We like to think of the US as the 'world leader for championing democracy'. A nation with the American ideals, and the power, and the honesty, to help challenge tyranny.
And yet, the US, it is clear, has at times been on the opposite side - a world leader backing tyrants, for our selfish interests - and many times, literally murdering those fighting for democracy and otherwise repressing such movements. For just one example, the very tyranny the Egyptian public is rising against of Mubarak has had strong US backing to keep him in power as the world's #2 recipient of US aid. As we praise the 'people of Egypt', we're a major source of the repression they're revolting against.
We say, 'we can't tell the Egyptian people who they should choose as their leader'. That's not democracy; if another nation tried to tell us who to make our leader, we'd be furious.
But take just a couple of examples of history - in Nicaragua, when we organized and sponsored a terrorist army to force the people to change the government to end the terrorism; or in Chile, when we paid over half the campaign costs for the opponent to Salvadore Allende, and spend millions to demonize Allende falsely as a 'Soviet stooge'.
And this wasn't especially noble - time after time after time the reason for for some base US corporate or financial interest. With Allende, it was driven by his left-wing orientation to reduce the exploitation of the country, such as a US corporation taking its #1 export, copper, in a monopoly for far less than it was worth; when we demolished democracy in Iran to install a tyrannical Shah for decades, it was in response to a reqeust by the British when their exploitative oil agreement was ended.
These are the opposite of the democracy-championing ideal.
When did a lot of this change? Before the CIA was created, the US could almost be said to be amateur on issues of global politics and intelligence gathering. Our information did poorly at identifying the threat of Pearl Harbor, and that caused great concern at the beginning of the Cold War, under Truman.
Under FDR, there had started to be some increases with the OSS; Truman created the CIA.
The CIA had some very specific purposes in its charter. None of them called for it to be a major operations agency; they all called for it to collect information. The fifth clause had a loophole for some minor operation - and five years after its creation in 1947 or 1948, the new President Eisenhower started to use it differently with that first operation, the overthrow of Democracy in Iran in 1953. It was used again, with false pretenses, to overthrow the government in Guatemala the next year.
This was the start of the CIA's new mission as 'operational organization that could bring about political pressure, revolt, assassination, change elections, etc.'
At the direction of the President, loyal only to him, with virtually no accountability to Congress - a very 'un-American' operation, in terms of ours and others' democracy.
President Harry Truman, who had created the agency, came to conclude that the agency - which knowledgable people had come to describe as 'a covert operations organization with a mask of collecting information', as over half the budget had gone to its Directorate of Operations side - had become dangerous and the operational side need to be shut down, going back to its charter's function of information.
Writing a month to the day after JFK, who had planned a complete overhaul of US intelligence operations - the details of which are not known, but expected to be consistent with his quote that he'd 'like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind' - Truman an article in the Washington Post:
After this era, we had Nixon, and CIA directors like Bush - in an era which finally had democracy somewhat confront the CIA's out of control activities, with the Church Commission. This led to outrage and some legislative reforms - that proved largely ineffective, followed briefly under Carter, before Reagan, CIA Director Casey, and all kinds of CIA excesses again such as the Iran-Contra crimes.
We should return to Harry Truman's warning, and dismantle most covert operations, that have violated American values and human rights around the world so much.
We should actually be on the side of the Egyptians and other people of the world, not praising them with words and killing them with our arms as we have under tyrants.
Save234
And yet, the US, it is clear, has at times been on the opposite side - a world leader backing tyrants, for our selfish interests - and many times, literally murdering those fighting for democracy and otherwise repressing such movements. For just one example, the very tyranny the Egyptian public is rising against of Mubarak has had strong US backing to keep him in power as the world's #2 recipient of US aid. As we praise the 'people of Egypt', we're a major source of the repression they're revolting against.
We say, 'we can't tell the Egyptian people who they should choose as their leader'. That's not democracy; if another nation tried to tell us who to make our leader, we'd be furious.
But take just a couple of examples of history - in Nicaragua, when we organized and sponsored a terrorist army to force the people to change the government to end the terrorism; or in Chile, when we paid over half the campaign costs for the opponent to Salvadore Allende, and spend millions to demonize Allende falsely as a 'Soviet stooge'.
And this wasn't especially noble - time after time after time the reason for for some base US corporate or financial interest. With Allende, it was driven by his left-wing orientation to reduce the exploitation of the country, such as a US corporation taking its #1 export, copper, in a monopoly for far less than it was worth; when we demolished democracy in Iran to install a tyrannical Shah for decades, it was in response to a reqeust by the British when their exploitative oil agreement was ended.
These are the opposite of the democracy-championing ideal.
When did a lot of this change? Before the CIA was created, the US could almost be said to be amateur on issues of global politics and intelligence gathering. Our information did poorly at identifying the threat of Pearl Harbor, and that caused great concern at the beginning of the Cold War, under Truman.
Under FDR, there had started to be some increases with the OSS; Truman created the CIA.
The CIA had some very specific purposes in its charter. None of them called for it to be a major operations agency; they all called for it to collect information. The fifth clause had a loophole for some minor operation - and five years after its creation in 1947 or 1948, the new President Eisenhower started to use it differently with that first operation, the overthrow of Democracy in Iran in 1953. It was used again, with false pretenses, to overthrow the government in Guatemala the next year.
This was the start of the CIA's new mission as 'operational organization that could bring about political pressure, revolt, assassination, change elections, etc.'
At the direction of the President, loyal only to him, with virtually no accountability to Congress - a very 'un-American' operation, in terms of ours and others' democracy.
President Harry Truman, who had created the agency, came to conclude that the agency - which knowledgable people had come to describe as 'a covert operations organization with a mask of collecting information', as over half the budget had gone to its Directorate of Operations side - had become dangerous and the operational side need to be shut down, going back to its charter's function of information.
Writing a month to the day after JFK, who had planned a complete overhaul of US intelligence operations - the details of which are not known, but expected to be consistent with his quote that he'd 'like to cut the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind' - Truman an article in the Washington Post:
After this era, we had Nixon, and CIA directors like Bush - in an era which finally had democracy somewhat confront the CIA's out of control activities, with the Church Commission. This led to outrage and some legislative reforms - that proved largely ineffective, followed briefly under Carter, before Reagan, CIA Director Casey, and all kinds of CIA excesses again such as the Iran-Contra crimes.
We should return to Harry Truman's warning, and dismantle most covert operations, that have violated American values and human rights around the world so much.
We should actually be on the side of the Egyptians and other people of the world, not praising them with words and killing them with our arms as we have under tyrants.
Save234
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