A Timeline of CIA Atrocities (1993)
huppi.com
huppi.com
It seems the issue is that this list is entirely sourced from Killing Hope, which was published just before the Operation Condor information was declassified.
-- George White, commenting on his work on CIA's MK-ULTRA program.
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/operation-midnight-climax-how-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...
Rectal feeding is of limited application in actually keeping a person alive or administering nutrients, since the colon and rectum cannot absorb much besides salt, glucose and a few minerals and vitamins. The CIA administered rectal rehydration to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “without a determination of medical need” and justified “rectal fluid resuscitation” of Abu Zubaydah because he “partially refus[ed] liquids”. Al-Nashiri was given an enema after a brief hunger strike.
Risks of rectal feeding and rehydration include damage to the rectum and colon, triggering bowels to empty, food rotting inside the recipient’s digestive tract, and an inflamed or prolapsed rectum from carless insertion of the feeding tube. The report found that CIA leadership was notified that rectal exams may have been conducted with “Excessive force”, and that one of the detainees, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, suffered from an anal fissure, chronic hemorrhoids and symptomatic rectal prolapse.
The CIA’s chief of interrogations characterized rectal rehydration as a method of “total control” over detainees, and an unnamed person said the procedure helped to “clear a person’s head”.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-...
"The CIA had force-fed some prisoners orally and/or anally in order to establish "total control over the detainee."^[47] The report notes that CIA documents indicate "Chief of Interrogations [redacted] also ordered the rectal rehydration of KSM without a determination of medical need, a procedure that the chief of interrogations would later characterize as illustrative of the interrogator's 'total control over the detainee.'"^[1]^:82 of 499"
"The Committee found that "[a]t least five CIA detainees were subjected to 'rectal rehydration' or rectal feeding without documented medical necessity."^[48] These detainees are listed as Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, Majid Khan, and Marwan al-Jabbur.^[1]^:114 of 499"
"At least one prisoner was "diagnosed with chronic hemorrhoids, an anal fissure and symptomatic rectal prolapse," symptoms normally associated with a violent rape.^[49] The report identified this detainee as Mustafa al-Hawsawi.^[1]^:100 of 499"
"CIA officials, including general counsel Scott Miller and deputy director of operations James Pavitt, were told that rectal exams of at least two prisoners had been conducted with "excessive force."^[49] A CIA attorney was asked to follow up on these incidents, but the report states that "CIA records do not indicate any resolution of the inquiry."^[1]^:100 of 499"
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
What are you talking about? Rape is forced sex. Lying to someone about who you are is not use of force.
Source: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rape
The key point being "valid consent" and its contravention by deception. i.e. It's not valid if what you are consenting to is a lie, namely who you think you are having sex with.
The problem with that definition is that it doesn’t define what kinds of deception are sufficient to make sex qualify as rape.
Does any lie automatically turn sex into rape, or are there limits, e.g. only if you lie about working for the state?
Why for example would not disclosing that you are a cop be different from not disclosing that you are a doctor or an engineer?
This entire idea that merely lying about who you before sex are constitutes rape is simply not true.
Certain deceptions may be crimes, but that is completely different.
If you have sex with someone because you think you're in love with them and they're in love with you, but in fact they're not who you thought they were but they're just putting on an act, don't love you, and are using you then it's most definitely rape because you haven't given consent to have sex with someone you don't actually know and who's deceiving you in the most despicable way.
What turns it into villainy is the explicit intent to deceive for nefarious purposes, but calling it rape feels like a serious dilution of the word
[1]https://www.law.cornell.edu/women-and-justice/resource/assan...
According to the very article you link to his wearing of a condom was only an aggravating circumstance, and not the primary reason for the charge of rape.
The primary reason was that he had sex with the woman while she was asleep, in a helpless state (in which she could not give consent).
Here's the full quote:
"Mr. Assange visited Sweden to give a lecture. He had sexual relations with two women there. In the home of the injured party, Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state. It is an aggravating circumstance that Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, still consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her. The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party's sexual integrity. Mr. Assange was accused of rape. Allegedly, the women agreed to sex on the condition Mr. Assange wear a condom. He did not do so throughout intercourse. Although the English courts had previously ruled that one cannot give conditional consent, in order to be able to allow extradition to Sweden, the Supreme Court ruled that his actions would constitute a crime under English law - thus allowing conditional consent to become valid in English law."
And to describe even just the aggravating circumstance described here as merely "not wearing a condom" omits that the reason for it being a problem: because Assange knew the woman would not have sex without a condom.
So (if true) there are 2 reasons to think he was having sex without consent, which is rape.
> The primary reason was
Assange was not charged. Please stop spreading this falsehood.
Yes, you did.
No victims, nor officials, have accused him of any such thing. The arrest warrant that was issued was because he was wanted for questioning/investigation, and the direct statements of the women involved in the matter are very illuminating.
Radio Free Europe — The CIA creates its first major propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe. Over the next several decades, its broadcasts are so blatantly false that for a time it is considered illegal to publish transcripts of them in the U.S.
Because it was not officially under governmental control (the ties to the CIA would only be revealed after Rampart's investigation released in 1967) it was spared from a McCarthyist witch-hunt, otherwise there's little doubt it would have taken several hatchet hits.
What will of the majority? Populations of the eastern block were never consulted about that, and definitely didn’t have the option of leaving.
They didn't have the choice either to not listen to blatantly false propaganda being spread to further US's power over them.
As bad as it was life behind the Iron Curtain, the people there didn't ask to be swayed into America's fold either, they were being used by both sides of the Cold War, as usual.
Of course they did, your statement is completely nonsensical.
RFE was just a broadcast, sometimes jammed by eastern block authorities. Not listening to RFE was as simple as not tuning in.
I heard many strange things on HN, but this is in top 10. I'm not sure if you are familiar with the history of the Eastern block. In short, the governments were communist and linked to Russia, but as soon as they freed, they overthrown communism, cut the ties with Russia, and became democracies, with most of them joining the EU.
Of course people were well aware of the power struggle between the USA and Russia over decades, and they had no illusions over what the interests are. After all, Western warheads were directed at their cities. Nevertheless, all of them choose West. The only exception is Belarus, where people can't express themselves freely.
There many things the CIA did wrong. There were some unthinkable atrocities. But RFE wasn't one of them. Maybe it's not clear from the American perspective and the main Wikipedia page; local pages (such as[0]) are much more telling - you can easily understand that it was the only source of free expression of this kind, joined by some of the greatest thinkers, writers, and other artists and activists of that era, all of them facing grave consequences for appearing on the radio. If you haven't seen the people sitting in the evenings with their ears next to the radio (the jammers were quite strong), yearning for a few words that were not lies, it's very difficult for understand.
[0] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozg%C5%82o%C5%9Bnia_Polska_Ra...
We both know that the change of economic systems was not somethings that the average persons did. It was executed by the leadership. Polls were made and most people were against drastic changes of economic systems that literally killed millions of people.
Unless your will is to further American interests, RFE was against your will. No more, no less. It was propaganda and manipulative and untruthful just as much as Pravda.
Just because you like the ideology of the propaganda doesn't make it any less of a manipulation and a déception.
> Unless your will is to further American interests, RFE was against your will. No more, no less.
I'm sorry, to me it's look like a semantic error. Maybe you meant "against your interests"? Because the term "will" has a precise meaning - if I want something, this is my will. In order to have a fruitful discussion, it is necessary to adhere to the generally accepted meaning of terms, otherwise everything becomes moot.
Compared to the people killed by Yeltsin economic tyranny, the people that died in the collapse were a rousing error.
Even nowadays, if you poll those who were adults during the fall of the USSR, the majority would have preferred it not to fall.
The will of RFE is to further American dominance. If that's what you want, it follows it, otherwise it doesn't.
In Russia, things were vastly different. What happened in the 90s is very often compared to treason. People, normal people were left to themselves; the state was unable (or unwilling) to deal with poverty and rising crime. Not just ordinary crime but organized on an enormous scale. The satellite countries drifted off. Now Putin is feeding on the longing of some for the imperial past.
I'm sorry to say that the Russian people have had very bad luck with their leaders over centuries. Sure, this happened in other countries too, and the French Revolution shows clearly how the poor masses felt about their rulers. The Russian Revolution did the same, albeit later, also killing a lot more folks on the way. When Stalin rose to power, the terror was even worse. You'd think that after Stalin's death people will finally start living in a relaxed way, but the communist system was still suffocating people, in this way or another. The Gorbachev/Yeltsin moment was a great chance to finally break this bad chain and have a truly free country. Russian people are wonderful, they also have many extremely smart personalities, some of them completely unknown in the West, some - like Grigori Perelman - known only in a small part and only because living in our times. I believe that through common effort Russians could construct an excellent form of government bringing benefit to everyone. But of course, with the current oligarchy system, it's way too late.
Rather, the countries that transitioned without leading to some kind of oligarchy and looting are the small minority. The majority of countries ended up like Russia.
Yeltsin did not break the chain. The oligarchy is every bit as oppressive as the Soviet system and in many ways even worse. The only hope for the chain to be broken for the majority of the USSR was to follow through with Gorbachev instead of giving in to the corruption.
Putin isn't living off a desire for an imperial past. Putin lives off the oligarchs he is in a symbiotic relationship with. The main reason people support him is because he made the degeneracy of the Yeltsin days better, and in fact Putin is a better leader than Yeltsin, which is an extremely low bar. The imperial ideation is a pure creation of Putin himself, he did not use it to climb to power.
If we want to look empirically we can simply see the results of the referendum on the dissolution of the USSR. If we take the republics that had a low turnout, to be against, we still find that the vast majority were against the dissolution of the USSR.
Therefore we can confidently say that the events of the 1990s were not any kind of realization of the popular will, and indeed they were against the interests and wishes of the vast majority of the people. Instead they were the doing of corrupt party officials and that caused privatization, privately profiting from it and many becoming oligarchs.
Having spoken to many people older than myself, they mostly wanted the west to allow trade, not capitalism. Some listened to Radio Free Europe; some of what was transmitted was clearly false to them, other things were unclear and merely created doubt. Almost all believe that 89 was a US-backed coup, some even recount anecdotes about English speaking men breaking shop windows or filming.
Just because you personally like capitalism doesn't mean that forcing it as part of coup which led to millions of death isn't an atrocity. And yes propaganda was part of it.
This is not an excuse to destroy and society a replace it with whatever you choose against the will of its inhabitants. It's just an excuse for more dictatorial behaviour.
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/13/130AEF153...
1. What is the CIA involvement in mainstream US media? How and why do they shape American perspective via the news?[1]
2. Why are so many (former? current?) CIA agents running for congress?[2]
3. To what extent and purpose is the CIA spying domestically on American citizens and the US congress?[3]
4. What was the true purpose of "fusion cells", where the CIA was partnered with the FBI for local law enforcement?[4]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-2...
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-brief...
[4] https://twitter.com/fool_nelson/status/1305599303906406402?l...
https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Scenes-Inside-Canyon-Laurel/dp/...
I don’t think is anywhere near conclusive, but it’s definitely plausible given the information he lays out.
Fun fact: Jim Morrison’s dad literally started the Vietnam War when he led the fleet that fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin Incident:
No, he didn't, because the Vietnam War (the US involvement, which itself arguably was merely a continuation of the French colonial conflict) started long before the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution
Yes, there’s a lot of events that led to this, but this is the act that started the war, and it was completely fabricated.
The US had been fighting the war since 1954.
> The act of Congress was called The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution:
Acts of Congress may authorize or declare wars, but they only start wars if the armed conflict isn’t already underway when Congress acts.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution didn't start the Vietnam War (or US involvement in that war), much as the “Joint Resolution Declaring that a state of war exists between the Imperial Government of Japan and the Government and the people of the United States and making provisions to prosecute the same” of December 8, 1941, didn’t start WWII, or US involvement therein (though the latter was closer in time to the start of US involvement in WWII than the former was to the start of US involvement in the Vietnam War.)
Here's John Krasinski, star of Amazon's Jack Ryan series, talking about how he was welcomed at the CIA and "we should thank them every day": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9Yg6y6bFeM
A good article on how the writers for Homeland closely collaborated with representatives from the US intelligence community: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/home...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
The biggest and most obvious way the CIA impacts media is through leaks to journalists, though.
>1979: Afghanistan — The Soviets invade Afghanistan. The CIA immediately begins supplying arms to any faction willing to fight the occupying Soviets. Such indiscriminate arming means that when the Soviets leave Afghanistan, civil war will erupt. Also, fanatical Muslim extremists now possess state-of-the-art weaponry. One of these is Sheik Abdel Rahman, who will become involved in the World Trade Center bombing in New York.
The US literally armed its own enemies.
The fifth (Operation Paperclip) was conducted by US Army Intelligence.
I gave up at that point. The list is obviously a product of its time - before the explosion of the web. I actually remember when this sort of list was popular - similar lists often appeared and re-appeared on Usenet or were circulated widely by email.
These days it's just too easy to factcheck stuff wikipedia/google/etc. so after checking out the first few items, the list comes across like a sort of Gish gallop.
To be clear, I'm not defending the CIA or its actions here - but this particular list hasn't aged well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mena_Intermountain_Municipal...
We (Americans) have been living in lies, living in shadows, living in death. There is no tangible difference between the acronyms USA and CIA. We have been sold to the devil, and we've made him our master.
Your last sentence is also needlessly inflammatory.
The CIA has murdered and lied with reckless abandon for almost a century. They murdered at least one US president (JFK), and have controlled more (HW, Clinton,..). The CIA has infiltrations in major media, in our news, in our bestselling novels, the top tv shows and movies, the celebrity culture.
Their shape on the world is immense, and immensely evil. So I'm sorry if that is too far for you, but its not even close to far enough to account for the depths of darkness to the CIA.
Which ones, we couldn't tell, that's kind of the point of the CIA. But in this case, the incentives are the same, the structure is the same, the unaccountability is the same, so past behaviour is a good predictor of future behaviour.
What are you talking about? Every country has spy agencies and almost every country conducts covert operations.
http://www.errolmorris.com/film/fow_transcript.html
>"Mr. President, I have three questions to you. Number one: did you know the nuclear warheads were there? Number two: if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of an U.S. attack that he use them? Number three: if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?"
He said, "Number one, I knew they were there. Number two, I would not have recommended to Khrushchev, I did recommend to Khrushchev that they be used. Number three, 'What would have happened to Cuba?' It would have been totally destroyed." That's how close we were.
EM: And he was willing to accept that?
Yes, and he went on to say: "Mr. McNamara, if you and President Kennedy had been in a similar situation, that's what you would have done." I said, "Mr. President, I hope to God we would not have done it. Pull the temple down on our heads? My God!"
As did the US - the CIA was instrumental in the arrest of Nelson Mandela while he was on the lam. A number of Vietnam vets went on to "fight communism" in African wars of independence.
African decolonisation and the cold war was a complex mix.On one side, you had a white settler minority ruling class, ostensibly on the side of Capitalism and western values. On the other side, you had the majority agitating for full democracy with voting rights extended beyond the minority, but found no help from the west when they requested it.
The same story played out in multiple countries, including Vietnam: they'd be rebuffed by the west, and these groups, in need of training and materiel, would look to the USSR, China and Cuba who were happy to help if the rebels/terrorists/freedom fighters could help make socialism global.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_intervention_in_Angola
Supporting Arabs retaliating against an illegal land grab by Israel.
>They also probably didn't send troops into Somalia
Helping Ethiopia defend itself against aggression from Somalia, the issue of which was caused by western meddling and colonialism.
>nor support the MIR and FPMR to destabilize Chile.
Supporting forces revolting against the horrible Pinochet dictatorship.
Really, why list any of this when we are talking about unwanted CIA intervention, which usually backed murderous right wingers? Cuba's interventions were at least battling western imperialism and had the support of part of the local populations and not just the rich land owners.
"because western imperialism/protecting the interests of rich land owners is good",
"because the alternative is worse, just trust me bro", or
"because the local population doesn't know what's good for them and/or are/were brainwashed"
No other country purposefully develops the types of technologies and techniques that we engage with to monitor and affect global power structures.
No other country develops propaganda networks (Radio Free ___) like we do, in order to corrode the trust of non-US citizens towards their governments. We literally have to invent stories of "Russian hacking" and "Russian interference" to try and conjure up some parity.
Don't try and make false equations. We are not like the world. We may possess the same apparatuses, but we use them as the devil would.
Which of these stores, specifically, were invented?
State-sponsored "hacking" and "interference" (by any definition of those terms) on the part of the Russian government are as frequent as they are well-documented.
Quite frankly it's probably only a matter of time until India develops them as well. The fact of the matter is all our history, doctrine, tactics, and studying come from living in a bi-polar world.
We aren't living in the 1940's or the Cold War, we are living in the early 1900's and we need to start studying that time to understand how to navigate and succeed in a multi-polar world (Russia, China, US, India?), or we will be fighting a trench war, while the enemy comes in with tanks and machine guns.
How, in the face of being presented with a list of evils the world over, are we all (us Americans) not prostrate in shame? Why do we search for some other vestige of evil to make rational our actions?
There is no rationality to the atrocities. There is no "other countries". There is US, and there is evil that must be admitted and atoned for.
You're asking Americans to feel shame for the actions of an unelected agency that has subverted their democracy? And lied to them and hid those actions? Americans, as a whole, should be ashamed, not just the CIA?
Do you also demand Russians feel guilty for allowing Stalin to take power?
But it is our greed, our demand for cheaper and faster, our uncaring nature to the extractive business practices that push the CIA into action. We are complicit, every one of us, and it is only after we admit this that we can start to change. Its not about burying our heads in the sand in shame, but about understanding what we are benefitting from and having a heart for the millions pushed down to push you, as an American, up.
I don't care about the Russians. That's their problem. I'm an American. This is MY problem.
Evocative rhetoric, that falls apart upon examination. Is it your claim that if only most Americans bought fair-trade coffee instead of the cheap stuff, the CIA would start to behave?
What about Americans that voted for politicians and presidents that promised fewer wars, or to clean up the deep state? Are they absolved of this guilt?
The CCP's tactic is to conflate criticism of the Party with criticism of the Chinese people and China itself, so that when the Party is attacked, the Chinese will also feel attacked, and rush to its defense. You are doing the same for the CIA.
The US is not playing to suceed in a multipolar world. The US is playing to maintain hegemony, ie, a monopolar world. All US strategy I've seen so far, especially economic, is focused on creating two spheres of power with the US being at the helm of the dominant one.
Dictatorships might not be elected, they still have structure and procedure. If the Chinese MSS obeys the Politburo and doesn't withhold information from them, then they are subordinate to the government.
When?
> Dictatorships might not be elected, they still have structure and procedure. If the Chinese MSS obeys the Politburo and doesn't withhold information from them, then they are subordinate to the government.
I think you vastly overestimate the efficiency of authoritarian bureaucracies. Much has been written about this, there is a strong taboo directly against sharing information because sharing the wrong information can have lethal consequences. Authoritarian governments are marred from top to bottom by problems caused by friction in sharing information, and subsequent Balkanization.
You can criticize the efficiency of authoritarian governments. That doesn't have much to do with their structure. Sure, the MSS may have some issues with command, though there is no evidence for them so far, but they are still subordinate to their hierarchy.
Besides, we're in 2021 now, data issues are a lot easier to audit in these situations.
As for authoritarian governments, and their intelligence agencies, it’s not so much about “efficiency” in a technocratic sense so much as it is that I see no reason to believe that the government is in full control of them. How would we know if they weren’t? Authoritarians project an image of total control that often papers over a reality of internal disorder and dysfunction. We know, for example, that there was at least a brief coverup of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, just recently, to say nothing of the more famous examples, like Chernobyl.
You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on. But as far as anyone can tell the opposite happened, and the Politburo got rid of Zhou Yongkang, the removal by Deng Xiaoping of Luo Qingchang, and so on, there is a clear pattern of heads of the MSS being removed and changed by the Politburo when they step out of line or don't follow the direction of the government, and so on.
This isn't unique to China, by the way. The French also keep a much tighter leach on their intelligence agencies, first by separating domestic activities from foreign activities, and then by putting them tightly in the control of the Ministry of the Interior for the first and the military for the second, affording them very little latitude.
The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes. There are credible reports that the Church committee even covered up the worst of it, see the reporting by Carl Bernstein.
And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
This is questionable, but it’s clear at least that China’s eventual response was more successful than the US’s, so there is that. Whether we’ll ever know the true origins of the virus is a different question of course.
> You would know if the CCP wasn't in control of the MSS or if the CPSU wasn't in control of the KGB if documents were leaking, if people were being assassinated, and so on.
I asked mainly because the KGB seems to have functioned a bit like a shadow government and operated with a high degree of autonomy, another commenter mentions that Putin himself is ex-KGB.
> The Church committee made a lot of things public, but as far as how things were done in the CIA there weren't much big changes.
There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
> And we know that many things the Church committee supposedly addressed, such as direct involvement by the IC into domestic politics, did not actually stop.
[citation needed]
I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians. However, I think one is hard pressed to prove that the situation with the CIA is substantially different from that of other intelligence agencies around the world, outside of the issues I mentioned. For one thing a lot of European intelligence agencies operate with even less transparency than the US IC (among them GCHQ, famously), so raising them up as a model gives me pause.
Putin is KGB, yes, but he was only able to get power after the KGB dissolved, did he not? The KGB attempted to influence Soviet policy, but they were largely unsuccessful, which is why both times they had to use force and failed. From all the declassified documents since the fall of the USSR I can't see any evidence of control of the rest of the CPSU from the KGB.
>There was an executive order signed banning political assassinations, and all evidence suggests that there were significant changes after their accountability was made clear.
Banning political assassinations is a good look, but we both know that's not going to do much at all.
>[citation needed]
>I have no particular affinity for the CIA. I am particularly disgusted by COINTELPRO, regime change efforts, and CIA’s use of torture during the Iraq war. I think it would make a lot of sense to split the covert operations and intelligence-gathering parts of the organization, but these reforms do not interest most politicians.
Well, we know that the IC still got involved into domestic politics. The FBI for example surveilled leadership of BLM in 2014 and later, and leaked documents from 2017 showed that the FBI targeted organizations based on ideology even if they were not engaging or planning to engage in anything remotely criminal, nowadays using the excuse of left-wing domestic terrorists to do so [https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...] [https://theintercept.com/2018/03/19/black-lives-matter-fbi-s...]
Many European intelligence agencies are as bad or even worse than the CIA, agreed. I was talking about the specific example of France, which still is not perfect, but is much better.
A strange statement. Putin was put in power by it.
If I were Yelzin, I would've ordered firing squads for every KGB officer above a major.
And if you were Biden would you for example order the same for any government employee who puts/keeps/prevents release of an innocent person in jail?
Yeltsin had no choice but to collaborate with the KGB if he wanted them to execute his machinations. The rogue elements from the KGB were the reason why Yeltsin was in power to begin with. Without the KGB he would never have been able to illegally arrest Gorbachev and execute a coup.
I read many books on events 1990-1993. Even the two soldiers who were guarding the door when Yelzin was arresting his cabinet were hand picked through a very tight network of loyalists in the most extreme secrecy.
They had an order "see anybody resembling KGB? Fire at will"
It's a grandiose conspiracy theory of CPSU holdouts that "KGB subverted the Union!" I will believe more that Trump Donald was a communist spy, than KGB nibbling at hand that fed, and protected it from decimation at the hands everybody wanting to return the favour.
He knew this very well. If he directly went against the part of the KGB that supported him he would die.
And yes, the KGB subverted the Soviet Union by removing Gorbachev. This is obvious to anyone that has any understanding of history. Removing Gorbachev could not have been anything less.
So yes, I will persist, the only reason why Yeltsin was able to gain power is because a significant faction of the KGB supported him - though not at the very highest level - while the leadership was against Gorbachev. That is to say, thanks to the KGB.
At night, the ice weasels come.
The CIA has certainly done some weird and evil shit. Slanted writing like this isn't going to persuade anyone, though.
And I somehow suspect you would be absolutely outraged by an equally poorly written summary that has the opposite viewpoint. Just a guess...
The meat of the content is the documented acts of the CIA.
Click around the website. It's a deeply ideological source.
It is completely plausible that the CIA has done really evil things, but with honest intentions of stabilizing regions.
Never fall for the PR that the CIA (or any similar agency in other countries) has any altruistic goals like freedom and democracy. Their are simply a tool of the geopolitical power struggle. Sometimes they are best friends with the worst dictators, sometimes they overthrow democratic governments. It does not matter as long as it was decided that the result would be better for the USA (again, that's the same in every country, I'm not attacking the USA specifically)
Stimson was a moron. Sure, being polite and respectful of other people's mail/privacy is a socially responsible thing to do, but if EVERYBODY else is reading other people's mail, then it puts you at a serious disadvantage when you choose not to.
What actions are too far?
What if EVERYONE else is doing it?
Having a moral standard and sticking to it no matter what somebody else is doing makes you a moron now?
You’re part of the problem.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2010/11/3/us-trained-cart...
I thought the book was a bit overly hostile -- surely the CIA isn't that incompetent -- and in looking for a rebuttal I found this on the CIA web site written by the "CIA History Staff": https://www.cia.gov/static/49561e0c75f85cc633453c8d40888e94/... . I found this a weak argument against the points made by Weiner but its interesting to read what the CIA thinks of its own history.
Edit: i thought this was obviously a joke. I misspelled a word to give it less credibility.
look at all the wikipedia article mentions and additions in this comment thread.
Instead of posting this, how about reference this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_violations_by_the...
This is one of many reasons why I don't use Twitch and avoid using AWS and amazon.com whenever possible.
Please read this webpage in full before you enrich those who collaborate with this organization.
If you work at AWS, you should consider quitting. If you are applying to jobs, you should skip Amazon. AWS are the CIA's sysadmins.
(I think almost any country with our resources would project their vision vigorously to maintain stability)
That’s to say were China to emerge as the world power, I don’t think they would take pause and just let things be.
It's even less likely that China could even surpass the US in relative terms without relying very heavily on other powers such as Russia, some African powers and so on, because of their geography and lack of resources. So even then they wouldn't be able to project their mode of governance or impose social overhaul on other countries in the way the US did.
I've heard that a lot, but I actually wonder if that's true or if it's just American paranoia projected onto a different ascendant power.
You're saying given a larger playing field, they would forgo it. Let someone else project?
Turkey isn't a great example either due to its NATO membership; their geopolitical motivations aren't that easy to pin down.
And yes, China acts very territorial towards Taiwan and the regional oceans. Taiwan and the surrounding ocean is the one exception to my statement; given the opportunity they'd take it without hesitation.
But for all those countries you listed, I really believe they would remain strong regional powers and not try to dominate the world the way the US does. Shocking as it may be to some of us in the British/American sphere of influence, most countries do not have imperial ambitions, and our opinions of places like China are heavily influenced by the military-industrial-media complex seeking to gin up resentment against foreign powers who don't bow to Western economic influence. (Much criticism of China is valid; that's beside this discussion specifically about imperialism).
So, if they had the resources the US has, I very strongly suspect they would be more muscularly assertive than we are when it comes to world affairs --as I pointed, out, even at their reduced size and power, they desire quite a bit.
Also, correction, China is not only rattling sabers with Taiwan, but Philippines, Vietnam, Japan too.
In other words, yes, if China had the resources of the US it would be a global empire... because in order to have the resources the US has, you need to be a global empire.
This is just a pet theory at this point, I'm not an actual historian.
To what purpose? Do you believe that it would result in a happier and more successful populace/world?
If so, what is the foundation for that belief? If not, again, why? I'd argue these counter-narratives already exist, so why do we need a new one/more of them/them to be stronger?
No, just in the interest of promoting a varied selection of ideological opinions and in support of the search for truth.
> I'd argue these counter-narratives already exist, so why do we need a new one/more of them/them to be stronger?
My contention is exactly that they are insufficiently represented in the current cultural zeitgeist! You're free to disagree, but the context here is that the parent post expressed an interest in 'signal boosting' this narrative, and I was agreeing. Sounds like you disagree.
I get that, makes sense. I don't think what the gp said was consistent with that, though.
I think that if your goal is to boost the viewpoint that the USA should be an example of a country no one else should aspire to be while also attempting to support the search for truth, hypocrisy shouldn't really play into it much, unless of course that is the sole reason you find the actions of the US distasteful. For me, whether you killed people and then pretended it was for the greater good or just killed them, the chief crime is murder, not lying about it.
The reasons not to aspire to be like the US are the same as the reasons not to aspire to be like the UK, France, Spain, Russia etc. Highlighting them as unique to the US wouldn't appear to improve the varied selection of ideological opinions (a lot of people already don't like the US) and certainly doesn't improve the level of truth present. I'd also argue that doing so would be playing into a different type of the same exceptionalism.
Nationalist exceptionalism created a foundation for the US to do things nobody had done before. Unfortunately, the US also did things a lot of countries had done before and it should definitely be noted that those things are not exceptional nor are they particularly good for the idealized nation.
https://www.insider.com/inside-forced-sterilizations-califor...
It still isn't.
Most of Europe has shown that it can't be trusted with power. Same with most of Asia.
The past 80 years under pax americana have seen the greatest reduction in global poverty in history.
It's misleading to put some of those CIA actions into 1979 in the timeline, since Carter was guardedly supportive of the new governments in El Salvador and Nicaragua, and the actions against them were undertaken by the subsequent Reagan administration.
Edit: I mean by any measure. They don't seem to actually succeed in furthering any of the possible motives, whether you think it's about democracy or business interests, as soon as the CIA touch it it gets worse.
Which is just as far from the truth as some of the lies the CIA has told over the years.
The CIA has always been involved in intelligence gathering, which means among other things preventing terrorist attacks and discovering the capabilities of potential enemy nations. Like it or not, both are necessary tasks.
You might say the success of the European Union has some CIA fingerprints on it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Committee_on_United_E...
Probably, but if you are asking you probably don’t have the security clearance to see it.
> it sometimes seems like the CIA has never really succeeded at any intervention.
Well, duh. If it seems like the CIA was involved in an intervention, then it, ipso facto, seems like they failed: while interventions aren’t the primary job of the CIA, overt interventions aren’t any part of their job.
> Have they ever had an unqualified success that actually helped people?
If the CIA had a success (qualified or otherwise), helping people would be a side effect (or maybe instrumental but not ultimate goal). The CIA isn’t the Peace Corp or US AID, along with “overt intervention”, another thing that isn’t their job is “helping people”.
Their efforts in Iran ruined any chance of western countries doing business there for decades...
Picking the "business interests" as the only motive for these action is an extremely narrow and simplistic explanation at best. And in my opinion also wrong, given historical facts. You could even argue the US went to war against Nazi Germany because Hitler would have seized all their foreign investments in Europe... Which is true but hardly the complete picture.
Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, several leaders of Laos, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic, Joao Goulart of Brazil, and Juan Torres of Bolivia were all democratically elected leaders who got overthrown by CIA-backed coups. And that's not even the complete list.
EDIT: and several of those coups happened immediately after the victim countries attempted to nationalize their natural resources, such as oil and minerals, such that US and British companies could not extract them anymore. After the coups, the right-wing dictators which were installed often allowed those companies back in to continue their extraction. These are just historic facts, and the US government has declassified and acknowledged much of it.
Read OP's article. It's well-cited. I shouldn't have to summarize it for you in the comments.
I also gave the example of the Taliban. Cuba is another good example of a situation entirely without legitimate governments to overthrow.
Juan Bosch was not overthrown by the CIA, btw, whereas the murder of Trujillo, an actual dictator of the Dominican Dictator, probably had been done with CIA help.
I also don't see "nationalization" as such an ethically blameless thing. It's essentially stealing, from some point of view. To not see it that way - without sounding like a marxist idiot - requires careful analysis how the property situation came to be and how it is to be changed. Just taking back the oil rigs you sold a few years ago to an US company can't really be the answer.
I think this speaks to a sensitivity on your part, to which you're overreacting. OP never alleged anything of the sort. You inferred that yourself.
The fact that I'm arguing is that the CIA committed coups against democratically elected leaders in many countries, which was ethically wrong, and you seem to agree with that. Great. Afghanistan and Cuba can be their own different examples for the sake of argument. I'm talking about the countries I listed above.
Moving on from that, I would argue that a nation-state has the ultimate authority to decide what is done with the natural resources it controls. If people fairly elect a government which decides to stop selling its resources to foreign companies and keep the resources for its own people, that trumps previous business agreements made by a different regime. Full stop.
But, for the sake of argument, let's say the above scenario is immoral. Is it so immoral that it deserves a coup and installation of a CIA-friendly dictator? I don't think anyone would argue that. The worst it merits is financial compensation to the affected company which can't extract resources anymore.
Finally, I'll elaborate and say that I don't believe any of those coups were entirely for resources - it was for resource access as well as the broader American geopolitical strategy at the time of toppling any regimes deemed too leftist in favor of right-wing dictators. Similar to the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union; it was about installing puppet states who are loyal to you so that you can extend your sphere of influence as an empire. Neocolonialism at its finest. But the resources were always part of the picture too.
How did allying with former SS commanders and other Nazis help the people? How did them stealing children from Cuba help the people? How did them supporting Cuban exiles ongoing terrorism help the people? How did Gladio ops killing any sort socialist movements in Europe help the people?
Maybe you should take a second to realize a lot of 'anti-american talking points' are actually valid criticisms of a corrupt and deranged government.
I'm not denying the CIA did horrible things. But just to be devils advocate: Yes, you can derive benefits from Nazi war criminals. In these cases, during that time period it was vital to know what the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Block were. They did have expansionist intentions, and they even had plans to invade much of western Europe. That sometimes gets forgotten...
Most of the governments the CIA acted against have been much more "deranged and corrupt" than any US government. And you should be glad for this.
The US had plans to invade Russia, Cuba, and pretty much any place they could think of. That is irrelevant.
And to your last point, I disagree. I know also that lots and lots of people in other countries disagree. Why do you think the US is hated so much globally?
https://howardlsalter.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the-cias-fail...
Despite it looking like a failure by many metrics, they show that it can definitely be considered a success from the perspective of large multinational companies dealing in oil and other resources. CIA director during part of that time was George H W Bush, who may have had some interest in getting access to cheap oil.
That is when they decided to request the help of the US. The US assimilated much of Britain's military technology via the Tizard mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tizard_Mission
From that close collaboration, the US also assimilated much of the British intelligence know-how and created institutions that mirrored the goals of British intelligence institutions.
The predecessor of the CIA was meant to be an equivalent of the British MI6.
That is to me the true start of the CIA, NSA, etc.
You have to think of the mindset the led to the CIA, the CIA was an out growth of the OSS, which was basically just the CIA/MI6 for World War 2.
The men and women who were involved in the CIA had just seen a terrible world war that had led to a massacre of tens of millions of people, devastated the entire earth, and had seen humanity unleash the power of the sun on the face of the earth at will. To boot they were now facing down an ideological enemy that wanted to do the exact same thing to the Jews (see the Doctors Plot), and had the stated aim of destroying them and their way of life. Beyond that the entire US had been in a mindset of full mobilization, that the US needed to stand as a bastion of freedom, and liberty against the evil barbarism of Nazism (again the historicity of the point is debatable but it was the message).
So the people who were involved in the had lived through the storming of Omaha and been there on Iwo Jima, and so the idea was to create a clandestine, super powered organization that would be able to monitor things like the Nazis and assassinate their leaders before they came to power? Why, because no one alive wanted another world war and the devestation it had brought, not to mention the real risk that any significant military action would likely lead to literally the end of the world.
Now let's look at China, where the CIA had almost no intervention, they currently are conducting their third genocidal purge within their borders within the period of 80 years (The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, the Uighers). To me this speaks to some extent that the fears of the founders were justified.
I believe that the men and women who founded the CIA and created it did so because they genuinely believed what they were doing was right, they knew they would have to make distasteful decision but they felt it was better than the alternatives that the faced. Now as the organization grew and as the original members started to be replaced, it became an organization obsessed with power brokering, using its "mission" to justify whatever it did, and became a tool used by powerful individuals who didn't like accountability.
I don't excuse the CIA, I think they should be held accountable for their actions, but I also believe that as long as we continue to think of them as one dimensional cartoonishly evil bond villians, we will never be able to make any progress towards putting them right.
EDIT: Just to be clear I don't want to justify or exonerate the CIA, the biggest problem they faced, which is the same to all powerful and talented individuals and organizations is that of hubris and believing they knew better than anyone else. This led to a lot of terrible and despicable things, and atrocities, and then lead to efforts to contain the results of their actions, which led to a never ending cycle of fighting, destabilization, rebellions, etc., but again in the minds of the people making these decisions the things they did and the effects they had were better than the alternatives they considered. Not saying they were right, just that we can't attribute all of it to malice, as in many cases they believed they were basically dealing with the trolley problem.
At which point Dulles saw fully fit to start sneaking Nazis out of the way of justice. They were cartoonishly evil then, they were cartoonishly evil with the phoenix program, and they were cartoonishly evil doing Abu ghraib. Whatever they're doing now, it's cartoonish, as well.
You don't need to force nuance in everywhere, sometimes a spades a spade.
The fact of the matter is that we knew the cold war was coming and we knew that we would need to beat the Soviets to space, that's why we tried to round up all the best minds we could, because the alternative risk was to lose the world to another regime as tyrannical and bloodthristy as the Nazis, but now with nukes.
They were wrong in Abu Ghraib, they were wrong in the Pheonix Program, they made many many mistakes and committed many atrocities.
But if you continue to view them as cartoonishly evil because it makes you feel smugly morally superior to pass judgement on people and situations that you have only partial information on based on your wikipedia browsing then please continue to do so.
The rest of the world gets that bad guys aren't twirling their mustaches as they bind damsels to railroad tracks. You should be able to piece together that, after a very short list of atrocities over a 70 year span, the word cartoonish might not actually mean cartoonish and instead trivialize the word given the glaring mundane history of the entire organization.
Also, it's totally okay to feel morally superior to people who rape and torture. Especially those of us who do so in massive quantities.
This takes our agency (no pun intended) out of the equation a little bit, don't you think? To have a cold war was a decision we made (we and the Soviets, of course). Whether one agrees with it or not is another thing, but "was coming" ascribes a sort of inevitability to your argument that I don't think is merited. Making assertions by going "the fact of the matter is ____" is a nice flourish but it's lipstick on a pig in this case: your take is just as interpretive as the other poster's.
Re: nuance, well, yes and no. There's a lot of nuance to a murder case in most instances, but in the end we have to consult some fairly un-nuanced principles to help us make a decision about it: is homicide wrong or not? Saying "yes, it's wrong" isn't painting a killer as cartoonishly evil or not nuanced enough; it's just saying murder is wrong. The killer may have had reasons and circumstance - nuanced ones, even. But he's still a killer.
Same goes with the US government and the CIA, etc.: all the reasons in the world aren't gonna excuse you from accusations of "cartoonish evil" if your track record - your real behavior out there in the world - is one of cartoonish evil. The CIA didn't invent couching sociopathy in virtue or reason, but if you look at their track record you'll see they've gotten pretty good at it. They deserve only abolition and prosecution, but until that day, in my interpretation, they deserve every shred of scorn they get, nuanced or not.
I don't have time to add much at the moment, but it was nice to see at least an ounce of balance in the current state of this thread.
Dulles literally passed around little copies of this mural because he was proud of how it depicted him! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Gloriosa_Victoria
And this is without even getting into the fact that the CIA's early leadership worked at Sullivan & Cromwell when they helped fund the Nazis' rise to power, or that they helped thousands of actual Nazis escape justice after the war in order to bring them to the US to aid in all kinds of research.
When Trump was in power the intelligence agencies were actively trying to undermine him and half of America loved them for it. They believed every anonymous intelligence official whisperings to journalists. Ate it up.
Divide and concur. You can just imagine the kind of operations they constantly do in foreign countries.
They are just too smart and the public is too dumb.
You're welcome Italy
This still happens, especially with Russia. Putin is killing people with chemical weapons in NATO member nations, invading and annexing parts of Ukraine, and performing cyber warfare. All of these things are acts of war...
The world welcomes you too.
Yeah, Italy is today known for its stable, non corrupt, efficient and effective governance...
Nazis are terrible but after WW2 they posed significantly less of a threat than Soviet communists.
Soviet and Chinese communists might not have been as evil as Nazis, but they sure were close
What the US has done in the name of anticommunism dwarfs any evils done by communism.
I can go on. And these are just the individual incidents we know about. Who knows how much suffering and death happened as a direct result of the destabilization of the global south.
All of these incidents are bad, but none still compare to the mass deaths under Stalin and Mao
No one is saying Mao and Stalin were great guys. They're just pointing out that "anyone on the right no matter how terrible" isn't a better choice than "anyone on the left no matter how reasonable". And that's without getting into whether any country should involve itself in other people's elections at all...
My main point with all of this is to put into context how horrifying the threat of the spread of Communism was. I think the actions taken at the time by the CIA need to be viewed through this lens.
To your second point: no. You aren’t the arbiter of what qualifies as an atrocity or not. Go tell the countless people in Latin America that their continued torture and suffering isn’t a big deal, cause hey at least they aren’t in a Russian gulag. You are as deranged as our government if you truly think that.
Italian here. In a democracy you don't "threaten to win" the elections. You win or not according to the will of the peple.
I never vote Partito Comunista but I'd rather have any party win legitimate elections and have legitimate power until next elections rather than... secret services from another country undermining democracy.
Also CIA did WORSE than beating up people and infiltrating parties: they supported terrorist groups that exploded bombs around Italy in 70 and 80ies.
While there is no denying some of the real atrocities committed, this list makes some REALLY simple narratives out of some pretty complicated events. Several of the "democratically elected" dictators were nothing of the sort, and several of them buck the narrative by being right-wing populists.
A lot of other agencies were often complicit, in several of these examples the CIA was merely there holding the coats for European agencies or local political organizations.
Indeed, this list would make you think the CIA was capable of creating political movements out of whole cloth. But the truth is much more insidious - they often empowered the existing political movements conveniently at hand.
But I think, most importantly, is that we know all of this. You can look at the Wikipedia pages for all of these events. And all of the congressional investigations into them. I want to blame our government for letting all this happen, but on some level I at least separate the ideals of the US constitution and our separate and distinct failure of living up to those ideals.
This was actually a good thing. Che Guevara was a psychopathic murderer and war criminal.
Looking through this list, it is interesting how it minimizes the atrocities of communists.
Lest there be an accusation of “both sides”, you really have to consider the contexts in which things occurred. For example during WWII, you could easily do a huge article about Allied atrocities in fighting the Nazis and how civilian and industrial areas were targeted and often included as collateral damage during night time bombing. But it is also true that the bombing of cities and destruction of German industrial capacity contributed to the collapse of the Nazis.
The truth is that Communists have killed more people and been responsible for more human misery than any corresponding movement or ideology in the 20th century. In addition, for the most part, the countries that joined the US Bloc ended up doing well for their citizens in the long term, even when they started out as authoritarian (see for example South Korea and Singapore) while countries that embraced Communism screwed over their people (See East Germany and North Korea).
What the writeup is missing is a contemporary context. It also tries to fault the current CIA, and by association the current US government, for mistakes or even crimes committed by different human beings decades ago. In order to make an ideological point.
Please don't say Libya. That wasn't the CIA and there was a UN resolution. Please don't bring up the Iraq WMD story... the CIA didn't actually lie, it was the White House that massively overstated the evidence for the beliefs it actually had. And much later they actually found WMDs in Iraq.
How is the CIA involved with Saddam Hussein in 1996? Training "opposition" forces in Syria is hardly an "atrocity" and at worst it is ethically questionably, not an outright mistake or crime. Assad isn't exactly a benign, democratically elected and popular leader.
How does the drone program connect to OP's claim of assassinating democratically elected popular leaders for American business interests? It may be questionable on grounds of international law, or on strategy, or on ethical grounds (with the collateral damage), but they did target terrorist/insurgent leaders who are committing and planning violence against US forces, Afghan forces and civilians all the time. The CIA is acting more like a conventional military force in that instance.
The reason it is the CIA doing this, and not the Airforce, is not so much the "covert" or "secret" part of its capabilities, but the "intelligence" part, i.e. knowing who to hit. An alternative would be to tell Afghan (and on occasion Pakistani) forces to conduct heavily armed raids in these areas with many more casualties. Another, even worse alternative is what the US tried in Vietnam and neighboring countries, just burning and bombing everything and everyone.
Not mentioning all that context strikes me as a bit one-sided.
No, he wasn't.
>The truth is that Communists have killed more people and been responsible for more human misery than any corresponding movement or ideology in the 20th century.
No, it hasn't. Stop spreading worthless VoC propaganda.
What seems to have changed is they're not trying to prevent it anymore, but making sure it's one they can manage. Imo, I think they got completely taken by Russia, where they thought when the wall came down the cold war was over, but really it had just started in earnest, and now every single new CIA recruit is fully indoctrinated into their old enemies' ideology before they even fill out an application. The movements behind the former Russian oppression very much exist as non-state actors today, and instead of mere nation states, they form pan-national networks facilitated by colleges, NGO's, and foundations.
It's so subtle. If you believe the biggest problems facing the world today are rooted in some other people lacking social accountability, that it is limits to the ability of institutions to organize, fund, and plan society, and that it is religion creating identities that cannot be reconciled with society, you may already have been subverted.
What? Every CIA recruit is an acolyte of the immortal science of Marxism-Leninism?
The struggle is that once it becomes normalized it grows, and anyone with the power tends to want to increase it. If you are a rational and pragmatic person you have to be able to accept some things as necessary and seek punishment for others... while seeing that there is rarely much difference between one and the next.
One can also be an idealist and believe that none of this should be necessary and fight against every instance; perhaps that is the stable outcome, some people participating in things they see as necessary fighting against others who want everything to be perfect -- the stalemate between them being some kind of solution to the problem.
Why?
You couldn't ask for more favorable geography.
The inaccessibility caused by the mountains are largely what prevented Mexico from holding on to the territory.