- Pacific
Gregory F. Fegel
Pravda
April 19, 2010
To be an American citizen is very much like being the child of a wealthy and unscrupulous criminal ‘Godfather,’ who appears to be kind and generous to his own children at home, but is unflinchingly treacherous and murderous in conducting his family business, which is based on coercion, domination, exploitation, and violence. The average US citizen enjoys prosperity and relative freedom, but US prosperity derives in large part from the criminal exploitation of, and frequently the outright murder of, millions of innocent people in developing countries throughout the world. Most US citizens choose to remain in a perpetual state of denial regarding the criminal activities of their government, because they lack the courage and the character to learn and face the truth. An unquestioning acceptance of the values, motives, and goals of the US government by the majority of US citizens allows those citizens to be easily fooled and manipulated by the propaganda presented to them by the US government and by the US government-controlled ‘Mainstream Media.’
From early childhood, US citizens are raised on a steady diet of pro-US government propaganda that is fed to them at school and at home through the media of television, radio, newspapers, magazines, books, and popular music. The propaganda presents the US government as an ethically superior exemplar of justice for the entire world, as an exceptionally generous contributor to global economic development, and as a benevolent arbiter of world affairs. Furthermore, a great deal of crucial information about US political history, particularly regarding events of the past half-century, is not taught in US schools and is never allowed to appear in the Mainstream Media outlets.
According to the US Census report of 1998, 12.7% of the US population lives in poverty, 15.7% lack health insurance, and at least 38% of the wealth in the USA is owned by just one percent of the US population. The personal wealth of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates exceeds that of the total combined wealth of the poorest 45% of US households, which amounts to at least 133 million people. The USA has the highest concentration of individual wealth in all of the industrialized nations, and about three times that of the second-placed nation for concentrated wealth, which is Germany. The USA also leads the world in the number of its citizens who are incarcerated in prisons: one out of seventy-five US males are in prison, of whom 68% belong to racial or ethnic minorities. As of 2003, 12% of the USA’s black males in their twenties were living in prison, compared to 3.7% of the USA’s Hispanic males and 1.6% of the USA’s white males.
The USA consumes about 25% of the world’s oil and natural resources, but compared to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the nations of Europe, the USA ranks 21st in the percentage of its Gross National Income that it gives as Official Development Assistance to developing countries.
The US government wants to act as the ‘world’s policeman,’ but the USA behaves like a corrupt cop, using its military might to coerce or to force other countries into cooperating with the USA’s economic and strategic interests.
The USA is a democracy in name only, because for the past forty years the US government has been dominated and controlled by a ruling elite of wealthy individuals and powerful corporations that carefully grooms and selects, based on the vested interests of that same wealthy elite, most of the candidates for federal office, including the Presidency. The wealthy ruling elite of the USA maintains their control over the US government through their enforcement apparatus, which includes all of the US government’s intelligence agencies, operating under the overall leadership of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, which participated in both intelligence gathering and military activities for the Allies during World War Two. The OSS established several precedents, including the preferential recruitment of persons of wealth as agents, a thorough integration of the intelligence agency with various businesses, the utilization of known criminals as agents, and direct participation in drug smuggling as a means of fund-raising, that would continue within the CIA, which was created to replace the OSS shortly after the end of WW2.
The newly-formed CIA drew much of its membership from the ranks of the disbanded OSS, and the CIA continued the preferential recruitment of its agents from the wealthy upper class of US society, just as the OSS had done. The CIA has also integrated itself almost seamlessly with many international businesses, through hundreds of companies worldwide that act as CIA ‘assets.’ Just like a business, each individual regional foreign office, or Station, of the CIA is referred to within the Agency as an ‘account.’
The CIA was to be much, much more than an intelligence-gathering agency. The CIA was given the authority to initiate and conduct its own military operations, and also to establish fully-functioning businesses of whatever kind it chose, legal or illegal, throughout the world. Furthermore, the CIA was to be answerable only to the President and to the National Security Council. Those freedoms placed the CIA largely ‘outside the law,’ and prepared the way for the CIA’s eventual domination of the entire US government. The CIA-engineered assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in 1963 was a military coup that effectively marked the death of real democracy in the USA.
Many people within the ranks of the CIA, the US military, and the US government resented President Kennedy because Kennedy refused to authorize direct US military support for the CIA’s 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion of Castro’s Cuba, support that might have prevented the Invasion’s costly failure. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy fired the top three men at the CIA: Allen Dulles, Richard Bissell, and General Cabell, whose brother was the mayor of Dallas, Texas, where Kennedy was later to be assassinated. Kennedy also announced his intention to withdraw US forces from South Viet Nam, which was another one of the CIA’s pet projects. After Kennedy’s assassination, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, met with the US military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff at the White House, where Johnson made his first Presidential decision: to escalate the involvement of US troops in the Viet Nam War.
In 1977 the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that a lone gunman did not kill President Kennedy, but instead that Kennedy was shot by at least two snipers, one of whom delivered the final, fatal shot to Kennedy’s right temple from the famous ‘grassy knoll’ in Dealey Plaza. Marita Lorenz testified to the HSCA that in November 1963 she had accompanied CIA agent Frank Sturgis, Lee Harvey Oswald, and a couple of Cuban immigrants with a small arsenal of firearms on a road trip from Miami, Florida to Dallas, Texas, where they met with CIA agent E. Howard Hunt and Jack Ruby at a Dallas motel. In 1994 James Files (also known as James Sutton) confessed that he had served with a team of snipers working under orders from US government agents to assassinate Kennedy, and that he personally had fired the fatal head shot that killed Kennedy from a hidden position behind a fence on the grassy knoll.
In addition to the assassination of President Kennedy, there is considerable evidence of CIA and/or FBI involvement in the political assassinations of Martin Luther King, Malcom X, Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy Jr., and others.
In support of the success of the USA’s international business interests, the CIA has subverted and disrupted the democratic process in Italy, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Haiti, Ecuador, Zaire, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Cambodia, Bolivia, Australia, Angola, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and many other countries. Using propaganda, rigged elections, extortion, blackmail, sabotage, assassination, death squads, and torture, the CIA has deposed democratically-elected leaders and governments throughout the world and replaced them with ruthless right-wing dictators who were more accommodating to US business interests.
Saddam Hussein was twenty-two years old when he was hired by the CIA to serve on a six-man team that tried to assassinate Iraq’s Prime Minister Qasim, who had stated his intention to nationalize Iraq’s oil industry and to decriminalize Iraq’s Communist Party. When the assassination attempt failed, Saddam escaped to Egypt, where he remained in frequent contact with the US Embassy and the CIA. In 1963, after Baath Party agents, supported by the CIA, succeeded in killing Qasim, Saddam returned to Iraq. In 1980 Iraq attacked Iran, starting the Iran/Iraq War, during which the USA openly sold arms and provided logistic support to Iraq, while the CIA secretly sold arms to Iran, using Israel as a go-between. More than one million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers were killed in the Iran/Iraq War, which also took a heavy economic toll on both countries. The Iran/Iraq War, one of the longest and deadliest wars of the 20th Century, served the purpose of weakening and punishing two of the USA’s major rivals for the control of the Middle East and its massive oil reserves.
On July 29th, 1991 the US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, met with Saddam Hussein at his Presidential Palace in Baghdad, where Glaspie assured Saddam that the USA would not interfere or intervene if Iraq invaded Kuwait, which many Iraqis considered to historically be a part of Iraq. Four days later the Iraqi Army invaded and occupied Kuwait. In January and February of 1991 a US-led military coalition representing the United Nations assaulted the Iraqi forces in Kuwait, and in the desert borderland of northern Kuwait and southern Iraq the US-led force slaughtered more than 100,000 Iraqi troops with only minimal losses to the coalition forces.
Osama bin Laden is another ‘enemy’ of the USA who began his career as a CIA ‘asset,’ brokering the exchange of arms and heroin between the Afghani Mujahideen and the CIA during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. During the 1990s bin Laden provided financial support and recruited fighters for the Kosovo Liberation Army, an organization that smuggles heroin and cocaine into Europe. The KLA also receives protection and support from the CIA and the US government.
The CIA has participated in a major and an ongoing way in international drug smuggling, using its own private airline called “Air America” to bring heroin and marijuana out of Southeast Asia during the Viet Nam War, bringing cocaine into the USA as part of the illegal Iran-Contra operation during the 1980s, and now, once again, smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan. The CIA currently utilizes several airfreight companies that pose as Christian charities to ferry cocaine from Latin America into the USA and heroin from Afghanistan into Europe and the USA.
Beginning in the late 1940s with Operation Mockingbird, the CIA infiltrated all of the major media outlets in the USA, by forming alliances with publishers and media moguls, and by hiring hundreds of journalists to work as CIA stringers and propagandists. Today the major media outlets in the USA are owned and controlled by a very limited number of wealthy individuals and corporations, and the USA’s Mainstream Media presents a uniformly biased version of national and international news, full of lies and omissions, that conforms closely to the US government’s own dogma and propaganda.
The CIA and the FBI also infiltrated the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s in an attempt to derail those movements and discredit their leaders.
In his famous Farewell Speech of 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned US citizens against the growing power of what he called the Military/Industrial Complex, an unholy alliance of big business and the military which Eisenhower said was already well on its way to subverting the ideals and the principles of US democracy. Today, fifty per cent of the annual budget of the US government is spent on the military and the military debt. The many industries that support the US military are dependent on the US government’s pursuit of a continual state of warfare, as now exemplified by the USA’s manufactured, never-ending “War on Terrorism.” War is essentially a business, and the essential business of the USA is war.
Prescott Bush, the father of the USA’s 41st President and grandfather of the USA’s current, 43rd President, served as a US Naval Intelligence officer during World War One. After the war, Prescott Bush worked for the Brown Brothers Harriman Bank of New York, which bankrolled the Nazi rise to power in Germany from 1920 to 1942, when the US government finally ordered the BBH Bank to cease its illegal financial support for the rearmament of Germany. Like his Nazi clients and friends, Prescott Bush was an active white supremacist who hosted, along with his friend George Walker, another ancestor of ex-President George Herbert Bush and President George Walker Bush, the Third International Congress of Eugenics in New York City in 1932.
The young Richard Nixon was a protégé of Prescott Bush, and after WW2 Nixon worked with Project Paperclip to bring hundreds of Nazi scientists and industrialists into the USA. Nixon was also Senator Joseph McCarthy’s partner in the famous Red-baiting ‘witch hunts’ of the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the early 1950s. Nixon authorized the infamous Watergate burglary, in which the burglars and their associates included CIA agents Frank Sturgis, Bernard L. Barker, and E. Howard Hunt, who were assisted by Cuban exiles with CIA connections. All of them had been associated with the Bay of Pigs Invasion or the Kennedy assassination, or with both.
Prescott Bush’s son, George Herbert Bush, owned the Zapata Oil Company, which included an island 30 miles from Cuba that served as the staging area for the CIA’s “Operation Zapata” in 1961, which became known afterward as the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. Although he denies being there, George H. Bush was photographed standing in front of the Texas Schoolbook Depository just after President Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas on November 23rd, 1963. A declassified document from the office of former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover which is dated November 29th, 1963 mentions “George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency.” George H. Bush was named Director of the CIA in 1976, although he denied having ever served the CIA in any capacity. During his term as Director of the CIA, Bush gave exclusive private briefings on the future of the world energy market to the executives of Brown Brothers Harriman Bank and to the board of directors of the Chase Manhattan Bank, which was obviously an act of conflict of interest.
False-flag bombings and murders are a common tactic of the intelligence agencies of Britain, Israel, Russia, and the USA. Members of British intelligence participated in some of the murders and bombings that were committed by the Irish Republican Army. In the famous Lavon affair of 1954, Israeli Terrorists bombed several buildings in Egypt, but one of the bombs went off prematurely and an Israeli bomber was captured, which led to the arrest of an Israeli spy ring. Abu Nidal was an agent-provocateur who assisted the Israeli Mossad by organizing hijackings and Terrorist attacks in order to foster the illusion of international Arab Terrorism. In 1999 Moscow police caught members of the Russian FSB planting bombs in an apartment building in an attempt to enflame sentiment against the rebel Chechens.
Stoking the fires of war in support of the USA’s Military/Industrial Complex is a primary function of the CIA, which has worked cooperatively with the British, Israeli, and other governments to create the bogeyman of an ‘Islamic Terrorist threat.’ A 1998 German public television documentary revealed that some of the main suspects in the Berlin disco bombing of 1986 had been working for the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. According to federal court records, FBI agent-provocateurs organized and allowed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center to proceed. There is also considerable evidence indicating that FBI and ATF agents participated in the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
The attacks on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001; the anthrax letter attacks against two US Congressmen in October, 2001; the Spanish railway bombings in March, 2004; the London subway bombings in July, 2005; and the Bali bombings of October, 2002 and October, 2005 all show evidence of having been perpetrated by the USA and its allies, who are intent on generating animosity against the Islamic world.
The US government’s 9/11 false-flag attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon involved a coordinated effort by the CIA, the White House, the NSA, the FBI, NORAD, the Pentagon, and other federal agencies, along with the ongoing complicity of the USA’s major media outlets. The Israeli Mossad was also a likely accomplice to the 9/11 attacks, as indicated by evidence that demonstrates Israeli foreknowledge of those attacks. Since 9/11, the USA’s intelligence agencies have been further integrated under the overall leadership of the CIA, another step toward the formation of a monolithic US secret police with a global reach. Recently the arrest and ‘rendition’ by the CIA of so-called ‘Terrorist suspects’ throughout the world to undisclosed locations, often against the protests of the nations where the arrests take place, show us that not only does the USA fancy itself to be the ‘world’s policeman,’ but the CIA also wants to be the ‘world’s secret police.’
Many US citizens who oppose the aggressive right-wing domestic and foreign policies of President George Walker Bush and the Republican Party still have a naïve faith that the opposition Democrat Party will ‘turn the country around’ with a return to more Liberal policies if the Democrats are voted back into office. However, the ruling elite of the USA controls both of the major US political parties, which it manipulates like a pair of hand puppets. The Harriman Bank heiress, Pamela Harriman, was the chief contributor to the Democrat Party for thirty years, until her death in 2001. Pamela Harriman bankrolled the two Presidential campaigns of Democrat William Jefferson Clinton, who supported the CIA’s Iran/Contra drugs and arms smuggling through the airport at Mena, Arkansas while he was Governor of that State. During the 2004 Presidential election, the candidates of both major political parties were both the wealthy sons of CIA men, both graduates of Yale, both members of Yale’s secretive and elitist Skull and Bones Club, and both espoused a belief in the USA’s manufactured threat of ‘global Islamic Terrorism.’
The USA has all the ingredients of fascism: an intimate marriage of government, big business, and the military, in which the national media exclusively disseminates government-approved propaganda, and a ruthless, extra-legal and international secret police that enforces the policies of the ruling elite. Fascism in the USA is an accomplished fact, and it has been for the past forty years.
What can US citizens do to change the situation? Not much, short of revolution, because the entire US government and both of the two major US political parties are irredeemably corrupt. To bring about meaningful reform, the USA would need to abolish the CIA, require a full vote of Congress for any overseas military activity, restrict foreign aid to democracies with a proven human rights record, and eliminate financial contributions to politicians and their causes from lobbyists.
But fantasies of political reform are for dreamers, because corruption is the way of the world. For their own personal good, concerned citizens should study the secret history of the USA, and share that knowledge with those who will listen. And if they are ethical they should avoid, in every way possible, supporting the US government. http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/79790-0