Before he resigned.
Stockwell's book In Search of Enemies,
published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller.
John
Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola
in 1976, working for then Director of the CIA, George Bush. He spent 13
years in the agency. He gives a short history of CIA covert operations.
He is a very compelling speaker and the highest level CIA officer to
testify to the Congress about his actions. He estimates that over 6
million people have died in CIA covert actions, and this was in the late
1980's.
Some highlights
covered since 1947:
The CIA's wars
against the "Third World"
Estimated 6 million people killed by CIA and their cronies
Operate beyond US lawsand has infiltrated major media
Delivers arms to
Third World and returns with drugs; involved in drug trade
So far (until 1987) an estimated 3,000 illegal major operations and 10,000
minor ones
Manipulated
overthrow of functioning democracies and incited minorities to uprisings
Still organizes
death squads
Conducts propaganda in the US and attempts continuously to change laws to
take more control away from the people
Manipulated US public into the Vietnam war, Korean war, Congo, Cambodia,
Nicaragua, etc. and now Iraq and Afghanistan
Created the Golden Crescent which is the largest source of drugs
(Afghanistan, etc.)
THE SECRET WARS OF THE CIA:
John Stockwell lecture given in October 1987
Part II
"I did 13 years in
the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a
chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger,
Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the
important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it
happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert
action being done...
I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse,
date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do
with S. Africa, that was fighting in the
country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our
airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in
Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our
forces for us....
What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if
you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver,
astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the
Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions,
that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the
heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred
covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37
years.
What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national
security syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S.
manipulates the press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is
pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all
of this concerns us so directly. I'm going to try to explain to you the
other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of
State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we'll talk about the Korean
war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American
war.
Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or
another, already in the public records. You can dig it all out for
yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on
information gotten out of the CIA under the freedom of information act,
testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church
committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the world
who have been to these target areas that we'll be talking about. I want to
emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative. We come from
South Texas, East Texas....
I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my
background, to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war,
and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and
the brightest of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the
world, to join the struggle, to project American values and save the world
for our brand of democracy. And I believed this. I went out and worked
hard....
What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ... that
nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests
very much. We didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura,
Burundi, in the heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the
point.
We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our
function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting
the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry
Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and
had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa
division Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he
was giving me an explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'sir, you know,
this stuff doesn't make any sense, we're not saving anybody from anything,
and we are corrupting people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that
makes the U.S. look bad'.
And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, `you're trying
to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big
picture, who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret
information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should
have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then
you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you
work your way up to that point, then you will understand national
security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop,
you know, this philosophizing.'
And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very
powerful argument, our presidents use it on us.
President Reagan has used it on the American people, saying, `if you knew
what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand
why it's necessary for us to intervene.'
I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my
concern. A formal study was done in the State Department and published
internally, highly classified, called the Macomber
[sp?] report, concluding that the CIA had no business being in Africa for
anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not
justified, there were no national security interests that the CIA could
address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn't need to have
bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that
time.
I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and
my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a
country. It was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no
cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter.
300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed.
Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was
up-country in Tayninh. They were laid out next
door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for
burial.
I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I
reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house -
when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1).
The post was too important to close down. (2). They weren't going to get
the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political
problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he
worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn't have the stomach for the job, that
they could transfer me.'
But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral
fiber' to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn't
get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against
my career.
So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I
didn't approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him
for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do
this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador
today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.
They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually
chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks
over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs,
and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them,
they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it's a
sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their
children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools,
and they don't talk about the horrors of what's being done. They pretend
like it isn't true.
What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the
intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all
about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what I found was
that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about
the corruption in the South Vietnamese army....
Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton
army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a
month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money.
Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the
communist forces - that was their major supply, just as it is in El
Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of
the helicopters to haul heroin.
And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and
there was no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could provide
all kinds of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a
serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and
it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was
humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in
Vietnam....
I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this
secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976].... and what I figured out was
that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security
Council, this office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had
access to all the information about Angola, about the whole world, and I
would finally understand national security. And I couldn't resist the
opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I
had learned that the hard way. But the question was where did the U.S.
government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for myself in
the next big secret war....
I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on
truly important, threatening information, threatening to our national
security interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out
of the CIA, but I would know that the system, the invisible government,
our national security complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And
so I took the job.... Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of
you tonight if I had found these wise men making these tough decisions.
What I found, quite frankly, was fat old men sleeping through
sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were making decisions that
were killing people in Africa. I mean literally. Senior ambassador Ed
Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every
one of these meetings....
You can change the names in my book [about Angola] [13] and you've got
Nicaragua.... the basic structure, all the way through including the
mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the
U.S. led the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said
it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that
was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't
gone in first. We put arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they
answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando
battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We
brought in the S. African army, they brought in
the Cuban army. And they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were
lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the
truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests
there that should have been defended that way.
There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the
three movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one.
The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no
bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the
butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work
with whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul
in Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued
that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the
friendliest to the U.S.
We brushed these people aside, forced Matt Davis to resign, and proceeded
with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn't
want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to
fight them, they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap
victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we
wouldn't give them a cheap victory, we would
make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans died and they
won the victory that they were winning anyway.
Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition
to the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To
just about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force
that I put together in Washington, commanding this global operation,
pulling strings all over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and
military activities into Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists,
who were working, in every way they could to create this picture of Cubans
raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets introducing arms into the conflict,
Cubans and Russians trying to take over the world.
Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous
statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly,
and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible
for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the
militarization of the conflict.
And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was
originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed
this thing. The state department press person read these position papers
daily to the press. We would write papers for him.
Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `call us
10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we'll
tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would be false.
Nothing to do with the truth.
Designed to play on events, to create this impression
of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When
they were in fact responding to our initiatives.
And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA
director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam - he
gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we
were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal
briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it's a felony to lie to
the Congress.
He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely
with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles
with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and
armored cars. He said we were staying well away from them. They were
concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a
very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African country, to
help you impose your will on that black African country by killing the
blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might be
involved in that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.
We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into
Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about
that. They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said
no, and we were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he
said `no, we had people going in to look at the situation and coming back
out'. We had 24 people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of
weapons, installing communications systems, planning battles, and he said,
we didn't have anybody inside the country.
In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be
alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful,
or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and
they went ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best
thing for the country.
At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the
eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from
the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the
eyes of the world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's
impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified
with them. And that's illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been
visible lies. We were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S.
as liars.
After it was over,
you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the MPLA do after
they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be our
friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the MPLA had Gulf oil back in
Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf
technicians protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA
mercenaries who were still mucking around in Northern Angola.
You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets
from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians
to install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They
didn't buy [the Soviet Union's] Aeroflot.... David Rockefeller himself
tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press conferences, in which he
says that we have no problem doing business with the so-called radical
states of Southern Africa.
I left the CIA, I decided that the American
people needed to know what we'd done in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam.
I wrote my book. I was fortunate - I got it out. It was a best-seller. A
lot of people read it. I was able to take my story to the American people.
Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.
I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest,
after having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see
what communists were all about. I went to Cuba
to see if they do in fact eat babies for breakfast. And I found they
don't. I went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits
is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his
theories of social democracy.
I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and
Bernard Cord and Phyllis Cord, to see - these were all educated people,
and experienced people - and they had a theory, they had something they
wanted to do, they had rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly
to hear them. And then of course I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert
action against them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the
country. 19 days before he was killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice
Bishop about these things, these indicators, the statements in the press
by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both acknowledging that it was almost
certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada in the near future.
I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book
after book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on
the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I urge
you to read. In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts
together what they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get
what the editors select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about
the world and understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and
dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and find out for
yourselves. As you'll see, the issues are very, very important.
I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who
have done studies, people who are leading
different situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a
major covert action. It lasted longer and evolved to be bigger than what
we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from
Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to the
leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when you
give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or
bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the
people, who have been shot, or hit, or blown up....
We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has
performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have
been killed in these things.... Some of them are very, very bloody.
The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph
McGehee, who was in that area division, and
had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said
that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that
should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the
effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated
the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist
party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put
the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action.
We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.
Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a
covert action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many years,
with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country,
of the evils of communist China, and attacking them, as we're doing in
Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched against them to
parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country. And this led us
directly into the Korean war.
U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years,
with greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda, deceiving the
American people about what was happening. Panicking
people in Vietnam to create migrations to the south so they could
photograph it and show how people were fleeing communism. And on
and on, until they got us into the Vietnam war,
and 2,000,000 people were killed.
There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for
the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you're
killing 1 to 3 million communists, that's great. President Reagan has gone
public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The
problem, though, is that these people killed by our national security
activities are not communists. They're not Russians, they're not KGB. In
the field we used to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks
with them. It was like professional football players - we would knock
heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you're at a
banquet together drinking toasts and talking.
The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world.
That's the common denominator that you come up with.
People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being
born in the Metumba
mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now
in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics
than communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them
couldn't give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of
capitalism.
Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If you
want to get an easy-read of the history of our involvement in Central
America, read Walter LaFeber's book,
Inevitable Revolutions. [8] We have dominated the area since 1820. We've
had a policy of dominion, of excluding other countries, other industrial
powers from Europe, from competing with us in the area.
Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how military this
has been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for
a total of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican Republic 4 times. Haiti, we
occupied it for 12 years. We put our troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6
times, Guatemala once, plus a CIA covert action to overthrow the
democratic government there once. Honduras, 7 times.
And by the way, we put 12,000 troops into the Soviet Union during that
same period of time.
In the 1930's there was public and international pressure about our
marines in Nicaragua....
The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the puppet,
Colonel Armaz in a coup] died violent deaths,
and Amnesty International tells us that the governments we've supported in
power there since then, have killed 80,000 people. You can read about that
one in the book Bitter Fruit, by Schlesinger and
Kinzer. [5] Kinzer's a New York Times
Journalist... or Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall
Street Journal reporter, his book Endless Enemies [7] - all discuss
this....
However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this
program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the
rich, and not to the people of the countries
involved. And while we were doing this, while we were trying, at least
saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and Latin
America, the CIA was doing its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the
police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With the
leaders on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.
We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin
America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by
interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA
taught it. Dan Metrione, the famous exponent
of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching
interrogation, teaching torture. He was
supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount
of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want
from the individual.
They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID'
written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from.
They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine
enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the
teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and
submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the
human body can register.
Now how do you teach torture? Dan Metrione: `I
can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get
involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and
try it yourselves.'
.... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was
lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in
doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next
class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw
them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid
of the police and the government.
And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who
was in this program for 2 years - tortured in
Brazil for 2 years - she testified internationally when she eventually got
out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the
people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't break
mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They
were very ordinary people....
There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only
Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people,
it's people that do inhuman things to other
people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis,
to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this
plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police,
we give them a vast budget, and we let them go and run these programs in
our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going on, although the
information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it's ok because
we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're just as responsible
for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered and for all the people
we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that
they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!
Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion
dollars or so. And it's a documented fact that the... 14 families
there that own 60% of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion
dollars - it's called de-capitalization - and
putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort
Halper, in testifying to a committee of the Congress, he suggested
we could simplify the whole thing politically just by investing our money
directly in the Miami banks in their names and just stay out of El
Salvador altogether. And the people would be better off.
Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It's a
classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981, President Reagan
allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they're
called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture
and terror in Nicaragua that made the Nicaraguan people rise up and throw
out the dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army
of these people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not
only in Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked to the press - reported in
the New York Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the
world today, CIA covert actions going on around the world today.
You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the
troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua, the Central
American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50
de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to keep the world
unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let
the establishment spend any amount of money on arms....
The Victor Marquetti ruling of the Supreme
Court gave the government the right to prepublication censorship of books.
They challenged 360 items in his 360 page book. He fought it in court, and
eventually they deleted some 60 odd items in his book.
The Frank Snep ruling of the Supreme Court
gave the government the right to sue a government employee for damages. If
s/he writes an unauthorized account of the government - which means the
people who are involved in corruption in the government, who see it, who
witness it, like Frank Snep did, like I did -
if they try to go public they can now be punished in civil court. The
government took $90,000 away from Frank Snep,
his profits from his book, and they've seized the
profits from my own book....
[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it
a felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret agents or to
write about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities.
Now, what does this mean? In a debate in Congress - this is very
controversial - the supporters of this bill made it clear.... If agents
Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and
blew your fiance's head away with LSD, it
would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper saying,
`watch out for these 2 turkeys, they're federal agents and they blew my
loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a felony what they had
done because that's national security and none of them were ever punished
for those activities.
Efforts to muzzle government employees.
President Reagan has been banging away at this one ever since. Proposing
that every government employee, for the rest of his or her life, would
have to submit anything they wrote to 6 committees of the government for
censorship, for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking
out... to keep the American people from knowing what the government is
really doing.
Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive
Strikes' bill. President Reagan, working through the Secretary of
State Shultz... almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide
them with the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists can do
their terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able to do
this in this country as well as overseas. It provides that the secretary
of state would put together a list of people that he considers to be
terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers. And if your
name, or your organization, is put on this list, they could kick down your
door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due process of the law
and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with impunity.
Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York
Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from
Hitler's "night in fog" program', where the government had the authority
to haul people off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And
President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz has said,
`Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that would
never stand up in a court. And yes, innocent people will have to be killed
in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat of
international terrorism'.
Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'? These
things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist
actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79.
Now, obviously that's terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways
with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier,
mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves.
Obviously 79 peoples' death is not enough reason to take away the
protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.
But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the
pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the defense
department.
They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under
the McLaren act after World War II, to detain
aliens and dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was
done with the Japanese people during World War II. They're building 10
more, and army camps, and the... executive memos about these things say
it's for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency....
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by
Loius Guiffrida, a
friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going about the
country lobbying and demanding that he be given authority, in the times of
national emergency, to declare martial law, and establish a curfew, and
gun down people who violate the curfew... in the United States.
And then there's Ed Meese, as I said.
The highest law enforcement officer in the land,
President Reagan's closest friend, going around telling us that the
constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press, and due
process of the law, and assembly.
What they are planning for this society, and
this is why they're determined to take us into a war if we'll permit it...
is the Reagan revolution.... So he's getting himself some laws so when he
puts in
the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of
the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their doors, and
kill them if they don't like what he's doing....
The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our
freedoms because they have a charming smile and they were nice movie stars
one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our
freedoms?' It's up to us - you and I can watch this history play in the
next year and 2 and 3 years.
Part II
*****additional reading
Videoclip
of presentation
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4068.htm more
important videoclips and documentaries at
http://www.yirmeyahureview.com/videos.htm
http://thereitis.org/Web_Links-index-req-search-query-video-show-1000.html
Queen
Victoria
