 (of some 120,000 involved) Americans killed with additional casualties later due to disease contracted in the Phillipines, but anywhere between 16,000-20,000 Filipino soldiers and 200,000-600,000 civilian Filipino deaths resulted due to the war, war induced famine, disease, and multiple atrocities, but one would be mistaken to describe the conflict as characterized by brutality. The US continued occupying the Phillipines for another 48 years.
US military involvement in the Phillipines continues to this day, much to the advantage of foreign investors, who continue to maintain economic hegemony. US troops may not enjoy their stay quite as much as the last time, nor as the first time.
1903-1936: Panama
US indirectly runs Panama through a surrogate after managing its seccession from Columbia.
1904-1978: Dominican Republic
In 1904 the USG takes control of Dominican customs houses by force to collect on international debts, shortly thereafter signing a treaty, with the DR essentially at gun point, ratifying the debt relationship.
Between 1916 and 1924 the US occupies and rules the Dominican Republic. Shortly thereafter General Rafael Trujillo takes control of the country with the National Guard that was created and put under his control by the USG before its exit. During the 30s Trujillo wiped out some 30,000 Dominicans and Haitians in an effort to make his side of the island 'more white'. Trujillo recieved US backing until the mid 1950s, when he was finally placed under economic sanctions for attempting to assassinate the president of Venezuela. A few years later the USG began supporting the conservative opposition to overthrow him, successfully assassinating him in 1961, out of fear that the liberal Constitutionalist opposition would get to it first. Trujillo's son Ramfi was escorted out of the country by the US military.
In 1963 USG-backed militants remove the recently elected president of the Dominican Republic, Juan Bosch - a centrist liberal - to "prevent another Cuba". Two years later Lyndon Johnson sent 22,000 US Marines to land on the island and take control of the country for 17 months after falling sugar prices and political conflict stirred an uprising against the new regime of Donald Reid Cabral. The Marines assist in supressing the rebellion, killing over 4,000 Dominicans and solidifying conservative control over the country, leading to the reinstatement of Trujillo-frontman turned Washington-frontman Joaquin Balaguer, who dragged the country into a nightmare of political violence, electoral fraud, and death squad activity that, by and large, eliminated any possible political opposition to the regime - minus one or two times when Balaguer's masters in Washington yanked his leash for the cameras. The USG continued lavishing military support onto the regime throughout the waves of terror.
1915-1934: Haiti
US occupies and administers Haiti for 19 years.
A collection of Nation articles on the occupation of Haiti.
Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915-1940
1912-1979: Nicaragua
A sort of defacto American colonial holding during the mid 19th century - per the East India Company model of a private corporation taking control of a foreign nation with state assistance - US Marines occupy Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933.
In 1927 US Marines enter into a protacted struggle with the guerilla forces of Augusto Sandino, eventually suffering their first defeat against a third world insurgency.
Afterwards, the USG arms, trains, and otherwise props up the barbarous, nepotistic Somoza dictatorship and the National Guard, which holds on to dictatorial power until the Sandinista revolution of 1979.
1917-1920: Russian Civil War
The "cold" war begins with the Allied intervention in Russia and backing of the White armies.
1932-1972: The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
399 african american sharecroppers are denied treatment for syphilis as part of a US government medical study in 1932. Exposed by the press in 1972, the government finally shuts down the program over 30 years after a cure was discovered.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study Legacy Committee.
Center for Disease Control timeline of the study.
1936: Objective history ends.
Doubt being the prerogative of one who seeks truth.
1936-1958: America
The Federal Housing Administration - a mortage insurance program that helped millions of American families to develop their own property, accumulate capital, and lift them into the middle-class - became an effective state-mandated ghettoization program under blankly racist standards that prevented black neighborhoods and families from recieving the development assistance that their taxes otherwise helped pay for. Likewise, housing deeds included 'restrictive covenants' that prohibited blacks from occupying homes in white neighborhoods, until a 1948 Supreme Court ruling was implemented in 1950 that ruled such contracts unconsistutional. Similar policies excluded most black workers from Social Security coverage and agricultural assistance programs.
These policies re-inforced the status quo on the ground - the racist municipal and business practices of the dominate culture - lifting white America further above its black counterpart while encouraging urban decay and racial segregation. In terms of home ownership the gap between white and black home ownership jumped by 5.5% during the life of the program and left cities highly polarized between underdeveloped inner-city black neighborhoods and highly developed white suburbs. The black home ownership rate doesn't reach the white rate of 1900 until 1970. Fair housing legislation was passed in 1968 but subsequent court rulings show that individual acts of similar discrimination continued well into the present.
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, by James W. Loewen.
1940: The McCollum Memo.
In which, arguably, President Roosevelt's plan to provoke a Japanese attack is outlined.
1942-1945: Japanese-American internment.
1945-1974: Greece.
"Fuck your parliament and your constitution."
--President Johnson to Greek Ambassador, Alexander Matsas, June 1964.
The USG creates the Greek secret police (KYP) and backs military coups in 1949, 1967 and 1973. Dictatorships ruled with US backing during the periods of 1949-1952 and 1967-1974.
Under the ostensible rubric of defending Greece from Soviet aggression the US takes over British efforts to destroy the Greek left, establishing a brutal rightwing dictatorship. Since the original intervention of the Truman Doctrine the USG continued attacking Greece, overthrowing the elected government twice more when Greeks had the terminity to elect governments without Washington's approval.
One apology for this brand of imperialistic hubris is that the 1948 Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia fueled fears in the US government of various nefarious Soviet plots seen and unseen, demanding action. We defer to the US government as to the reality of such fears:
The Soviet crackdown on Czechoslovakia in 1948 therefore flowed logically from the inauguration of the Marshall Plan program, and was confidently predicted by United States government observers six months in advance of the event.
It is clear from the above that the sudden consolidation of Communist power in Czechoslovakia in 1948 was not a sign of any "new Soviet aggressiveness" and had nothing to do with any Soviet decision to launch its military forces against the West.
--George Kennan; Report to the US Dept of State from American Embassy in Moscow, September 8, 1952
Whether US leaders believed their own delusions about the Kremlin or not, it's difficult to lend such pretentions much credit by the time of 1967 coup. As Kennan comments in the Moscow Embassy report, "The attempt to portray the outside world as menacing, whether or nor it actually was so at any given moment, has been part of the stock in trade of Soviet rule." He does not shrink from making the same observation about the West.
But perhaps the easiest question to answer is whether a defense against Communist dictatorships required uncritical moral, political and material support for proto-fascist dictatorships - a highly dubious assumption, and an expensive one in this instance, costing some 150,000 lives. Alternatively one could - for instance - try promoting democracy and human rights.
NSC 68: Fact and Fancy
Who Killed George Polk?
Tying Greece to the West, by Mogens Pelt, 2006.
1945-1960s: China. Tibet. Taiwan.
With their capacity to defend themselves in part defining them as the "second world" the USSR and communist China benefit from little direct Western intervention in the post-war period. Mao, like other Communist leaders, was a close ally during the WWII, and was more effective in organizing resistance to the Japanese Empire than Chiang Kai-Shek because - to paint with a broad brush - Marxist euphimisms played better with peasant serfs long repressed by Chiang's army than reactionary feudal-nationalist doctrines.
During the post-war assemblage of the United Nations China was officially inducted, but the USG officially recognized Kai-Shek's exiled dictatorship in Taiwan as the legitemate government of China (US sponsorship of Kai-Shek lasted for decades, and it was he who cast China's vote in favor of the Korean war on the United Nations Security Council), as compared to Mao's insane dictatorship in China. By at least one count Kai-Shek's US-supported efforts to remain in power cost some 18 million lives, on par with Mao's campaigns to retain power after the revolution, excluding the horrendous famines he unknowingly presided over.
In an attempt to discredit Mao's China the US funnels covert economic aid and directs reforms in Taiwan, working with Kai-Shek's son Chiang Ching-kuo, instituting land reform and providing guidance in modern farming techniques and technology while heralding it as an example of the "free market". The successful development program, which lasted for about ten years, was then used as propaganda, absurdly, for market liberalization elsewhere in the third world - though the US continued to overthrow governments that attempted to institute similar land reforms, as they were indicative of "Communist sympathies" and "Soviet direction".
Amid this diplomatic rivalry between Taiwan and China the US and China were vying over Tibet, with the Chinese-incited Marxist rebellion stirring under the Tibetian aristocratic religious order and the CIA organizing and funding counter-revolutionary groups to compete with competing Red groups, having no better idea to sell, let alone any idea how to intervene productively in the madness swallowing China and, through it, Tibet. It doesn't seem unlikely that the USG would have happily supported the 1950 invasion of Tibet had Chinese Nationalists - who had already made failed efforts to re-aquire Tibet - won the civil war.
No stone among the remaining empires to be left unturned or uncontested. So it goes.
Two perspectives on Tibet: Chinese dissident Wang Lixiong, and a response by Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya.
CIA Dope Calypso
1945-1952: South Korean Occupation, Cheju Island, the Korean War
"If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot"
--Ambassador John J. Muccio to Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk.
The USG, with Japanese and South Korean collaborators (under Syngman Rhee - a Korean-American chosen by Chiang Kai Shek to preside over South Korea - curtesy Washington DC), slaughtered one third of the population of Cheju Island in anti-communist purges during the occupation of South Korea from 1945 to 1949. The repression of the population by US, ROK, and Japanese forces purged anywhere between 100,000 and 800,000 'suspected leftists' in the civillian population.
Among other things the anti-communist policy of the USG and the cooperation against the formation of an independent, unified Korea by both Soviets and Americans lead to the North Korean invasion on June 25th, 1950. During the war the USG deliberately targetted civillians caught in the war path, and with some 4 million casualties between all players in the war well over half were civillian casualties.
After the war the anti-Communist doctrine of the USG and Taiwanese governments lead to forced "voluntary" repatriation, where Chinese POWs were terrorized and tortured if they volunteered for repatriation to mainland China.
"Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. ...
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to 'be liked' or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague, and for the Far East, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
--George Kennan, A Review of Current Trends in U.S. Foreign Policy, 1948.
The historical record suggests that Kennan - for all his somewhat more sound advice on East Asia: the warning of overextension and admittal of US political failure (meaning the simple inability to offer an alternative to Communism that had any popular appeal, despite the existence of numerous alternatives that would undermine Soviet influence but not, per the stated goal, maintain economic disparities) - was largely ignored except on this particular point, as "our unsound commitments" to China continued in Taiwan for many decades. At least until 1979 when the Chinese government was finally formally recognized and given - in what I suppose would be considered sound commitment - backing in the Chinese invasion of Vietnam. The USG has continued "interfering in the internal affairs" of the Phillipines up to the present by propping up one cooperative despot after another, and directly assisting in the repression of internal rebellions. Nevermind that the US more than overstretched itself in Vietnam. The USG did, however, manage dealing in "straight power concepts" to a surreal and terrible degree, and has had little discernable trouble maintaining its "position of disparity".
1945-1994: Vietnam: "Remember! Only you can prevent forests."
"nobody ever told us they were human"
--Lt. Calley, My Lai hearings. 'Calley Pleads for Understanding', New York Times, March 31, p. 1
We might begin with the CIA's orchestration in 1952 of a dramatic terrorist bombing in the center of Saigon that was blamed on communist forces to stir American rage against Agent 19, creating political support for the US to become the primary financer of the French war in Indochina until the US takes the entire project over in 1961, when Kennedy sends in the first US ground advisers, who almost immediately begin taking over the fighting for a corrupt Diem regime. Similar incidents, such as the Gulf of Tonkin, are repeated to generate support for ramping up the scale of American intervention.
In a campaign that is probably best described as institutionalized genocide some 1 million Vietnamese combatants and 2-4,000,000 South East Asian civillians (DRV statistics, including Laos and Cambodia) were killed during this US stage of the war (estimated anywhere between 10-20% of the population), with over half the Vietnamese casualties inflicted in South Vietnam, the ostensible protectorate of the United States. Likewise the US managed to kill some 17,000 US troops - one third of all US casualties were reportedly caused by American-deployed landmines and unexploded cluster ordinace.
The CIA's Phoenix program lead to the extra-judicial assassinations of some 20-40,000 civillians alone - or "suspected Communists", nevermind the hundreds of thousands that were subjected to brutal interrogations and internment in American re-education camps. Military intelligence programs differed little in their essential brutality, including torture by field telephone. In violation of international law, among other things, the US utilized chemical warfare (sarin per operation Tailwind is largely discredited, VX perhaps remains a possibility, and massive amounts of toxins - the carcinogen Agent Orange comes to mind - were dumped into the Vietnamese ecosystem, defoliating vast swathes of the country) and scorched earth policies which afflicted not only US and Vietnamese soliders, the former of whom were awarded damages for the exposure, but caused massive civilian casualties and harm that continue to this day, as unexploded ordance and damage to the gene pool caused by chemical agents take their slow toll:
The Vietnamese government estimates 500,000 children have been born with birth defects caused by contamination with Agent Orange and two million suffered cancers and other ill effects - innocent victims of a chemical intended to harm plant life, not humans. But unlike the American soldiers who sprayed the defoliant, they have never received compensation.
--The Independent, "Agent Orange: the legacy of a weapon of mass destruction", 4/3/2006.
The main thrust of this violence was directed towards South Vietnam, who we were purportedly there to protect, or whatever it is we were purpotedly doing; protecting America from Vietnam, I suppose, against their plan to sail over in rafts and crush us with sheer numbers. To have Michael Lind tell it I'm supposed to believe that the NLF's refusal to surrender makes them responsible for the victims of US invasion. So far as Soviet involvement is concerned Ilya Gaiduk argues that Russia was partly responsible for the war due to their lack of actual involvement, however that works. US involvement in Vietnam increased neighboring alliances with the Soviets and forced the Vietnamese into a position of dependency on China and the USSR (they had, after WWII, sought alliances and support from the US to preserve their independence from the French and the Chinese - the latter position eventually lead to their alliances with the Soviets). The Sino-Soviet split in 1960 resulted in China becoming a US ally after the end of the war in 1975, at which point Vietnam turned even further to the Soviets for support against the traditional Chinese hegemony over the region.
The US paid for the French campaign between 1945 to 1954 before taking it over directly, beginning a US phase in the Vietnam wars that lasted until 1975. After the end of direct US involvement in Vietnam the US continued waging the conflict for almost two decades afterward. In 1979 China invaded Vietnam with US backing when the USG deployed the carrier Constellation to the Gulf of Tonkin to deter a Soviet response, and gave diplomatic and political backing for the Chinese action - to "teach the ex-colony a lesson" for deposing the pro-Chinese, genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. During the invasion the Chinese destroyed the dikes and canals that formed key components to agrarian production and with them much of the country's rice reserves, inducing food shortages exacerbated at the same time by the US-led blockade on the country that, incidentally, lasted until 1994.
In 1986 Nguyen Van Linh, former leader of the NLF, took control of the CP and persued market policies and attempted to re-integrated Vietnam into the world economic system. The latter was prevented by successive administrations, which continued the embargo and blocked Western access to - to quote Eisenhower - "the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs": tin, tungsten, rubber plantations, "and so on".
This curious justification for the war was self-fulfilling: when a population elected a communist (Ho Chi Mihn) with 90% of the vote (an early result that was never called into question) who was extremely friendly towards - and a former operative of - the US, the response was to wage an invasion until, against impossible odds, the population expelled the invader. After the war, which was - by Eisenhower's own lame admission - in part to secure access to raw materials, the response of the invaders was to turn around and block access to those materials with no discernable, rational goal (to "teach Vietnam a lesson"?) for 25 years. The pathology of blind anti-Communism prevented a Western response that quite easily could have curbed a Communist regime's worst excesses and defects by working with a country and its elected leaders that were considerably pro-American, and surprisingly still are.
To prevent Communist atrocities - as the justification for the war was argued even as it was waged - was clearly no long term committment. During the normalization process of the early 1990s the subject of human rights was conspiciously absent, as before and as after. The familiar justifications of spreading humane values such as liberty, justice, and life with military force were entirely absent from post-war relations, when they might have been persued in a nonviolent manner.
Thusly there is the generally acknowledged fact that "In the years since we lost the war, we have won it." In consideration that the French had already bailed on the war as a hopeless enterprise in the mid 50s, that the British told Washington in 1954 that "None of us in London believe that intervention in Indonchina can do anything" (Eden to Dulles, April 25th, refusing Eisenhower's request for British support of the US-French war) and made further efforts to end the war in 1967. Our allies were by and large opposed to the war. The only realistic conclusion is that the war, the deaths of millions upon millions of innocents and the ensuing rise of repressive security states throughout the region due to meaningless destructive games amongst imperial powers, was never in any way justified.
Whoever can sort out the logic behind this insanity wins a cookie.
The US never paid reparations to Vietnam - let alone Cambodia or Laos - although the Paris Agreement Nixon signed in 1973 specified in Article 21 $3.3 billion in reconstruction aid for the DRV. As Gabriel Kolko described the post-war relationship in 1982:
To state ... that Vietnam wishes to be dependent on Soviet aid ignores entirely its intensive efforts during 1976-1978 to establish economic ties with the West via loans, aid, and investments - efforts it has not abandoned. Its present dependence on the USSR is the consequence of a conscious US and Chinese policy which Assistant Secretary of State John H. Holdridge summed up last June 8: "It is important to keep the Vietnamese isolated politically and economically, and there is agreement on that score."
Agent 19 has yet to receive commendations from the US for his resistance against the Japanese during World War II.
"About the war in Vietnam, all I have to say is [...inaudible...] and that's all I have to say about the war in Vietnam."
--Forrest Gump
Betrand Russell's International Warcrimes Tribunal on Vietnam, 1967.
Tiger Force: Buried Secrets, Brutal Truths
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities went far beyond My Lai.
Dellums House Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam, 1971.
Winter Soldier Investigation, 1971, or "When We Were Psychos"
THE COLLAPSE OF THE ARMED FORCES, Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr. 1971. Armed Forces Journal.
The Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition
Vietnam declassification project
NSA materials on the Pentagon Papers, related links from the VVA and Anthony Russo's website.
1,000 combat veterans gone public.
Dissing Vietnam
MIA Facts
Hanoi Jane
Phillips Jones Griffith, Agent Orange: "collateral damage"
The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam
The Disquieted American
Ed Moise's Bibliography of the Vietnam War
1945-Present: Projection of American Nuclear Power
1946-1954: Phillipines
After taking control of the Phillipines during WWII the US disarms the largest Filipino anti-Japanese guerilla movement, the Hukbalahap, and installs Manuel Roxas, a Japanese collaborator that General MacArthur pardoned, to run the new government. Roxas' government issues an amnesty for collaborators, bans peasant political organizing, refuses to seat opposition congressmen, and directs a campaign of repression throughout the country.
Formal independence is granted to the Phillipines shortly thereafter, with provisions for a large and perpetual American military presence and special privelidges for American business. Roxa's failed policies, however, lead to the resurgence of the Huk movement.
Roxas and his successor Quirino continue those same policies, using US aid primarily to enrich themselves and wage US supported violence to suppress the Huks. The USG begins supporting Ramon Magsaysay by 1950, who, assisted to power by American Colonel Lansdale, manages to use large quantities of economic aid and political reforms, including land reform, to undermine the primary grievances of the Huk movement, which eventually subsides.
However, Magsaysay and his successors fail to implement long term reforms that could resolve the country's problems and extreme poverty, leading later to further popular unrest, a new insurgency, and another US supported strongman and kleptocrat by the name of Ferdinand Marcos.
1946-1996: Marshall Islands.
Nuclear testing during Operations Crossroads, Sandstone, Greenhouse, Ivy, Castle, Redwing, and Hardtack involved over 60 known atomic and hydrogen bomb tests at Enewetak and Bikini. The testing involved USG imposed exile for thousands of islanders to neighboring atolls, hundreds of whom suffered from radiation poisoning and other exposure related diseases, and dozens committed suicide admidst the derilect conditions of their displacement. The USG could have decided to do anything to avoid this constant string of fiascos at little relative expense (how's an army-engineered ocean-side community in SoCal on a cushy government stipend sound, while we nuke your motherland?): it chose to do nothing.
Also affected by radiation poisoning were Japanese fishermen on a boat called the Lucky Dragon - in part inspiring the Non-Proliferation Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union six years later - and a number of US military personel.
The IEER has apparently estimated the excess deaths from atmospheric testing on all sides and related fallout between 1940-2000 to be 430,000.
Memorandum for Mr. Herter, remembering Nagasaki.
1949-1961: Burma
General Li Mi retreats with his army of Chinese nationalists into Burma during Chinese civil war. The US, supporting retreating KMT forces elsewhere, also backs Li Mi's army, which continues to make incursions into China.
1948-1976: Italy.
The Congressional Pike Report, as leaked uncensored to the Village Voice and thusly abandoned by the House in embarassment (the Church Committee was the parallel intelligence review in the Senate), revealed that the since 1948 the USG spent over $65 million dollars (including some Marshall Plan aid) interfering in Italian elections, joining Moscow in support of European anti-communism, by way of neo-fascists and known terrorists.
According to Tim Weiner [Legacy of Ashes, p.298] "every Christian Democrat who ever won a national election in Italy" was backed by the CIA.
Interference in Italy included buying every election from 1948 to 1972 and destroying [search for "Federico Romero", also discussed here] the anti-fascist resistance that had organized powerful unions and worker committees in its fight against Germany, coming to dominate northern Italy shortly after WWII, threatening the old order, and so the USG reaction. Anti-left violence continued well beyond world war two, into the 70s, with CIA backing for the Gladio
. Gladio operations were formed throughout Western Europe, for example in Norway (exposed in '78 when an associated arms cache was discovered), which included the operation to track suspected communists as part of the intelligence service.
Similar actions were taken against anti-nazi resistance groups in other liberated territories, for example in Germany, where an average of $6 million was spent supporting the Nazi intelligence network of General Reinhard Gehlen until he was replaced by the CIA in 1954. Related support for Nazis, including giving them safe harbor in the US, was the basis for Operation Paperclip.
Italy and the Cold War [pdf]
The Guardian: Terrorists 'helped by CIA' to stop rise of left in Italy.
The Pavelic Papers: the "Ratline", US support for Nazi war criminals.
1948-1956: Peru
Elected APRA government overthrown by Legion of Merit award winner and "CIA pawn" Manuel Odria.
1949: Syria
CIA agent Miles Copeland manipulated elections prior to the CIA backing a military coup against the elected government of Syria, establishing Colonel Al-Zaim's military dictatorship who was promised de facto recognition by the USG. CIA assists in repression of political opposition.
1949-1953: Ukraine
Organizational and material support for Ukrainian resistance movement.
1949-1976: Thailand
After the war in Thailand - the only state in Southeast Asia to support the Japanese war against the allies - the US supports the Thai military (some $2 billion from 1949-1969), leading to Phibun Songkhram reaquiring dictatorial control after a brief exile to Japan in 1949. With a cooperative military junta in total control of Thailand the US was able to use it as a major base of operations from which to mount its attacks on neighboring Southeast Asian countries throughout its involvement in the Vietnam wars.
USG later supports a military coup in 1976, precipitated by the Thammasat Massacre (carried out by forces that had previously been trained by the CIA) and followed by arrests of over 10,000 students, academics, politicians, and labor activists.
The US role in Thailand has been described in detail by the CIA agent that lead the Thailand counter-insurgency program to new heights,
1950-?: Congress for Cultural Freedom/International Association for Cultural Freedom
The locus for a broad cultural black-op, the CIA founds the Congress for Cultural Freedom in 1950 under project QKOPERA, and with support from various foundations and through relationships within the AFL-CIO and media, use it to organize and disseminate propaganda supporting American foreign policy goals. One of the less trivial offenses committed against humanity in this octopus of inanity was a vast criminal conspiracy to impose Abstract Expressionist painting on a distracted world that had enough problems without it.
1950: Puerto Rico
Independence rebellion crushed in Ponce.
1950-1952: Albania
The US and UK send teams of "free Albanians" to infilitrate and establish paramilitary organizations within Albania to topple Enver Hoxha. The missions are compromised by Kim Philby, a Soviet assett at the head of the British operation
.
1950-1952: Poland
Backing for Polish Freedom and Independence Movement.
1950s: Japan
After reimposing the old leadership and imposing a new constitution on defeated Japan the US continues to interfere in this new "democracy":
In Japan, in order to prevent the Socialist Party from coming to power through the polls, which seemed likely during the 1950s, we secretly supplied funds to the representatives of the old order in the Liberal Democratic Party. We helped bring wartime Minister of Munitions Nobusuke Kishi to power as prime minister in 1957; split the Socialist Party by promoting and financing a rival Democratic Socialist Party; and, in 1960, backed the conservatives in a period of vast popular demonstrations against the renewal of the Japanese-American Security Treaty.
--Chalmers Johnson
1950s-1970s: United States
USG performs chemical and biological weapons tests on US citizens in over 230 US cities and use "hundreds of thousands of military personnel" as human guinea pigs, often without their knowledge or consent.
The 1994 Rockefeller Report on Biological Experimentation on US military.
1950-1975: Spain
US suppports Franco's fascist, anti-semitic dictatorship in Spain which had been responsible executing some 40,000 political prisoners after defeating Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War of the late 1930s, during which he executed another 100,000.
President Truman begrudgingly begins dealing with Franco in 1950, sending him some $62 million in aid. Eisenhower sends him $1.5 billion. Successive US administrations are openly supportive of Franco's regime until his death in 1975.
1952-1959: Cuba
Coup overthrows elected government of Carlos Prio Socorras. Fulgencio Batista's ruthless regime and his secret police force, the Buro de Represion Actividades Communistas (BRAC) - created by the CIA in 1956 - tortures and kills thousands with US assistance.
Before January 1959, Cuba's economy was dominated by US interests, which owned 40% of the sugar production, including seven of the ten largest estates, 90% of the telephone and electricity utilities, the oil refineries, most of the mining industry, and some of the banks.
--Oxfam International, Going Against the Grain: Agricultural Crisis and Transformation
1952-1992: South Korea
After the Korean war the USG re-installs and backs the autocracy of Syngman Rhee until 1960, when the CIA flies Rhee and $20 million in government funds to Hawaii to protect him from the population. Chang Myong is then elected for an unnaturally brief nine-month term, when in 1961 further unrest and the USG supported military coup and dictatorship of Japanese collaborator and suspected commie General Park Chung He overthrows Chang's Second Republic.
Elected to office in 1963, Park later declares martial law in 1972, suspending democracy indefinitely. He also creates the KCIA, an organization 370,000 strong by its third year of existence, the head of which shot Park in the head in 1979. See: Koreagate.
With Chung He's timely passing the South Korean government nevertheless remains on Washington's leash, with another military coup in 1980 by General Chun Doo Hwan, and in 1980 the USG - under Carter - authorized his massacre at Kwangju of pro-democracy activists [2]. The following year Reagan was honoring Doo Hwan for his "commitment to freedom".
South Korean democracy finally takes on some semblance of reality in 1992. General Doo Hwan and his successor Roe Tae Woo were later convicted for mutiny and high treason.
1953: Costa Rica
Attempted overthrow of Jose Figueres.
1953-1979: Iran
The nationalist parliament in Iran nationalizes British oil concessions that were reaping 88% of the profits from the Iranian oil industry. It had offered the British 25% of the profits, rather than 88%, and the British responded by imposing a blockade on Iran and freezing Iranian assets. British embassies are closed, and so the British make proposals to Truman to intervene.
Truman, whose administration considered Prime Minister and Time 'Man of the Year' Mohammed Mossadegh a nationalist and an anti-communist, rejects the proposal, believing the enlargement of the middle-class made possible by the liberal oil nationalization would protect Iran from communism. When Eisenhower takes office the British repeat the proposal, but Ike's Sec. of State John Foster Dulles and the Director of Plans in the CIA Allen Dulles happen to be partners in the lawfirm Sullivan and Cromwell, which coincidentally is the legal counsel for Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. Eisenhower is sold a trumped up anti-communist story (also trumped up in the press by the CIA, as was common: see MOCKINGBIRD) and sends Kermit Roosevelt to the American Embassy in Iran to foment a coup as part of Operation AJAX and overthrow Iran's Prime Minister and liquidate the elected Iranian parliament.
The underlying Cold War justification was that because Mossadegh was supported by, among others, the communist Tudeh Party, which had supported Mossadegh's social reforms when resisted by conservative clerics, and so Mossadegh must therefore be Communust: this 'logic', of course, wasn't. The declassified CIA records suggest the opposite: it's apparent that Mossadegh preconditioned a spring 1953 contract with Count Della Zonca (an Italian hauling Iranian oil) on a guarantee that no oil be sold to the Eastern bloc, and with most of the oil continuing to be sold through AIOC the British would effectively have control over the rest of it - essentially an anti-communist contract. The CIA cable on March 31st, 1953 says quite plainly that the "Communists did not create the crisis nor are they playing a significant role in its outcome". Hence a CIA directed plot was necessary to deepen the crisis, improving the insignificant Communist position, and thus make it appear necessary to disband all democratic institutions in favor of years of state violence and terror against anyone who would resist the Shah.
The Shah's dictatorship introduces one of the more totalitarian regimes of the third world, but the British oil concessions became a largely American oil consortium and the day was won for Democracy: the Shah's SAVAK police (organized by US intelligence) proceeded to brutalize, repress, divide, isolate, and torture the Iranian population for a quarter of a century until he was exiled in 1979 by Khomeini's Islamic Republic, which did more of the same, supported in turn by tons of US arms, initially funnelled through Israel, via Carter and Reagans' "illegal-arms-for-CIA-operatives" and "illegal-arms-for-an-illegal-war-in-Nicaragua" deals.
The support of the Shah helped polarize much of Iranian society against the West. Relations, which began to warm in the 90s, have otherwise remained antagonistic. The recent hex cast upon Iran by George the II probably isn't helping.
This is a suitable place to interject a discussion on why oil matters, and why, if we want the oil, we don't just go and take it.
The October Surprise, "Then there are the inexplicable arms sales to Iran after the Reagan administration took over, which some journalists have estimated to be worth several billion dollars", with Kevin Phillips.
The Seized CIA Documents
PBS timeline of US-Iran relations.
National Security Archives: the Iran Coup
Two reports on CIA training SAVAK in torture.
Lifting the Veil
Mansour Farhang and William Dorman, The US Press and Iran, 1988.
Human Rights Watch - Iran
1953: Segue: explosion of the first Russian hydrogen bomb; Destalinization begins; the McCarthy Era
With varying degress of success liberalization programs are undertaken in Soviet Russia and its satellites to undo the worst of the persisting crimes of Stalin's regime. Most, but not all, political prisoners are rehabilitated, religious freedoms expand, and the use of torture reduced. In 1956 Krushchev delivers a limited but accurate enough condemnation of Stalin and Lysenko to the Party. Military suppression of protests against the state and people's movements, vast state censorship, partocracy, militarism, Soviet economic hegemony, and other forms of control for the most part continue - ie. the political life of citizens begins to bear - lacking in violent purges and religious intolerance, torture, famine, and personality cults - more resemblance to that in the US than in China. After 1964 and Brezhnev's rise to power the decline in repression reverses somewhat, and cultural and political dissidence meets with forceful "damage control".
Around the same time in the United States a concerted propaganda campaign is waged to whip up anti-communist hysteria, causing a purge of much of the State Department as numerous diplomats and experts are accused baselessly of 'communist sympathies', to be replaced by comparatively uninformed, ideological wingbats who go on a rampage across the globe in search of enemies to destroy. The effects of McCarthyism on foreign policy makers prolonged a relatively quick and painless three month war on the Korean penninsula, when accepting an armistice would have been seen as "soft on communism", and turned it into a three year long massacre that killed millions. Similarly discussion of Vietnam turns from one of French colonialism to one of "communist expansionism", leading to the deaths of millions, and so on, one massacre after another.
Soviet Archives Exhibit
McCarthy Hearings, 1953-54
1953-1996: Guatemala
"We have created a more humanitarian, less costly strategy, to be more compatible with the democratic system. We instituted civil affairs [in 1982] which provides development for 70 percent of the population, while we kill 30 percent. Before, the strategy was to kill 100 percent."
--General H?ctor Gramajo, 1980s Guatemalan Minister of Defense, interview with Harvard International Review, cited here
United Fruit Co., aka Chiquita Banana, and the CIA lobby the Eisenhower administration to overthrow President Jacobo Arbenz, who attempted to institute land reforms that threatened United Fruit's extortion of Guatemalan agriculture, and expanded on the ideal of democracy to end disenfranchizement of communist sympathizers at the table of government. The Eisenhower administration and CIA, apparently in confusion about what democracy means, prompty organized a botched assassination attempt on Arbenz, trained and armed a military regime to take over, and lent military assistance to the counter-revolution. The ensuing civil war lasted 40 years and left some 160,000 dead and 40,000 "disappeared" (in 1999 there was some light cast on the fate of the disappeared).
"The social and economic programs of the elected government met the aspirations" of labor and the peasantry, and "inspired the loyalty and conformed to the self-interest of most politically conscious Guatemalans. Worse still, the government of Guatemala had "become an increasing threat to the stability of Honduras and El Salvador. Its agrarian reform is a powerful propaganda weapon; its broad social program of aiding the workers and peasants in a victorious struggle against the upper classes and large foreign enterprises has a strong appeal to the populations of Central American neighbors where similar conditions prevail."
So therefore a military solution was necessary. It went on for 40 years, and its left the same culture of terror as in Central American neighbors.
--Chomsky, summarizing internal US documents discussing the communist threat in Guatemala, Kiva Auditorium, NM. A similar quote from the linked essay by Streeter is attributed to the State Department, discussing regional stability for Honduras and El Salvador; quote attributed citation by Gjeijeses, Shattered Hope, p 152.
CIA veteran Ralph McGee has compiled a list of non-classified reports of CIA activities in Guatemala, with the CIA Seal of Approval. A talk of his is available at montclair.edu in which he discusses briefly the CIA's recruitment of rejects from the NFL. John Stockwell has given the same sort of testimony about Angola.
In addition to death squad activity, executions, rape, and torture, US government suppression of the murder of an American, etc., US backed goons engaged in scorched earth campaigns. While US military aid was halted in 1990, the CIA continued its own funding for another 5 years until reports in the US press made the funding public.
Guatemalan suffering continues to this day:
UN Truth Commission on Guatemala: "during the period from 1981 to 1983 these acts descended to the level of genocide directed against elements of the country's indigenous Mayan population".
Human Rights Watch - Guatemala
Amnesty Int. - Guatemala
National Security Archive - Guatemala: Corroberating US documents declassified under FOIA.
NSA - US-Guatemalan policy documents: including a 1982 accusation by the U.S. Embassy that Amnesty International, the Washington Office on Latin America, the Network in Solidarity with Guatemala and the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission are supporting Guatemalan Communism because of their reports on human rights abuses in Guatemala - which have since been confirmed by declassified documents.
Guatemalan Baby Organ Farming: the Myth and Legend and the indication of the "general mood"
1954-1965: Pakistan
US military aid to Pakistan helps reinforce the military's position in society and assists it in seizing power in 1958. Overconfident in the strength of its US backing, Pakistan blunders into a war with India in the mid 60s. This and shifts in alignment towards China result in LBJ issuing an arms embargo on Pak and India in 1965, producing a cease-fire. The embargo weakens shortly there-after, and under Nixon military aid resumes, to genocidal effect.
1955-1958: Indonesia - Operation HAIK
"No wonder Sukarno doesn't like us very much. He has to sit down with people who tried to overthrow him." - President Kennedy, 1961
The CIA interfers in Indonesia's first parliamentary elections since it acquired independence from the Netherlands in 1945 by providing $1 million to the Masjumi Party against Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta's Nationalist Party. Sukarno, who had lead the independence movement, wins the elections. Enraged by Sukarno's "unity through diversity" policy, which allowed the communist PKI to run (and consistently lose) in elections, the CIA advocates for a military coup, culminating in President Eisenhower issuing an order on September 25th, 1957 for Sukarno's overthrow.
By early 1958 the CIA established a revolutionary government on Sumatra and Sulawesi that calls for uprisings against the government. The US-trained and armed Indonesia military destroys the rebel base a week later, even recieving maps of the islands from the US military attache in Jakarta, who was unaware of the CIA operation. In March the US State Department, under John Foster Dulles, publically echoes the calls for uprisings against Sukarno, declaring that "all-out Communist despotism is taking over". Overrun, the CIA assets are evacuated to saftey by the US navy in April.
In late April the CIA started sending warplanes to strike military and civilian targets. These sorties killed hundreds. When the Indonesian military downed one of the craft and captured the pilot, Allen Lawrence Pope, revealing the direct American involvement in the war, the CIA was forced to shut down the operation. Al Pope was sentenced to death (released in August 1962) and his capture demonstrated that rumors of American involvement in the attempted overthrow were true, making the dire predictions about Sukarno's loyalties entirely self-fulfilling, leading eventually to further US intervention and the massacres of 1965.
Subversion as Foreign Policy, Audrey and George Kahin, 1997.
1956-Present: The US government strikes back: COINTELPRO; Operation CHAOS, MOCKINGBIRD, House Pike Report, Senate Church Committee Report.
Of roughly 20,000 people investigated by the FBI solely on the basis of their political views between 1956-1971, about 10 to 15% were the targets of active counterintelligence measures per se. Taking counterintelligence in its broadest sense, to include spreading false information, it's estimated that about two-thirds were COINTELPRO targets. Most targets were never suspected of committing any crime.
--COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story
Harkening back to the first red scare and the Palmer raids after World War I, the US government moves to target its real enemies: US citizens.
The FBI assisted right-wing hate groups in carrying out bombings, shootings, murder, and other assorted manifestations of violence against activist groups, as exemplified by the siege at Pine Ridge, South Dakota (1973-76) and the Greensboro Massacre (1979).
The CIA was utilized for the same ends, spying on the student movement, collecting information on some 300,000 Americans, distributing LSD to unwitting participants, American and foreign, as part of MKULTRA (leading in one case to the 1953 death of Dr. Frank Olson). It included enticing heroin addicts to use the drug in return for heroin (part of the long history of CIA involvement with the drug trade) and testing it on "unwitting subjects in social situations". All records pertaining to MKULTRA were destroyed by the order of CIA director Richard Helms in 1973, so what these findings from the Church Committee entail exactly we'll never fully know.
Operation MOCKINGBIRD is a well documented program in which the CIA made (and continues to make) infiltrations into domestic media organizations, as well as creating front organizations poising as media groups, giving the intelligence community a high level of influence and occasional instances of direct control in the "free press". This is what democracies do in lieu of having direct state control over media, and one can readily observe that it's a far more effective policy in guiding public opinion and covering up state secrets, since the citizen is left unaware that any influence is being exerted, or if he is he is left unaware of when. Of course, since these activities are never verified by the government until decades after they happen anybody claiming that such activities continue are easily labelled as cranks, as was the case for most instances of covert activity listed in this document - such is to be expected, and I make no claims that such activity continues, but it's a safe assumption. And god forbid, they even have their hands in the establishment left, whatever one makes of that, the arguement is that it keeps them "anti-conspiracist" - a position I would argue is also in keeping with simple rational behavior, by virtue of occam's razor.
Likewise, the CIA has entered into a similar relationship with academics.
Government intelligence services in general often being conspicious, rotten fucks, leading rational, sane people into the bowels of paranoia when government secrecy prevents the public from knowing the full extent and details of operations that targetted US citizens, leaving fear, manufactured or not, to fully disembowel the credibility of people who have reasonable questions but choose instead to fill the gaps in themselves with mindwasting conjecture.
A related segue to this discussion is to address the chamber of horrors that can be the US prison system, just consider George Hansen and "diesel thereapy", who blames the abuse on "government tyranny and liberal treachery".
It's almost enough to suggest that the US government has been involved in a conspiracy to promote the spread of conspiracy theory.
Diesel Therapy & George Hansen resources
Recent COINTELPRO activities.
'Free Speech Zones'.
Inventory of MKULTRA documents.
1956-1976: Jordan
Average of $750,000/year paid personally to King Hussein. After disclosure of payments in 1976 USG claims payments ceased.
1957-1975: Laos.
CIA organizes one coup a year between 57 and 65. Then it bombs the fuck out of Laos for the next decade. Left behind were some 500,000 corpses, and unexploded bomblets from cluster bombing that kill or maim hundreds to thousands a year. Over 87,000 square miles of Laos countryside remains infested by unexploded ordinance and landmines as of 2002, :
Laos is mainly affected by unexploded ordnance (UXO) dating back to the Indochina War, especially the period from 1964 to 1973, when it is estimated that more than two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos. Fifteen of the country.s eighteen provinces are significantly affected by UXO; the most heavily contaminated provinces are Savannakhet, Xieng Khouang, Saravane and Khammouane.[7] Over 85 percent of the population lives in rural areas, and UXO seriously constrains the livelihood and food security of large sections of the population.
--International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Laos Country Report, 2003.
The US government made little or no effort to help with ordnance clearing projects until 1996.
1957-1986: Haiti
US supports 30 years of rule by the Duvalier dictatorships in Haiti. Rule was transferred from Francois Duvalier to his son Jean-Claude in 1971, who now resides comfortably in France. Our nepotistic friends massacre some 40-60,000 political opponents and torture countless more.
The relationship was not without its early complexities. Used as a base for attacks against Cuba in the early 60s, the Kennedy administration reduces some aid and has the CIA make wavering attempts towards overthrowing the regime between 1962 and 1968. The CIA - observing that the regime had "crushed all opposition and destroyed almost all Haitian institutions" - concludes in the end that Duvalier must be propped up against the threat of a devastated and demoralized general population. Even while supporting coup attempts by Haitian exiles in the US they assist the regime against coup attempts by non-exiled Haitians.
The Duvalier Regime in Haiti, David Nicholls.
The Duvalier Dictatorship, Brenda Plummer.
1957: Syria
The UK and US governments approve a plan to stage fake incidents to excuse invasions by neighboring pro-Western Arab countries, in an effort to install a government that "would probably need to rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power".
The plan is abandoned after Syria's neighbors refuse to go along with the project.
1958-1973: Cambodia
The Khmer Serei movement is not a genuine part of the Cambodian political life. It is an external organization covertly supported by the Thai and South Vietnamese governments with the object of overthrowing the Sihanouk regime. Its chief methods are subversion and terrorism.
--British Embassy, Phon Phem, April 22, 1966
Cambodian minorities from southwestern Vietnam and Thailand's Surin province making up Son Ngoc Thanh's Khmer Serei movement are supported by the CIA and used to wage cross-border attacks against the Cambodian army in order to pressure Prince Sihanouk into a stronger pro-Western alliance through SEATO. The operation fails, making Sihanouk more popular and more resolute in his determination to maintain neutrality. The attacks also bog down the small Cambodian army along the Thai border, forcing Shihanouk to seek assistance from China, which is then used by the CIA to justify continuing support for the Khmer Serei's attempts to undermine the government.
By 1964 US Special Forces, on loan to the CIA, are joining in the cross-border raids from South Vietnam as "advisors" along with South Vietnamese Army units. On top of the initiation of US bombing raids on Cambodia, Shihanouk breaks off relations with the US in the spring of 1965. The steady escalation of US bombing, ostensibly to target communist Vietnamese forces, leads to one of the largest and most destructive bombing campaigns in history, as the order came down for an escalation of the attacks by Henry Kissinger, "Anything that flies on anything that moves".
"The fact is that the United States dropped three times the quantity of explosives on Cambodia between 1970 and 1973 than it had dropped on Japan for the duration of World War II. Between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of high explosives rained down on Cambodia; that is more than one billion pounds. This is equivalent to some 15,400 pounds of explosives for every square mile of Cambodian territory. Considering that probably less than 25 percent of the total area of Cambodia was bombed at one time or another, the actual explosive force per area would be at least four times this level."
--The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, Craig Etcheson, 1984
American support for the ouster of Sihanouk (viewed by the rural populace as the father of the country), in a coup by General Lon Nol and the subsequent invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops in April 1970 prompted a backlash that strengthened support for the insurgent Khmer Rouge (KR) guerrillas.
--Phil Robertson, Foreign Policy in Focus, December 1997.
The data released by Clinton shows the total payload dropped during these years to be nearly five times greater than the generally accepted figure. To put the revised total of 2,756,941 tons into perspective, the Allies dropped just over 2 million tons of bombs during all of World War II, including the bombs that struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki: 15,000 and 20,000 tons, respectively. Cambodia may well be the most heavily bombed country in history.
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia, 2006
The CIA estimated that the US bombing campaign killed some 600,000 Cambodians, but between four years of US bombing, the Khmer Rouge's self-immolation of the country from 1975-1979, the 1979 Vietnam invasion, and a mass famine induced by the destruction of farm land, cluster bombs effectively mining tracts of countryside (even now a continuing problem, with over 400 casualties from unexeploded ordnance in 2002), the flood of refugees fleeing from US bombing to urban centers that could not sustain the population, and later a US-led blockade after 1979 (except for Khmer Rouge-lead groups opposing the new government, which the US "tilted" towards), nobody really knows how many died to what by whose hand.
Cambodian Neutrality and the United States, George Kahin, 2002.
Taylor Owen and Ben Kiernan, Bombs Over Cambodia.
International Committee to Ban Landmines, Cambodia Country Report 2003
1958: Lebanon
CIA funds election campaign of Camille Chamoun, quoted from the NYT, 3/31/1997:
In Lebanon in 1957, the CIA supported Christian parties with U.S. government money and donations by American oil companies that wanted to insure a friendly government in Lebanon, a pivotal Middle Eastern country. Wilbur Crane Eveland, a CIA officer, later described driving his gold and white DeSoto onto the grounds of President Camille Chamoun's residence in Beirut and delivering political payoffs. "Throughout the elections, I traveled regularly to the presidential palace with a briefcase full of Lebanese pounds, then returned late at night to the embassy with an empty twin case" to be replenished with CIA money, Eveland wrote in "Ropes of Sand" in 1980, a history of American policy failures in the Middle East.
Shortly thereafter 14,000 marines occupy Lebanon to repress dissidents opposing Chamoun's government, intervening in a small civil war to prop him up.
1959: Iraq
Saddam Hussein, working as a CIA asset, makes his first botched attempt on the life of Iraq's nationalist leader Gen. Abdel Karim Qassim.
1959-Present: Cuba
Continuing an old feud, that being that Cuba is United States territory and not Cuban, the USG has continued intervening on it's own behalf in Cuba. With the overthrow of the US imposed and supported Batista dictatorship the CIA starts directing bombing raids from US soil, manned by exiled Cubans, against Cuba. The Cuban government sought redress in the UN in 1960, and the CIA bungled attempts to overthrow Fidel Castro 6 times between 1961 and 1963. The US ordered Britain not to provide arms to Cuba, forcing it to eventually seek aid from the Soviet Union, providing a pretext for further intervention. Direct support for sabatoge and terror attacks continue until 1966, including the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation, strafing attacks on beach-side resorts, contamination of agricultural imports, and even attacks on British cargo ships.
In 1969 Nixon restarted the terror campaign, directing greater aid from the CIA and allowing exile groups to carry out attacks on Cuban targets from US soil with impunity, leading eventually to the bombing of a Cuban airliner, killing 73 people. These operations continue up until the present, with the FBI arresting Cuban infiltrators of US-based exile groups that engage in anti-Cuban terrorism: after being told about their presence by Cuban counter-terrorism officials in an effort to cooperate in anti-terror campaigns, such as those instigated by Bay of Pigs veteran Luis Posada Carriles.
US embargos, continuing long past the end of the cold war, strangle the Cuban economy and deprive all but the highest American elites of fine Cuban cigars. To be fair to Cuba - and it's unlikely that this has much to do with Castro's administrative "genius" - it rates somewhere around 3rd or 4th in the Western hemisphere on basic human development indicators, its infant mortality rate is in fact lower than that of the United States. On human rights it's useful to compare notes on Cuba versus the United States and the top recipient in the hemisphere of US military aid, Columbia, before trying to explain or justify USG policy against Cuba as a response to Castro's human rights abuses.
US-directed biological warfare against Cuba.
Operation NORTHWOODS
638 Ways to Kill Castro
1960-1963: Ecuador
According to a book by ex-CIA agent Philip Agee, the CIA staged a Communist takeover of Ecuador before backing a military coup, ousting elected President J. M. Velasco Ibarra, and again in 1963 the government of Carlos Julio Arosemena. Agee now lives in Cuba and is accused of being a "KGB shill", which all around is probably better for the health than staying in the US and being a CIA target.
1960-1971: Turkey
CIA assists Turkish Military Intelligence (MIT) in designing plans for mass arrests and repression of political opposition from 1960-69. In 1971 the CIA assists a military coup, and the plans are carried out, leading to the arrests and torture of 4,000 "suspects" in a single night.
1960-Present: Congo
Shortly after the Congo wins its independence from the brutal rule of Begium
- which received support from the USG - the USG assists in assassination attempts of the newly elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba (including one attempt via a viral agent, delivery courtesy Sidney Gottlieb), bringing the former European colony into the US "sphere of dominance" under the USG backed reign of Joseph Mobutu Sese-Seko. As an informal colony of a troika between Belgium (for prestige), France (for trade), and the US (resource exploitation and supporting reactionary forces in neighboring states), the backers of Mobutu's regime set about some 37 years of supporting a brutal despot and kleptomaniac, leaving the Congo drownd in $12 billion of international debt. International propping of the regime continued well beyond IMF advisor Erwin Blumenthal's exposing the kleptocracy in 1982 and the IMF's and World Bank's continued support of it because of Western dominance in those organizations. Funds supplied by Western kickbacks and aid were used by Mobutu to bribe off select military, familial, and regional elites in order to maintain his position in the country.
After his rise to power Mobutu proceeded to rape and brutalize the country and its citizens. Replaced by Laurent Kabila and then his son Joseph Kabila, things still aren't looking any better. Part of a general juggling and inadvertent discombobulation of African "nations" (artificial constructs based on the generally arbitrary borders established and afterwards maintained by "exiting" colonial powers) between world powers the Soviet role was "largely rhetorical". Saner imperial powers might have entered into an Anti-Circus-Ring Pact.
In 1964 the CIA provided air support for Mobutu, Cyril Adoula, and Moise Tshombe in Katanga, against Lumumba supporters in Stanleyville.
During the 1970s the USG and France organized military support for Mobutu during rebel invasions from Angola into Shaba.
Whatever finger-waving one might direct upon various outside actors, the IMF and WB institutions that are subsidiaries to Western interests, the problems of a corrupt and repressive state supported by them, and a helpless, repressed, and disorganized society, one has to admit that "the disaster had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference. ... Zaire's free fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad." (Foreign Affairs, 2001)