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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

Foreign abuses eventually rebound on the imperial core. The establishment of more and more internment camps and the snatch squads to fill them is extremely alarming, even if it doesn't have a "CIA" label on it but "ICE" instead.

America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?

Ironically I think the extremely indiscriminate nature of Trumpism might be its downfall when the security agencies finally turn on him. I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front, and if they're offended that it was burned down without consulting them.

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> I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front,

This needs to be shouted from the rooftops to the crazed Trumpers who think that USAID is a waste of money.

It's a jobs program for midwestern farmers to grow unprofitable legacy crops and then it morphs into an intelligence operation by giving those crops to the poorest of the poor as food donations in some resource rich but economically poor and geopolitically strategic areas, all while creating tremendous goodwill and ground-level intel.

And somehow, this combo deal that puts money in poor farmers' pockets AND creates tremendous political goodwill AND serves as a fountain of continuous strategic information in vital localities is seen as a bad thing by Trump fans.

I don't get it. It's probably one of the most economically beneficial operations the CIA has ever taken part of outside of trafficking cocaine.

The counterargument is pretty simple - it was directly funding propaganda. One of the truly fascinating aspects of the USAID budget cuts was a lot of journalists suddenly looking for new funding including an astonishing 9/10 Ukrainian outlets who were drawing funding from foreign sources like USAID [0].

As a matter of principle it just isn't possible to run a democracy where the government, in its official capacity, is working to shape the narrative. I can't deny that is what has been happening for decades, but the result is a toxic soup of lies and would explain a lot about why the journalist community seems to have been slowly unmooring from reality - they're attached to the money printing pipe. People shouldn't be paying for political propaganda with their taxes; particularly not in the US where it is probably leaking into domestic politics. Those NGO networks USAID was pushing money towards appear to be hostile in the main to the Trump voter base and their political objectives.

[0] https://rsf.org/en/usa-trump-s-foreign-aid-freeze-throws-jou... - I note they put in an erratum, although given that the US is almost certainly trying to obscure where its propaganda funding there are still a lot of questions. Their source in imi.org.ua was quoting some eyebrow-raising numbers.

Quite. Only billionaires should own propaganda organizations. The toxic soup of lies should be fully private.

>As a matter of principle it just isn't possible to run a democracy where the government, in its official capacity, is working to shape the narrative.

You're not that naive...come on.

Of course it's possible to run a democracy when the government is working to shape the narrative. Every government regardless of their type tries to control narratives. That's sort of their whole thing....

100%, CIA has long controlled that narrative in this country though its subsidiaries. Just a few BIG examples:

1. USAID – Frequently used by the CIA for covert operations and as cover for agents abroad. (Washington Post [1])

2. Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) – CIA-founded and funded anti-communist intellectual network during the Cold War. [2]

3. Air America – CIA-owned airline used heavily during the Vietnam War and Laos operations. PBS [3]

4. Blockstream - CIA backed "non-profitable" company that controls the Bitcoin GitHub repository and guides development founded by useful idiots like Gregory Maxwell, "Blue Hair Matt," and a handful of other internet trolls with no real software credentials.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/usaid...

2. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1263191.The_Cultural_Col...

3. https://www.miamiherald.com/

No reference for #4?

no references to most of it

Citation #1 is 404 - unable to find this article anywhere when googling.

Citation #2 is a link a good reads page for "The Lincoln Lawyer" - confused on how this is relevant to "air america"

Citation #3 is not a specific link to any particular article, just the miamiherald's home page.

And someone previously mentioned there is no citation for claim 4

Kind of feels like astroturfing or a bot of some sort. Mind clarifying any of this?

That would explain a lot about how aggressively it was nuked. Trump's operators hate the CIA with a memetic passion, to the point it's like a joke.

I would be shocked if the CIA hadn't registered what was happening, isolated its would-be minder, and gone totally dark. If they hadn't been running an American imperialist plot to conquer their Cold War enemy, by now they've got no choice but to do that. And we won't be hearing about it unless they had a complete collapse of opsec.

They don't have operational control of the ICE camps, though maybe they'd rather take them over than take them down.

>Ironically I think the extremely indiscriminate nature of Trumpism might be its downfall when the security agencies finally turn on him. I wonder to what extent USAID really was a CIA front, and if they're offended that it was burned down without consulting them.

If it was a swamp/intel front I don't think it could've gotten burned down. I think the CIA laughed the whole time "this is what those idiots get for not doing their stuff under our umbrella and letting us take our cut".

Just because Trump represents a slightly different faction of capital doesn’t mean he seriously threatens the one the CIA is the paramilitary arm of, though.

Huh? Most of the point of killing USAID was because it was a CIA front.

And yes, they've been operating domestically as well with the same color revolution tactics. Particularly to try to keep Trump out of office.

Trying to project this onto ICE is cute.

>>America built a machine for overthrowing democratic governments in South America because they didn't align with corporate interests, and somehow pretends that this can be contained to only operate south of the Rio Grande?

It's been used in Ukraine and other Eastern Europe countries as well.

This is a slur against the genuine demands for freedom from those countries, and not one you'd say if you listen to people from there.

(while I'm happy to condemn the CIA, the existence of one bad actor does not disprove the existence of other bad actors out there)

So countries in Latin America didn't want to be "free" as well?

I don't think people wanted Pinochet and his torture and murder spree, no. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14584095

You are correct, originally people of Chile voted for Salvador Allende, A leftist politician.

But that has been deemed unfit by the CIA and somehow Pinochet coup d'etat succeeded.

Backing from the US helped a lot there.

man youve got to be borderline retarded to believe that shit. what about Jacobo Árbenz? And Americans have the fuckin cheek to cry over Russian election interference - richest country in the world crying about how "unfair" everything is

Well that's one country in South America. What about the rest?

heard of Venezula? [https://time.com/5512005/venezuela-us-intervention-history-l...]

US support for the ‘64 Military coup in Brazil? [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1964_Brazilian_coup_d%27%C3%...]

and Bolivia.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...]

Not to mention all the drug war meddling in Columbia, etc.

Or the really crazy Operation Condor [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor]. Which included Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Peru.

You’d have to be willfully ignorant to not know this history.

Screwing with South America has to be one of the CIA’s favorite hobbies.

You misunderstand me. I'm not saying the USA doesn't screw with Latin America. I'm saying it's also screwing with Eastern Europe via it's Colour Revolutions etc, but people seem more willing to accept that or look the other way.

I'm here and I don't see it. It sounds like a kind of American provincialism to think that everything revolves around them.

> I'm here and I don't see it.

You mean in Ukraine, right? It's quite normal to not see something that's been carefully designed to be invisible.

> It sounds like a kind of American provincialism to think that everything revolves around them.

Those words are a sure sign of serious brainwashing, similar to the Russian side. In the meantime the dead keep piling up... Quo bono?

> You mean in Ukraine, right?

No.

> Those words are a sure sign of serious brainwashing,

Hardly. Pinning all recent human history on the CIA seems like a "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail" kind of thing. The world is far more complex than stale Usenet copypastas suggest, and the CIA is entirely outclassed by a number intelligence organizations in Eastern Europe purely it lacks an understanding of local history and culture. For the longest time, Eastern Europe has been academically taught through a Russian-centric lens. It's like learning the history of Africa through the perspective of colonial empires rather than the natives; gives barely any understanding what's going on between the different peoples of Africa. This has led to major intelligence failures, such as the failure to accurately predict the collapse of the USSR, which took CIA analysts by surprise. This, in turn, left everyone in Eastern Europe stunned: how could they be so completely oblivious to the facts on the ground?! That gave a lifelong immunity to the whole category of "almighty CIA" conspiracy theories.

I'm not concerned with bla-bla natives outside of them being sicced on each other like Pavlovian dogs. The history in general doesn't mater, life matters the most and that necessarily brings death into utmost scrutiny.

I clearly sense that you cannot relate to issues of life and death, which puts your non-botness into serious question. Besides, I've never argued about who is doing the siccing, you're simply following your old context which happens to be wrong.

What kind of BS rant is this?

No one in South America missed what was going on when it was happening.

>This is a slur against the genuine demands for freedom from those countries, and not one you'd say if you listen to people from there.

People from there do say those things just as well. Unless one only hears the expats that say what he wants to hear and/or have adopted their host countries politics, or only taks to people who share his own lifestyle, which are usually hardly representative, there's even a name for this phenomenon in journalism, because it's often how things are told in western media.

The "genuine demands for freedom for those countries" range from actual ones, to orange "revolutions", to astroturfed bullshit, to grooming the political establishment and civic society with tons of imperial money.

There are plenty of well documented and unambiguous cases where the CIA has overthrown governments, directly interfered in elections and exerted covert influence but Ukraine really doesn't look like one of them. Possibly in the covert influence sense, sure, but nowhere near at the level of determining the outcome.

The constitutional crisis in Ukraine in 2014 was between President Yanukovych and the Ukrainian Parliament, which is actually the sovereign institution. In a constitutional sense it wasn't even really a revolution because the sovereign institution was never overthrown. It pressured Yanukovych into resigning, backed by massive public support.

There are no sovereign institutions in client states except in name. And anybody who tries otherwise (like spurning the IMF), gets economic, diplomatic, and even personal blackmail. Propping a dissident far right ultra-nationalist minority to build up as "mass revolt" is then easy, classic Banana Republic style.

A 'far right' government that has a jewish president, and which large numbers of LGBT+ citizens have flocked to support militarily.

https://www.lgbtmilitary.org.ua/en/

>A 'far right' government that has a jewish president

Why, are we in 1930s Germany when those things were incompatible? It's 2025, get on with the times:

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/orban-netanyahu-israel-war-crime...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/le-pen-as-frenc...

Supporting Jews and Israel especially is a great way for modern far-right to get allies on its anti-immigrant and anti-muslim campaigns. The same is increasingly true for LGBT+ rights (take Geert Wilders as an example).

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