CIA
THE CIA: BEYOND REDEMPTION AND SHOULD BE TERMINATED
July 24, 2010 || By Sherwood Ross
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/24/the-cia-beyond-redemption-and-should-be-terminated-2/
The Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) has confirmed the worst fears of its
creator President Harry Truman that it might degenerate into an American
Gestapo. It has been just that for so long it is beyond redemption. It
represents 60 years of failure and fascism utterly at odds with the spirit
of a democracy and needs to be closed, permanently.
Over the years the Agency as it is known, has given U.S. presidents so
much wrong information on so many critical issues, broken so many laws,
subverted so many elections, overthrown so many governments, funded so many
dictators, and killed and tortured so many innocent human beings that the
pages of its official history could be written in blood, not ink. People the
world over regard it as infamous, and that evaluation, sadly for the
reputation of America, is largely accurate. Besides, since President Obama
has half a dozen other major intelligence agencies to rely on for guidance,
why does he need the CIA? In one swoop he could lop an estimated 27,000
employees off the Federal payroll, save taxpayers umpteen billions, and wipe
the CIA stain from the American flag.
If you think this is a radical idea, think again. What is radical is to
empower a mob of covert operatives to roam the planet, wreaking havoc as
they go with not a care for morality or, for that matter, the tenets of
mercy implicit in any of the great faiths. The idea of not prosecuting CIA
interrogators (i.e., torturers), as President Obama has said, is chilling.
These crimes have to be stopped somewhere, sometime, or they will occur
again.
The CIA had run secret interrogation centers before-beginning in 1950, in
Germany, Japan, and Panama, writes New York Times reporter Tim Weiner in
his book Legacy of Ashes, The History of The CIA(Random House). Weiner has
won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the intelligence community. It had
participated in the torture of captured enemy combatants before-beginning in
1967, under the Phoenix program in Vietnam. It had kidnapped suspected
terrorists and assassins before.
In Iran in 1953, for example, a CIA-directed coup restored the Shah (king)
to absolute power, initiating what journalist William Blum in Rogue State
(Common Courage Press) called a period of 25 years of repression and
torture; while the oil industry was restored to foreign ownership, with the
US and Britain each getting 40 percent. About the same time in Guatemala,
Blum adds, a CIA-organized coup overthrew the democratically-elected and
progressive government of Jacobo Arbenz, initiating 40 years of military
government death squads, torture, disappearances, mass executions, and
unimaginable cruelty, totaling more than 200,000 victims-indisputably one of
the most inhuman chapters of the 20th century. The massive slaughter
compares, at least in terms of sheer numbers, with Hitler's massacre of
Romanian and Ukranian Jews during the holocaust. Yet few Americans know of
it.
Blum provides yet other examples of CIA criminality. In Indonesia, it
attempted in 1957-58 to overthrow neutralist president Sukarno. It plotted
Sukarno's assassination, tried to blackmail him with a phony sex film, and
joined forces with dissident military officers to wage a full-scale war
against the government, including bombing runs by American pilots, Blum
reported This particular attempt, like one in Costa Rica about the same
time, failed. So did the CIA attempt in Iraq in 1960 to assassinate
President Abdul Kassem. Other ventures proved more successful.
In Laos, the CIA was involved in coup attempts in 1958, 1959, and 1960,
creating a clandestine army of 30,000 to overthrow the government. In
Ecuador, the CIA ousted President Jose Velasco for recognizing the new Cuban
government of Fidel Castro. The CIA also arranged the murder of elected
Congo Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in 1961 and installation of Mobutu Seko
who ruled with a level of corruption and cruelty that shocked even his CIA
handlers, Blum recalls.
In Ghana, in 1966, the CIA sponsored a military coup against leader Kwame
Nkrumah in 1966; in Chile, it financed the overthrow of elected President
Salvador Allende in 1973 and brought to power the murderous regime of
General Augusto Pinochet who executed 3,000 political opponents and tortured
thousands more. In Greece in 1967, the CIA helped subvert the elections and
backed a military coup that killed 8,000 Greeks in its first month of
operation. Torture, inflicted in the most gruesome of ways, often with
equipment supplied by the United States, became routine, Blum writes.
In South Africa, the CIA gave the apartheid government information that led
to the arrest of African National Congress leader Nelson Mandela, who
subsequently spent years in
