CIA publicly acknowledges 1953 coup it backed in Iran was undemocratic
nbcnews.com
nbcnews.com
Then they've got a long way to go. Everybody already knew that the Shah's coup was planned and backed by the CIA. That was part of a long and ugly history of CIA covert operations that have backfired spectacularly. It's not unreasonable to trace the Sunday's horrors in Israel to that event in 1953.
I really hate the way events like that justified so much conspiracy-theory thinking. The CIA gets blamed for anything and everything, much of false and outright deranged. But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of mea culpas and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it's going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.
Probably because the people who theorized that there had been a conspiracy turned out to be correct, and the usual bromide objections ("someone would have talked," "more than 50 people can never keep a secret," "the government just isn't that competent," etc) were shown to be entirely false.
- Iraq WMDs
- MkUltra
- The Crack Epidemic
- Watergate
- Glados
- Paperclip
- Robert Kennedy car crash
- Epstien
But they just got lucky a bunch.
2. For the ones you listed, were there specific and credible "conspiracy theories" that existed prior to them being discovered/confirmed? Or were there only vague theories of "government doing something shady"?
The set of possible conspiracy theories is infinite. The set believed by any one 'conspiracy theorist' is likely to be far smaller. Lumping in hollow earth, lizardpeople, flatearther, aliens etc with 'government lies about wars' is always a cynical move to avoid legitimate criticism and spread propaganda.
The one I lived through, Iraq WMDs, wasnt a conspiracy theory at the time. All credible evidence said there were no WMDs. Bush and Cheney lied with no evidence. Everyone that was not a partisan Republican called them out on their flimsy pretext. That's why we had the largest antiwar protests ever (while conservatives ridiculed us).
Another was that the collapse of the world trade center towers was due to planted explosive charges. That one has been roundly refuted.
Of course, people continue to believe what that will, but there's a pretty big gap in the amount of evidence behind those theories and confirmed conspiracies.
Hack those numbers.
https://www.nist.gov/pao/questions-and-answers-about-nist-wt...
It's not just unsubstantiated, it's flatly wrong on its face. Bush had been in office less than 9 months. He wasn't anywhere close to re-election. This is when the next race typically didn't ramp up until the year of the election.
His approval was relatively stable and above 50%. You can see what it looked like if you scroll down from this link: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-approval-rating/
I don't care if you pay attention to the conspiracy theorists or not. But please stop propagating conspiracy BS as if it were true.
To be fair, his approval was continually dropping when he decided to invade Iraq on claims of WMD, but that was well after 9/11 and going into Afghanistan.
No, most of this was ignored by mainstream US journalists, and the mainstream journalists who still insisted on talking about them were pushed out of the mainstream. Journalists like Judith Miller at the notoriously conservative NYT (a woman who was made to take the blame for everything for some reason) were the face of the mainstream.
The only distinction that makes journalism "mainstream," at least in the US, is a running mutual relationship with the administration and intelligence agencies. Not circulation, not profitability, not influence, not truthfulness of reporting, nor quality of reporting. "Mainstream" outlets float government narratives crediting anonymous sources or sources delivered to the outlet on a platter. They also consult with the government and intelligence agencies before publishing stories, and will avoid entire subjects or questions on request. They do this in exchange for accurate inside information and scoops, or external benefits for the owners of the outlets.
The vast majority of Democrats energetically supported the WMD lie, although it was false on its face based on the reports of the inspectors, and the fact that the documents used to justify it were obvious frauds ("The Dirty Dossier"). The rest was from "Curveball" who was an obvious fraud with an ulterior motive from the first encounter, and who no one ever bothered to corroborate, but who offered what the people who sell war material (and the politicians they fund) were buying.
Democrats ridiculed us, too. All but one of them voted for the war, and they still marginalize her for it.
This personal identification with Democrats among certain people seems to wash away all of their actual votes and rhetoric. Every problem becomes about how evil Republicans are, and no rational reason is ever offered for that evil, because all of the rational reasons (corruption, ambition) apply as easily to their Democratic counterparts. I found a name for those people during the Trump impeachment: "emoluments libs." They were the people who insisted that the Democrats weren't impeaching on emoluments because they weren't brave enough and weren't really trying, rather than because any investigation into Trump taking advantage of his office for cash would in the end implicate most of Congress to a greater extent than Trump, who was an outsider in a bad position to make the kind of money that old masters get up to.
The idea that Tony Blair is the face of conservatism is laughable. Obama taking over the wars was ideal for people who made money from them, because they had become too closely associated with US religious warriors who were trying to put clothes on naked statues. You needed an Obama to indemnify the worldwide black site torture program and the intentional destruction of the evidence of it, to continue PATRIOT and to indemnify the companies that surveilled their customers, and to continue to prosecute those wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curveball_(informant)
Iraq War's Authorization by Congress Is Still on the Books and Dangerously Open-Ended
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/09/28/iraq-war-aumf-authority...
Where are you getting this information from?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37875198 has the actual voting record. Senate Democrats were 57-43 in favor but 2:1 against in the House.
Are you confusing it with Afghanistan? A lot of people seem to do that these days, though I didn't look up the voting record for that conflict.
Republicans had a total of 7 votes against attacking Iraq - in both houses.
Here's the voting record for the authorization for use of force in Iraq:
House: For: 296 (R:215, D:81), Against: 133 (R:6, D:126, I:1) [0]
Senate: For: 77 (R: 48, D:29) , Against: 23 (R:1 , D:21, I1) [1]
Yes, there was more opposition from members of the Democratic Party, but there's quite a lot of support there from Dems.
[0] https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2002/roll455.xml
[1] https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1...
Iraq WMD's is also wrong and case of what happens when conspiracy theorists get a hold of the US government. Most countries and the US house did not accept the WMD conspiracy that immediately turned out to be untrue as most conspiracies do. Now the conspiracy theorists are that it was all done for oil, which is also a blatantly dumb characterization.
The OIG (Office of Inspector General) report into "THE CIA-CONTRA-CRACK COCAINE CONTROVERSY" (December, 1997)
https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/special/9...
didn't touch the bedrock involvement of the CIA-Contra support underpinning the magnitude increase and near literal flooding of cocaine powder into the USofA (because that connection had already been "extensively reviewed in previous inquiries by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Narcotics, Terrorism and International Operations; the State Department; the DEA; and the CIA.")
That, however, is enough on it's own to make the case that the CIA was (indirectly) responsible - had the volume not increased so substantially and had the price not dropped so dramatically there would never had been any driver to make a more addictive by product so readily available.
The rest of the OIG report is volumous but weak - there is no evidence because various targets "fell between the cracks", there was no task force because the agent who suggested one had a case of "her supervisors did not take her request seriously because she was a female agent." and not "because there was pressure to cover up".
These are not great reasons that the evidence is lacking because deeper investigations were not held, and they don't exclude unseen pressure to not look further.
Epstein is a particular howler because the QAnon set loudly proclaiming triumph about that was entirely focused on phantom satanic pedophile cults with the Democratic Party while Epstein was never even on their radar.
Yes, they just got lucky a bunch.
Probably you're unaware of this because your conception of a conspiracy theorist and what they believe or argue has been handed to you by mass media.
Realpolitik is like corporate America today. It optimizes return for the next couple quarters disregarding the long-term damage.
Or for a more modern one, examine the diverse accusations around 5G.
Some of it's just general paranoia and distrust, or outright mental illness.
It was just genuinely not a secret.
It was quite clear the US did it until in the 00s a top US official said "yeah, we did it, it was cheap".
JFK assassination is weird, because only 3 people needed to be involved, so it might be hard to find actual participants, but most conspiracy theories needs a lot more (anywhere from dozens to thousands), and those, i wouldn't trust no one serious talked. When Seymour Hersh managed to find proofs on CIA most secret operation (MKUltra, which is way worse imho than lying about getting on the moon or whatever), its hard to keep that objection.
The CIA tried to deleting all evidence of the mkultra project in 1973. They missed a few documents related to the funding that allowed the commission to actually find evidence for it. Had they succeeded you would never have had enough evidence to prove it. You would have had ex-cia members involved in drug experiments. Would the general public have trusted them? If a guy with drug problems claimed the government had experimented on him, who would have believed him?
How many projects did they successfully erase all proof of?
We’ve always known the NSA spies on Americans. We’ve always known ISPs were involved in dragnet surveillance. We’ve always known the CIA assassinated Kennedy
Israel doesn't care if their neighbors are islamic dictatorships, military dictatorships, or democracies, they work hard to keep them all as weak as possible.
It actually goes back much farther than that to WW1 and the dissolution of the Russian Empire and the fighting that happened amongst the middle eastern states, the new Bolshevik government, and the Triple Entente, and of course the Balfour Decleration.
> But there was a time that the CIA was responsible for an awful lot of heinous things, and the ousting of Mossadegh is just one.
There was a time? Because of course they promised 100% that they would totally not do something like that again ever ever, and so of course they aren't doing anything like that anymore.....
I’m pretty sure it goes back much, much, further than that.
[0] https://chat.openai.com/c/83abf663-6011-4ed0-9a8b-f183d2e029...
Edit: why the downvotes with no explanation? I thought the same thing as the parent, and did some research, to discover the real history, that the Israel-Palestine tensions actually only go back to the late 1800s. I did some independent verification, but would appreciate being corrected if this is wrong.
I'd wager people aren't likely to be as methodical in their analysis of comments' verity on this topic as they might be normally. I thought US politics was polarizing, israel palestine legit seems to drive people to even further extremes
Wikipedia sometimes has similar problems, but it has generally gotten pretty good over the years on many topics. I still wouldn't cite Wikipedia on something so politically charged as the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The ChatGPT conversation has zero value as a source in the abstract.
> It feels just somewhat like when I was told not to use wikipedia in my early school days.
Do you understand why you should not cite Wikipedia?
If your objective is to get only first hand accounts, sure. But like wikipedia it's good as a source to find where to look deeper. I disagree there's zero value there. I often use it to generate a few things I go look at more serious sources for. Surely that's some value when web search's well has been well (heh) poisoned by ads?
>Do you understand why you should not cite wikipedia
If you find the primary source through wikipedia, did wikipedia provide "zero value as a source"? I don't think so. Bad analogy I suppose - I meant like how wikipedia was seen as not trustworthy to use even if you just used it to find the primary sources. I guess I should've said "use as a source" wikipedia not "cite" it.
You aren't using Wikipedia as a source but as a partial and severely biased index of the reference material. You must still be very skeptical because you have no idea what led a page's editors to include or exclude a particular reference. Frankly, you'd be better off contacting the reference desk of your local library. That's what it's there for.
From the transcript:
> The animosity that characterizes the modern Israeli-Palestinian conflict has roots in the late 19th and 20th centuries and shouldn't be projected onto earlier epochs. The current conflict is influenced by nationalist movements, territorial disputes, and political developments of the last two centuries, rather than solely religious differences.
Imagine if the Cherokee fought the US government and somehow captured part of Tennessee. That would surely create hostilities between the Cherokee and displaced Tennesseans. But would you say those hostilities arose from what the Cherokee did, or the original conquest of the land by Americans?
Jews were banned from even entering Jerusalem (except for the day of Tisha B'Av) until the Arab armies marched in and took it from the Christians.
That same Wikipedia article says: "Josephus' death toll figures have been rejected as impossible by Seth Schwartz, who estimates that about a million people lived in all of Palestine at the time, about half of them Jews, and that sizable Jewish populations remained in the area after the war was over, even in the hard-hit region of Judea. Schwartz, however, believes that the captive number of 97,000 is more reliable"
The Judaean Jewish community was nowhere near wiped out by the 66–73 CE war, given the fact they were able to launch another sizeable rebellion against Roman rule (the Bar Kokhba revolt) in 132–136 CE.
And even after the Bar Kokhba revolt, significant Jewish communities survived in what is now Israel/Palestine – of particular note is Judah ha-Nasi, the redactor of the Mishnah, who was born during the Bar Kokhba war. The office of Nasi (leader of the Jewish community in Israel/Palestine) continued until the death of Gamaliel VI in c. 425. The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius II refused to permit the appointment of a successor, which was arguably the decisive step in transferring the seat of leadership of the Jewish community from Galilee to Babylonia.
While it is clear that many Jews were driven into exile, killed or enslaved, it is also likely that a significant number succumbed to the temptation/pressure to convert to Christianity (and later Islam). How many is difficult to say; I wonder how many Palestinian Arabs have Jewish ancestors, it is possibly a quite substantial number.
Someone saying with a straight face "no, I really checked and it goes no further than this" about the Holy Land seems unbelievably naive, no?
The Crusades were a rather belated attempt by Christians to reconquer the territories they had lost to Islam – over 400 years after that initial Islamic conquest. They succeeded in the short-term – the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem endured for almost 90 years, and they managed to hang on to the coastal city of Acre (now in Israel's Northern District) for almost another hundred – but were ultimately unsuccessful.
Whereas, the current Israel-Palestine conflict is primarily a Jewish-Muslim conflict, not a Christian-Muslim one. There is a small Christian minority on the Palestinian side, but Palestinian Christians have no particular links to the Crusades; nor do Israeli Jews or Zionism have any particular link to it. Some of the Crusades (especially the First) involved antisemitic pogroms-but there were plenty of other pogroms in European history which had nothing to do with the Crusades, and by the time Zionism came along, other more recent instances of antisemitism were much more of a motivating factor than any of those as historically distant as the Crusades by then were. So, the Crusades were really a rather different historical chapter without much to do with the current one.
However, given that the historical crusades in Israel/Palestine have rather dubious relevance to the contemporary conflict, other “crusades” fought thousands of kilometres away are of even more dubious relevance
Whether that conversation happens to be accurate or not and to what degree, I don’t know, because the link fails to load.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_exodus_from_the_Muslim_...
I read the Wikipedia article you cited, and I can’t find anything in it about conflict between Jews and Muslims in the early 1800s. The vast majority of the conflict of that nature it describes is 20th century; it mentions a few things happening in the second half of the 19th century, but I’m struggling to find anything in it about that in the early 19th century
Dhimmi also means "protected" but you may ask protected from what?
That's not a standard English term, I think you mean to say "Noahide". I am guessing you are getting your information from non-English sources.
In contemporary use, "Noahide" primarily refers to a religious movement which is a sort of "Judaism lite", of people who accept Orthodox Judaism's theological beliefs without formally converting to Judaism, and without following the vast majority of Orthodox Judaism's rules and rituals.
But, I think what you are actually referring to, is the concept in Jewish religious law (halacha) of "ger toshav", which is a non-Jew permitted to reside in the land of Israel. Formally speaking, contemporary Noahides by religion do not have the legal status of "ger toshav".
It is true that there are some clear parallels between "ger toshav" and "dhimmi" status. However, at the same time, there is a very fundamental difference – the Jewish laws of "ger toshav" have not been enforced in practice since the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE. The Rabbis engaged in a lot of development of those laws (as an abstract intellectual exercise, not a practical matter) since 70 CE, and so those laws as they currently exist in Orthodox Judaism have never been enforced in practice, and for all we know their pre-70 precursors were rather different. The State of Israel has never recognised the laws of "ger toshav", and the majority of Orthodox Rabbis believe they are impossible to apply in the current scenario (in which the Jewish Temple no longer exists, etc). Indeed, the majority of Orthodox Rabbis believe that the laws of "ger toshav" are not to be put into practice until the Messiah comes. There is a small minority of Jews who believe they can and should be applied today (such as the followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane), but that minority has never had the political power to put their beliefs into effect.
By contrast, dhimmi status has been a real thing in the Islamic world, not just a theoretical thing, for many centuries. There are a lot of disagreements between different schools of Islamic law (madhabs) on what the exact rules of dhimmi status are, and very often what Islamic scholars have insisted should be done in theory has had little to do with what actually happened in practice. Still, it doesn't really make sense to compare what has been, for the past 2000-odd years, a purely theoretical/hypothetical legal construct, with a legal construct which has actually been implemented in practice (to varying extents and in varying ways) in many societies for more than half of those 2000-odd years.
[0] there is somewhat of a debate on the topic in Orthodox Jewish sources, not that it makes much difference to the matter under discussion: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/513212/jewish...
Which, in itself, was a reaction to other developments. Zionists argued that Jews needed their own homeland in order to be safe from pogroms and potential extermination at the hands of European nationalists; the Zionist idea, obscure and fringe at first, only gained traction with the increase of anti-Semitic attitudes after the Great War.
To a big degree, current existence of Israel is a strange echo of the vicious nationalisms of pre-WWII Europe.
Compare with Europe which never was unified and where tribal distinctions were slowly replaced with national and religious ones.
The Ottoman Empire fell apart 100 years ago. After which the French and the British tried to colonize it and when that didn't work they just drew lines on a map and installed a tribal chief from a weaker tribe as king.
Which is to say this mess has a deep history that has it's roots in the Muslim conquests, the Mongol conquests, and the Ottoman Conquests. Followed by the dissolution of the Ottoman empire and ham handed foreign meddling since.
Indeed. They've finally found their moral compass and we should forgive them /s
> In it, CIA spokesman and podcast host Walter Trosin cites the claims of agency historians that the majority of the CIA’s clandestine activities in its history “bolstered” popularly elected governments.
This was really just one exception, normally they are the "good" actors /s
Does anyone believe that? After that they were involved in MKUltra, enhanced interrogation torture, toppling governments in South America and other places. Why bother pretending instead of staying quiet.
Still means the CIA interfered in democratic elections in sovereign nations.
After finishing it, my sense was that the best thing for America and the world would have been to put an end to the CIA.
In the case of "rogue operations", the CIA is responsible.
In the more usual case the Administration signs off on the go-ahead, and POTUS is ultimately responsible. Examples: Kennedy's Bay of Pigs, Bush 43 torture flights ...
But the part that irks me the most is your incorrect insinuation that they did what they did on their own. They acted on behalf of the american people and their elected leaders. Much like how the US military also did heinous things in times of war (as any military would).
The CIA is partly a paramilitary organization, sanctioned by the american people. Like any such agency they harm civilians and interfere in foreign governments' politics and economy.
Why does the US need to repair our reputation? Unless by repair you mean remind the world who to be afraid of. We do not live in a nice world where everyone gets along. The US government and military (and the CIA) have no obligation to the world, their obligations are entirely to protect the american people and economy.
Look at the unresr and strife in american society today. This is with a good economy! Look at the mass global migration to the US, civil rights changes,etc... they all happened because of post world war 2 prosperity, if you think all these rights and niceties can be kept under a crashed economy I'd have to respectfully disagree. In any other century in history, a country like the US would be inavding and decimating continents by now. When the CIA intervenes, it is because their leaders were hostile towards the US.
My challenge to you is if you are willing to face the chaos of a poor/powerless america and hope the alternative power-vaccum fillers would be nicer. China for example literally has police stations in western countries to crush dissent and I shouldn't need to say much abour Russia's election interference (and China!), if they were in the US's place, how would you think they would react to a hostile Iran in 1953? Even now, Russian mercenaries are toppling African governments left and right!
My point is not to morally justify anything but to plead for perspective here.
Oh, and we did this to a country that we had given nuclear power to.
Evaluating the CIA's move on the rubric you've set out does not produce a passing grade!!
The intent may have been good but regimes don't self-sustain without their original support easily. Unwillingness to finish what they started and taking half-measures to avoid pissing off the american public I think was their real fault. Even in recent years, Israel was more than willing to start a fight with Iran before they matures their nuclear program but it is the US fearing involvement that is holding them back. Maybe in a few years the world would have to deal with Iranian ICBMs. What happens when they try to nuke tel aviv? Does the US nuke Tehran? Is that better than what Israel would have done?
If Russian or China had organized that coup you would never hear the end of it. You would hear scalding criticism in every western newspaper and rightly so. Just because other countries do horrible things does not excuse the actions of the CIA.
The US has been trying to do something similar as NATO in the pacific but they are not doing well picking sides there. Look at most of western China for example, it was not China 80 years ago, it was all a result of invading and incorporating other countries like Tibet. I mean, western media will act high and mighty but this is just the reality of the world. This was the context under which the Korean and Vietnamese wars were fought by the US. Empires keep expanding until they collapse, this is still true today.
I just like to remember what empire I live in and that partly thanks to war averse folks like you, we do try to avoid and minimize war and invasions but also spend a crapton of money into a military that serves as a deterrence of wider scale global conflicts, wars and instabilities. The CIAs actions don't need to be excused because the CIA does not act on its own. It acted on your behalf if you are an american (my behalf too). And I for one support electing level headed leaders who would look at classified information I don't know and then decide what the CIA would do on my behalf.
The company responded by intensively lobbying the U.S. government to intervene and mounting a misinformation campaign to portray the Guatemalan government as communist.
In 1954, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency deposed the democratically elected government of Guatemala, and installed a pro-business military dictatorship.
Exactly how many democracies has the US toppled through fear that the "socialist leaning" elected people's government might not buy American or fully align with the US hegemony?
How has that played out for the US in the long term (this thread, for example, being about Iran).
The US public is very much pro-business. In every election cycle you almost never see the economy and jobs being less than #1 and #2 topics. Even the very fact that you are criticizing the govenrment, I suspect is a result of a good economy, perhaps you would be wondering why we are not invading someone if things were much more dire? Most people would and have too.
> How has that played out for the US in the long term (this thread, for example, being about Iran).
A better question is how might it have turned out otherwise. I don't see any war with Iran for example.
> Exactly how many democracies has the US toppled through fear that the "socialist leaning" elected people's government might not buy American or fully align with the US hegemony?
As empires go, are you saying the US is doing worse here? Colonisation would have been the first choice by any other historical empire. America can pretty much manifest destiny our way into the rest of the world you know.
I mean, it's actually thanks to more level headed folks like you that doesn't happen. If it were up to me, they would get a tomahawk for so much as spelling America wrong. But don't worry, you will get your way, China and much of the world has forgotten what world wars were like and the CIA thanks to the changing views of the US public has gone soft. It will be you or your children that will pay the price. The CIA is a paramilitary org that "nips it in the bud" as they say, except even that offends your sensibilities so let's go back to full on century long back and forth warring with nukes, drones, slaughterbots and ML now!
I won't try to reason with you using notions of "morality", or "doing the right thing", cause you are clearly not looking at the world like that. So how about repairing the US reputation, cause you don't like terrorists flying airplanes into buildings? The violence of terrorists attacks is not justified, but it is entirely expected for when a country acts like this. Imperialism will always face opposition and struggle, and anybody that supports it is helping to generate violence, both to oppressed people, and to the opressors themselves (or their inocent civilizians) when oppressed people fight back.
> So how about repairing the US reputation, cause you don't like terrorists flying airplanes into buildings? The violence of terrorists attacks is not justified, but it is entirely expected for when a country acts like this.
Again with the "justified". You don't see much terrorism after afghanistan's invasion right? My sticking point there is that the US shouldn't have helped them rebuild. This is a conflict between horrifically violent parties who have no chance of sorting things out diplomatically. The US will never stop supporting israel and abandon an ally, Israel is there to stay, they're not abandoning their historical homeland which is no longer historical because Israel has been a country for almost 80 years now. Violence is all that's left. And wouldn't you prefer violence that involved minimal civilian casualties?
If that means the CIA playing "dirty" decimating one country and leaving them in shambles as a lesson to the rest, is it not worth it? In a world where other countries think the US is nice and docile more civilians die. In a world where countries are terrified at the thought of the US military or IC thinking about them, much less civilians die and suffer.
The violent understand only violence as a language of negotiation.
> Imperialism will always face opposition and struggle
Oh please with that b.s., did the US colonize any arabic country? What was colonized for al-qaeda who were besties with the CIA to do 9/11? You think becoming a coward and abandoning your allies who are surrounded by genocidan enemies will satiate the murderous terrorists.
Do you even undersrand that according to their extremist views, they have no desire to co-exist with you in this world? If they had the power, they would invade the whole world and decapitate all unbelievers. Why do you think ISIS was invading Iraq and Syria? America already pulled out! Their propaganda was to take over the levant and the world.
You think these terrorists are misunderstood freedom fighters! That's not the case.
Their intifada against the US is not because they are oppressed but because people who have the same faith as them are oppressed in palestine. Neither palestinians nor most of Israel's neighbors have an interest in a two state solution. Victory in these terrorists minds is not liberation of palestine but the genocide of jews and christians in the middle east.
They have no interest in accepting their former land has been give away to the jews, not because the jews kicked them out but because their ancestors kept getting invaded by the ottomans then the british. It was not palestinian land that was given away, it was british land. It was as much palestine land then as it is today. Like it or not, this is not imerialism but a country being created as a result if an occupation, much like how america was created after native american land was invaded. Just about every country in the world is a result of one group invading a land that does not belong to them, countries are built on blood and ill-gotten gains. I suggest you cede native american land (if you are american, canadian, australian) before you ask israel to give up their only home.
The palestinian people are oppressed because generations of hatred and raising their kids to dream of murdering their neighboring jews has put them in a corner where they either get oppressed or there is another jewish holocaust.
If they were willing to accept history and move on to negotiate their own free and peaceful country that accepts the right of Israel to exist and if the muslim world as a whole decided to stop dreaming of genocide the palestine would be free.
Put it a bit differently: I would prefer another 9/11 and invading another middle eastern country than not support Israel's right to existence. I don't support their incursions into the westbank or treatment of palestinians in general though. If any of Israel's neighbors could, they would have killed them off. Even Iran taunts israel with a nuclear holocaust all the time.
So I suggest you pick a side, terrorists who kill babies for fun or not so nice Israelis who are willing to negotiate coexistence with their neighbors.
I suggest you think long and hard about the outcomes to civilians and how much pain and suffering results in the side you pick.
I'd love to see a realistic treatment on where the line of 'possible' lies for an intelligence org. They're already one of the most open intelligence orgs in history.
If they were in fact, _just_ intelligence, there might be a point here. As it is, they're a rogue agency that needs to be completely disbanded. Never in my life have I felt that I owe any part of my safety as an American to these thugs.
> Maybe, just maybe, they can issue a long string of mea culpas and the US can begin to repair its absolutely horrific reputation in the Middle East, Latin America, and elsewhere. But it took seven decades to come clean about this one, and it's going to take many more decades to undo the damage it did.
My goodness, the actual things that the US has done abroad has damaged its reputation in the most affected places around the world.
EDIT: I can't help myself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37767826
I think it would be a very bad intelligence service if this was true.
If someone wasn't communist, they got our support. It didn't matter if they were bloodthirsty monsters or if they were even more anti-American than the communists.
If someone seemed to even be tilting red, they get undermined and sometimes even overthrown either directly or through us backing one of the previously mentioned anti-communist forces.
There really was no other principle at work beyond "communism bad, USSR bad," and we made a lot of devils' bargains in that era on the theory that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. It's a great example of monomania and paranoia guiding bad policy.
The only thing I can say in defense of people from that era is that everyone thought WWIII was around the corner and we were going to all get nuked anyway. It was a really paranoid time.
The Cold War really dominated all foreign policy thinking in that era. Everyone else was seen as a chess piece up for grabs by either the US or the USSR.
I'm really not defending it. I think a lot of terrible decisions were made during that time. But it is useful to understand why.
It's funny you say that...[0]
[0] https://www.globalresearch.ca/cia-memo-1967-cia-coined-weapo...
I guess people in 1953 said the same.
Know knows what will be admitted/acknowledged in 70 years?
Past things, yes. But never the current thing.
But to critique US involvement in Ukraine which is extinguishing a whole country with their forced mobilization just for the sake of drip buying US arms? That's heresy and punishable with de-platforming.
The fierce resistance the Ukrainians are providing would appear to indicate they very much do care about who is ruling over them.
>Crimea, lugansk, Donetsk, mariupol is all business as usual
In all these places the ukrainians are back to work. There are live webcams on the internet if you want to watch these places.
>The fierce resistance the Ukrainians are providing
Mostly by the extreme far right azov regiment. Which were banned from receiving any funds from US till Obama administration. Trump overturned it.
Yes for most, then occasionally things explode with the occupiers on board, I suspect being a mayor or high up position of an occupation government in occupied Ukraine is one of the deadliest jobs in the world at the moment.
> Mostly by the extreme far right azov regiment. Which were banned from receiving any funds from US till Obama administration. Trump overturned it.
The entire country and army is providing fierce resistance. But if you want to talk about far fight extremists why dont we talk about Wagner who was led, by a man with literal swastikas and other nazi imagery tattooed on him until he exploded in mid air.
Is a picture of Dmitry Uktin, who founded Wagner with his Nazi tattoo's.
There was lots of talk about him not being part of Wagner anymore then surprise surprise he dies in the aircraft carrying Yevgeny Prigozhin and other Wagner high ups and is later seen in videos with Yevgeny Prigozhin in Africa this year.
Yeah, they pretty much had a choice, no? I mean, they were allowed to leave the country, right? right? oh but atleast they could voice their frustration by joining opposition parties? right? Oh well but atleast the good comedian has made Ukraine far more tolerant of LGBTQ, right? oh...
They are in a war, its not at all surprising they have closed the border to people leaving there country is literally having a crisis over its very existence.
> oh but atleast they could voice their frustration by joining opposition parties? right? Oh well
They banned the pro Russian parties, which is totally reasonable given the current invasion by Russia, you can join any of the other political parties that aren't pro trying to actively wipe Ukraine off the map.
> Oh well but atleast the good comedian has made Ukraine far more tolerant of LGBTQ, right? oh...
What does this have to do with anything?.
We are sleep walking into a global disaster by interfering in everyone else war.
Blame russia for all the problems in the country. Makes it easier to blame someone else
At the same time, nobody was surprised that Russia and NATO disagreed over whose sphere of influence Ukraine resided in. The “Ukraine Problem” and how it would culminate was making it into popular foreign policy writing 50 years ago, and was part of diplomatic and intelligence strategies long before that.
Putin is getting old and sick and made a play for his legacy, hoping NATO would be too war-anxious to act. That didn’t work out.
Critics should have their voice heard because there always new questions about how to proceed, or whether past choices were well made, but that conflict was prefigured for decades and is not an “everyone else’s war”.
This is not an ideological war (Technically no war is!) or "sphere of influence"
Dictators will gladly do the dirty work of repressing the population while giving American companies their cut. And if these dictators forget their place, the US government will send a little freedom their way.
It's not a foolproof strategy, but it works well enough.
And please spare us with the excuse that they just hire subject matter experts. You would not accept such logic for Russia or China. Though the NYTimes are far from perfect or impartial, they are at least good at appearing neutral (one has to gather statistics on how they cherry-pick stories to see their well-hidden but strong bias). Their journalist ethics guidelines warn against the appearance of bias, and their reporters aren't allowed to give political donations: https://www.nytimes.com/editorial-standards/ethical-journali...
> In All the Shah's Men, Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times sugests that the explanation may lie next door in Iran, where the CIA carried out its first successful regime-change operation over half a century ago. The target was not an oppressive Soviet puppet but a democratically elected government whose populist ideology and nationalist fervor threatened Western economic and geopolitical interests. The CIA's covert intervention—codenamed TPAJAX—preserved the Shah's power and protected Western control of a hugely lucrative oil infrastructure. It also transformed a turbulent constitutional monarchy into an absolutist kingship and induced a succession of unintended consequences at least as far ahead as the Islamic revolution of 1979—and, Kinzer argues in his breezily written, well-researched popular history, perhaps to today.
Nearly 20 years ago already, this was an admission of a coup against a democratically elected government, instituting an "absolutist kingship", with "unintended consequences".
All of this used to be available in HTML before the recent CIA website redesign.
People would do well to read old books, and even watch old television news programs and documentary programs like those from CBS, all the way back to the 60s, before thinking that this wasn't in some sense, common knowledge, at least among those who attempt to be knowledgeable. One great success of the CIA has been that this and a litany of similar events have been hiding in plain sight, and that it is "conspiratorial thinking" just to remember this stuff.
"That complicates the public’s understanding of an event that still resonates, as tensions remain high between Tehran and Washington over the Islamic Republic’s rapidly advancing nuclear program, its aiding of militia groups across the Mideast and as it cracks down on dissent."
The timing of this mea culpa from the CIA is very interesting.
Is the CIA essentially saying "oops, sorry"? And if so, why, and why now, at this moment?
But these new eyes will do similar things that seem like the right thing to do at the time, to them. It's just a cycle.
Just like everything, it seemed like a good idea to some people, and a bad idea to others.
The notion that "it seemed like the right idea at the time" ignores all of the people in government who thought it was a terrible idea.
Oftentimes it's very much historical accident who happens to be making the final decision and who they happen to be listening to.
Guatemala, 1954
Indonesia, 1957-8, 1965
Congo, 1960
Laos, 1960
Dominican Republic, 1961
South Vietnam, 1963
Brazil, 1964
Nicaragua, 1980
Haiti, 1991, 2004
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/08/20/mapped-the-7-government...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
> You can get Lockheed Martin-branded apparel in the states, but it won’t have the same stylish cut or design. American manufacturers of promotional products, like Brand Junkie, in Cypress, Texas, also work with Lockheed Martin to “create unique products and sustain fulfillment programs and e-stores,” according to the Brand Junkie website.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/style/lockheed-martin-fas...
i assume made exclusively of titanium and composites?
They also don't look half bad.
[1]:https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/09/10/fashion/07LOCKHEE...
[2]:https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/style/lockheed-martin-fas...
Love this quote from the NY Times article: “They stopped killing people for just a second to help you kill those looks”
(https://nuclear.gepower.com/company-info/about-ge-hitachi)
(https://web.archive.org/web/20140827183517/http://www.engadg...)
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/iraq-conflict-the-historica...
It's probably fair to say that the actions of the Americans and the Brits had catastrophic consequences that are visible even today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9ta...
Internally I refer to the former as "systemic" people. They believe something is good for you because the FDA said so. I find that these people also buy into capitalism. E.g, poor people shouldn't be so stupid/lazy, or their parents shouldn't have been stupid/lazy. I find these people often are privileged and benefit from power imbalances imposed by the system.
But it's hard to relate to that once you can see reality more accurately.
Classic "conspiracy theory": The term "conspiracy theory" was concocted by the CIA as a label for anyone talking about the JFK assassination. And it was never put to bed. I see the term increasing in usage over time as well.
But yeah, systemic people gonna system. Weirdly it seems they outnumber people who form their own opinions.
Arse-hats.
In most cases you get The Taliban, whatever the post-Mubarak government was, or ineffective governments that can't even wipe their own assholes (Latin America, Africa, Haiti).
In contrast, the French Revolution was led by intellectuals and demagogues against cruel and unjust power held by the aristocracy and the rich; the poor masses joined willingly.
This is why when the French are unhappy, they protest and riot because they feel empowered. Meanwhile, Americans wait for someone to lead them.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.