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US short-term gains prove to be strategic blunders
March 18, 2011
CIA meets most of its expenditure on covert operations from drug trafficking. In addition to the ‘Golden Triangle’ (Burma, Laos and Thailand), this has remained the pattern of CIA activities in Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, Haiti and Afghanistan. These activities have spread drug addiction, with the antecedent perils, across the globe.
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The turmoil and instability that one witnesses in the world today can be attributed to the desire of global powers to keep resource-rich and strategically important Third World countries under their stronghold.
In pursuit of this objective, the US supported, throughout the last decade, decadent, exploitative and oppressive ruling elites in Third World countries, while simultaneously exporting to them ideas of democracy, freedom, human rights and liberalism and thus keeping their societies divided on the basis of class interests. However, surprisingly, all segments of those societies, whether liberal or pro-status quo, look towards the West for support to pursue their agenda.
The world supremo has been pursuing this policy to ensure continued supply of energy and raw material to keep its factories running at top gear, and thus providing maximum job opportunities to its citizens and keeping the economy growing. For achieving this objective, Uncle Sam’s three-lettered spy agency resorted to both overt and covert operations. However, it is another thing that in covert operations, in most of the cases, the short-terms gains ultimately proved to be strategic blunders or disasters for the global head hancho.
Take the case of Iran. When the Iranians overthrew monarchy, the US felt that the regime change could jeopardise its regional interests. Through operation Ajax of 1953, CIA overthrew the democratic government and re-installed Emperor Raza Shah. Eventually, the anti-people interference led to the 1979 revolution. The leaders of that revolution branded the USA “Shaitan-e-Buzarg” (Great Satan). Even after three decades, the mistrust and schism between Tehran and Washington continues to exist.
In Iraq, CIA supported Ba’ath Party’s coup eventually facilitated the rise of Saddam Hussein to power. Decades later, the USA had to launch an offensive to get rid of the Ba’ath Party and its leader.
CIA meets most of its expenditure on covert operations from drug trafficking. In addition to the ‘Golden Triangle’ (Burma, Laos and Thailand), this has remained the pattern of CIA activities in Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Panama, Haiti and Afghanistan. These activities have spread drug addiction, with the antecedent perils, across the globe.
In addition to toppling governments, it is also involved in murders, kidnappings and tortures. Even US leaders, for example President Ford, accused it of involvement in assassination attempts against foreign leaders. Mounting accusations and complaints against CIA often led to investigations by congressional committees, including the Rockefeller Commission, Church Committee and Pike Committee.
Following a presentation about the agency’s activities, Representative Otis Pike described CIA as an out of control “rogue elephant.” A former senior staff member of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Angelo M. Codevilla stated that “the United States would have been better off not having an intelligence service at all.” Interestingly, the views of the US leader, who consented to the spy agency’s setting-up, were not much different. President Harry Truman said: “I never would have agreed to the formulation of the Central Intelligence Agency back in ’47 if I had known it would become the American Gestapo.”
The spy agency’s first head of covert operations (1948-1958), Frank Wisner was diagnosed with psychotic mania and committed to a mental hospital. In 1962, Wisner’s files were reviewed by a successor who destroyed them as “the ramblings of a madman.”
The reports by the spy agency contribute to policy formulation, though some of its leaders continue to get illusions. The US attack on Iraq was the result of one such illusion: ‘Clandestine production of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) by Iraq!’ The US offensive on Iraq caused much destruction and upheaval. However, US occupation forces could not find the trace of any facility in Iraq, which was engaged in producing WMDs. Despite launching an attack on a sovereign country on false notions and causing massive destruction, no one has been held responsible for supplying wrong information or for launching an attack on whimsical nations.
The Raymond Davis issue has revived the memory of CIA’s covert operations. In an article “Same Cover, Same Lies,” Robert Anderson (CIA’s former agent, who lives in Albuquerque, N.M. and can be reached at citizen@ mailto:citizen@comcast.net) writes: “The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things - they cost us credibility. Davis is the American being held as a spy working under diplomatic cover out of our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. You can understand why foreign countries no longer trust us and people are rising up across the Middle East against the Great Satan.
“In the Vietnam War, the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as does Pakistan to Afghanistan today. As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using CIA. I was a demolitions technician with Air Force who was reassigned to work with CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans. We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive.
“We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the US would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.
“Our team knew when the UN inspectors and international media were scheduled to arrive - we controlled the airfields. We would disappear to our safe houses so we could not be asked questions. It was all a very well planned operation, 60 years ago, involving the military and diplomats out of the US Embassy. It had been going on a long time when I was there during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This continued for a long time, until we were routed and had to abandon the whole war as a failure.
“In Laos, the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to US goals. It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina. We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war. I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed. This was how they verified their kills for us. The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears.
“Mel Gibson made a movie about all this, called Air America. It included in the background the illegal drug operation the CIA ran to pay for their operations. Congress had not authorized funds for what we were doing. I saw the drug operation first hand too. This was all detailed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy....
“Our country has a long history of these type of programs going back to World War Two... One of the first operations was T.P. Ajax run by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953 to take over their oil fields.
“In that coup, the CIA and the State Department, under the Dulles Brothers, first perfected these covert, illegal and immoral actions. Historians have suggested that Operation T.P. Ajax was the single event that set in motion the political force of Islamic fundamentalism we are still dealing with today....If we had taken a different approach to our problems in those days, an approach that did not rely on lying to our own and the people of other countries and killing them indiscriminately, our country would not be in the disaster it is abroad today...These kinds of actions have immense and long reaching consequences and should be shut down.
“But I see from the Ray Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true. When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks? How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programs?”
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