INTRODUCTION
John Stockwell is a 13-year veteran of the CIA and a former U.S.
Marine Corps major. He was hired by the CIA in 1964, spent six years working
for the CIA in Africa, and was later transferred to Vietnam. In 1973 he
received the CIA's Medal of Merit, the Agency's second-highest award. In 1975,
Stockwell was promoted to the CIA's Chief of Station and National Security
Council coordinator, managing covert activities during the first years of
Angola's bloody civil war. After two years he resigned, determined to reveal
the truth about the agency's role in the Third World. Since that time, he has
worked tirelessly to expose the criminal activities of the CIA. He is the
author of In Search of Enemies, an exposé of the CIA's covert
action in Angola.
Stockwell is a founding member of Peaceways and ARDIS (the Association for
Responsible Dissent), an organization of former CIA and Government officials
who are openly critical of the CIA's activities. His latest book is entitled
The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.
JOHN STOCKWELL: What we're going to talk about tonight are the CIA's secret
wars. But the subject is much broader than merely little CIA dirty tricks and
shenanigans. We're talking about a situation ..... We're living in a world
which has grievous problems. Our planet is terminally ill, and it's not a long
term disease. We're talking about the nuclear arms race. This is something.
These 52,000, soon to be 70,000, nuclear weapons are going to be going off
sooner, rather than later.
At the same time, the world is facing serious economic problems of the sort
that triggered world wars in the past. Leaders of countries, leaders of banks,
for purposes basically of greed, have never been able to balance their
checkbooks. They always overspend. They run countries into bankruptcy.
When the world has gotten blocked up before, like a Monopoly game where
everything is owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erase the
board and start over has been to have big world wars. Erase countries, bomb
cities, and bomb banks, and then start from scratch again. This is not an
option to us now, because of all these fifty-two thousand nuclear weapons.
The Center for Defense Information counts sixty wars that are being fought
in the world today, in which they estimate that five million people will die.
The U.S. is on the brink of its next war: the Central American War. In this
situation of a volatile world, about as troubled as it can get, the U.S. CIA
is running fifty covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the
countries in the world today.
Now these things interrelate. The nuclear arms race, conventional wars, the
world debt, CIA covert actions; they're all viewed from our point of view,
they're all part of our national security. They're supervised by the National
Security Council. The National Security Advisor advises the President, and we
respond to them in terms of our own national security compulsions.
By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public
record. The fifty covert actions are secret, but that [information] has been
leaked to us by members of the Oversight Committee of Congress. I urge you not
to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and tell you and give
you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously, I could be lying. The only way
you can figure it out for yourselves is to educate yourselves. The French have
a saying: "Them that don't do politics will be done." If you don't fill your
mind eagerly with the truth, dig out the records, go and see for yourself,
then your mind remains blank, and your adrenalin pumps, and you can be excited
and mobilized to do things that are not in your interest to do.
Approaching this subject from my own point of view, my own experience -- my
special expertise in the CIA covert actions -- let's look at Nicaragua. This
is the most famous covert action of the fifty that are going on today. They
say there are thirteen "major" ones. This is not the biggest one. Afghanistan
is. We've spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent
somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the most famous
one, and there's a reason. Part of it is it's closer, but a big part of it is
the fact that the Administration is using Nicaragua for a very special
purpose, so they have made it public from the outset.
What this is is a technique of destabilization. In covert action, you call
it destabilization. You have a target: a government that you don't like. You
pick a country you're going to go after. The reasons are quite whimsical. We
go after a country for a while, and if it doesn't work, sometimes we wind up
being friends with them. They pick a government. They target them. They send
the CIA in with its resources and its activists: hiring people, hiring agents
to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country. It's a technique
for putting pressure on the government, hoping they can make the government
come to the U.S.'s terms, or that the government will collapse altogether and
they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own
choice of people in power.
Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric is fairly textbookish.
What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions
where the farmer can't get his produce to market; where children can't go to
school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where
government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals
are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international
capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.
If you ask the State Department today what is their official explanation of
the purpose of the Contras, they say, it is to attack economic targets,
meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a
lot more.
To destabilize Nicaragua, beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of
Somoza's ex-National Guardsmen, calling them the Contras, the
counter-revolutionaries. We created this force, which did not exist until we
allocated money. We armed them. We put uniforms on their backs and boots on
their feet, gave them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors,
training, leadership, direction, as we sent them in to destabilize Nicaragua.
Under our direction, they have been systematically blowing up bridges,
sawmills, graneries, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush
trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The
farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.
If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this and
their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that they were circulating
throughout Nicaragua: a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations
of what you can do to bring a society to a halt: how you can gum up
typewriters; what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines; what you can
stuff in a sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work -- things you can do
to make a society simply cease to function.
Systematically, the Contras have been assassinating religious workers,
teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators.
Remember the "Assassination Manual" that surfaced in 1984? It caused such a
stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential
debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror to traumatize society so that it
cannot function.
I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand
what your Government and its agents are doing.
They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced to
watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put a
grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch,
they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes, for
variety, they make the parents watch while they do these things to the
children.
This is nobody's propaganda !
There have been over a hundred thousand American "Witnesses for Peace"
who've gone down there, and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed
these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented thirteen
thousand people killed this way -- mostly women and children.
These are the activites done by the Contras. The Contras are the people
President Reagan called "freedom fighters." He said: "They are the moral
equivalent of our founding fathers."
In 1960, we came up with a new term, a policy of trying to correct the
problems of Central and Latin America -- the economic imbalances -- by
addressing them directly. In President Kennedy's famous program he said:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution
inevitable." However, the millions and millions of dollars that we put into
this program, inevitably went to the rich, and not to the ordinary people of
the countries involved. While we were doing this, or trying -- 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. The leaders were on the CIA's payroll, trained by the
CIA in the United States. We had the public safety program going throughout
Central and Latin America for twenty-six years, in which we taught them to
break up subversion by interrogating people: interrogation, including torture,
the way the CIA taught it.
Dan Mitrione, the exponent of these things, spent seven years in Brazil and
three 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 gave them crank generators -- with "U.S.A.I.D." written on the side, so
the people even knew where these things came from -- and 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 in or around
the genitals. 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? Someone can teach you about torture, but
sooner or later you have to get involved. You have to lay on your hands and
try it yourself. They would pick up guinea pigs off the streets: beggars, and
take them in to use in these torture training classes. Of course, the horror
of that is, these people wouldn't know why they were being tortured. They
couldn't give up. They couldn't say: "I'm sorry! Stop the pain! I'll tell you
the names of everybody involved!" All they could do was lie there and scream!
When they would collapse, they would bring in doctors who would 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 that everybody would be afraid of the police and
the Government. This is what the CIA was teaching them to do.
One of the women who was in this program for two years -- tortured in
Brazil for TWO YEARS -- testified internationally when she eventually got out.
She said the most horrible thing about it, in fact, was that the people doing
it were not raving psychopaths. She couldn't break mental contact with them
the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people.
She told about being tortured one day: She's on this table, naked in a room
full of six men, and they're doing these incredibly painful, degrading things
to her body. There's an interruption. The American is called to the telephone,
and he's in the next room, and the others take a smoke break. She's lying on
this table, and he's saying: "Oh, hi Honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in
another hour or so, and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador's on the way
home."
There's a lesson in all this. The lesson is: It isn't just the Gestapo
maniacs, or KGB maniacs, who do inhuman things to other people. It's PEOPLE
who do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these
things on a massive basis, to people of the world today. We do it in a way
that gives us plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a
secret police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs in
our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though the
information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's okay because
we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just as responsible for
these ONE TO THREE MILLION PEOPLE we've slaughtered, and for all the people
we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that they
slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide !!
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T H E P E O P L E'S S P E L L B R E A K E R
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News They Never Told You .... News They'll Never Tell You
EDITOR: John DiNardo
From the Pacifica Radio Network station,
WBAI-FM (99.5)
505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl.
New York, NY 10018
(212)279-0707
To receive an episode of these many series in your e-mail box
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I urge you to post the episodes of this ongoing series to other
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It is also important to post hardcopies on the bulletin boards
in campus halls, churches, supermarkets, laundromats, etc. —
any place where concerned citizens can read this vital information.
Our people's need for Paul Reveres and Ben Franklins is as
urgent today as it was 220 years ago.
— John DiNardo