...regime change -- whether it was in the early '50s in Iran, whether it was toppling Salvador Allende in Chile, whether it is overthrowing the government of Guatemala way back when -- these invasions, these toppling of governments, regime changes have unintended consequences.
- transcript of the Iowa Democratic Debate.
This is masterful phrasing — calling out the CIA and their long, long history of overthrowing governments without mentioning the organization by name. Bernie has to pass his words through a filter to avoid getting "Dean screamed" by the corporate media. I do not.
1. One of many possible history rhymes
History is important. Most voters are so busy surviving in today's cutthroat neoliberal economy that they don't have time to remember what happened five months ago, much less five decades ago.That is in spite of the fact that five decades ago was well into the age of television; and there are many online historical resources on that violent and significant period in our history.
Citizens legitimately ask how the US wound up funding the Syrian resistance and bombing sovereign Syrian territory without permission, and how Obama was constantly faced with the choice to approve (Libya) or reject (Syria) various overt and covert interventions throughout the Middle East and Eastern Europe. To me, it is all deja vu.
There was virtually a coup atmosphere in Pentagon circles…The
atmosphere was poisonous, poisonous" - Daniel Ellsberg
The displays of disrespect for President Kennedy's authority grew more glaring in the clubs and suites of Washington's permanent government. By the spring of 1963, JFK was painfully aware of the profound miscalculation he had made by appointing Eisenhower-Dulles holdovers and "designating conservatives to do liberal things"…
General Marshall once told me that, when you change a policy, you must
change the men too. The CIA has the same men - on the desk and in the
field - who were responsible for the disasters of the past, and naturally
they do things to prove they were right.
- Averill Harriman's advice to JFK
- David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard - Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
The most charitable interpretation of the history of Obama's foreign policy is that he is as much in thrall to the permanent government as Jimmy Carter was in thrall to Zbigniew Brzezinki (also a policy advisor to Obama), as much as Harry Truman was to Secretary of Defense James Byrnes.
What else explains the continuation of Bush insider, Robert Gates, as Secretary of Defense and the appointment of a shadow neocon, Hillary Clinton, as Secretary of State — the two most important foreign policy positions in the government? Given an undeserved Nobel Prize before he even took office, Obama has always been looked at askance by the increasingly unhinged Defense/Intelligence deep state. Like JFK, he has looked for ways to avoid escalation; although he has acquiesced in the ongoing takeover of Eastern Europe and the “stans” by CIA-sponsored Color Revolutions and in the Hillary-supported 2009 coup in Honduras.
As with JFK, if you aren't an involved insider, you can't really grasp the significance of various aspects of the political infighting between the White House and the MIC. To me, it seems like its Obama and Kerry vs Clinton and the neocon warmongers. But, I don't really know. That's the problem with Secret Government; it's not democracy, and I don't get honest reporting about my government.
2. History that is too new to rhyme
There have been many books that describe how the MIC has long since escaped the control of democracy. (See the list at the end.) One of the more important, and relevant, breakouts happened in 1976, when the CIA was privatized via Saudi money.
The Safari Club was an alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 to fight the Cold War in Africa. Its formal members were Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and France. The group maintained informal connections with the United States.
Peter Dale Scott has classified the Safari Club as part of the "second CIA"—an extension of the organization's reach maintained by an autonomous group of key agents. Thus even as Carter's new CIA director Stansfield Turner attempted to limit the scope of the agency's operations, Shackley, his deputy Thomas Clines, and agent Edwin P. Wilson secretly maintained their connections with the Safari Club and the BCCI.
The Club used an informal division of labor in conducting its global operations. Saudi Arabia provided money, France provided high-end technology, and Egypt and Morocco supplied weapons and troops. The group typically coordinated with American and Israeli intelligence agencies.
The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence
operations. With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the
CIA, Adham transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of
Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-
laundering machine, buying banks around the world in order to create
the biggest clandestine money network in history.
- Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror (2005)
- Wikipedia, The Safari Club
US overseas intelligence has always been the property of the financial elites, starting before the creation of the CIA. Since 1976, the Saudi's and their oil money have bought a very large seat at the US intelligence table. Hardly unexpectedly, George H.W. Bush was right in there facilitating this treasonous deal. Bush, like all of the deep state, live at the intersection of banking, oil, and spying. The OSS and the early CIA found their recruits in the offices of Wall St. bankers with strong international connections to resource extraction (i.e., colonialism).
As for the CIA itself, it was founded when Allen Dulles hoodwinked the naive Harry Truman into accepting its blank-check founding charter. In the 1950s, it kept banana republics (i.e., brutal dictatorships) "safe" for the corporate clients of Dulles's international law firm. In the 1960s, among many other things, it assasinated Lumumba, tried to assasinate Castro, and greenlighted the bloodbath in Indonesia. In the 1970s, under the pressure of Congressional investigations and President Carter's appointed clean-up man, Stansfield Turner, it was taken private by the Saudi-led Safari Club. That led to the 1980s Iran-Contra mess. Throughout its entire existence, no American political group has really landed a body punch on the CIA. Today, it runs our government's foreign policy, which is nothing more than a policy of covert subversion, financial colonialism, and outright murder of any opposition.
For the last 15 years, the US has ruled the world through force of arms. Well, guess what; other people have weapons too, and they’re ready to use them...Other nations are refusing to accept a model of global world disorder where one country unilaterally arms, trains and deploys homicidal jihadi psychopaths to achieve its own narrow geopolitical goals. That’s a model that is seriously broken and needs to be replaced ASAP.
Mike Whitney, Putin beats Uncle Sam at his own game
3. Syria: The Safari Club rides again
The idea that the US deep state cares about reducing terrorist violence is laughable. For over thirty years, through various cutouts, like the Saudis, it has funded Wahabi/Salafi jihadi terrorism as a geopolitical weapon in its drive for global dominance.
Now that the Russians have exposed our bullshit "campaign" against ISIS, we may have to destroy what our Saudi bedfellows created (i.e. ISIS) the same way we destroyed Donald Rumsfeld's handshake partner, Saddam Hussein, after he had outlived his usefulness. And, done properly, the public will never even stir from its slumber. All in a day's work for the CIA.
The US deep state has no problem whatsoever with Saudi fundamentalism. Fundamentalists don't think. Fundamentalists obey orders. Fundamentalists fight very, very hard because they are driven by other-worldly motivations. Fundamentalists have no problem being suicide bombers. The CIA funded Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and embraced local fundamentalist nutcases, like Hekmatyar. The CIA knows exactly what the Saudi's and other oil states have been doing in Syria, and they have tried very hard to find a way to get involved. (And so has Hillary.) Too bad that even the Pentagon had to admit there is no such thing as a "moderate rebel" in Syria.
Given the issues swirling around Hillary Clinton's "progressivism", it is instructive to see how Libya fits into the jigsaw puzzle. Remember that Hillary and her appointee Samantha Power (Cass Sunstein’s wife) lobbied heavily to bomb Libya. Today, the formerly prosperous Libya is a failed state, a ruined land fought over by gangs of religious terrorists. But, "nobody could have predicted" this outcome, right Hillary?
After we bombed Libya back to the stone age, the CIA instantly started sending Gadafi's looted weapons to the "rebels" in Syria. As we all know, the "rebels" were either fundamentalists to begin with or they soon defected to the fundamentalists. This whole black op has been masterfully buried by the tangential and lying attack on HRC's emails. The "compound" at which the Americans were killed was a CIA warehouse for transshipping the weapons. We can all agree there is no fire regarding Hillary's emails; but the smoke that has been put out about the emails obscures the real fire - our continued illegal arming of Sunni fundamentalists out to overthrow yet another Shia regime.
Gadafi's weapons were also dispersed throughout neighboring Africa countries, leading to ISIS affiliates like Boko Haram in Nigeria. Conveniently, US soldiers and intelligence apparatus are now on the ground to "assist" against the very terrorists we have created and armed.
The whole terrorism thing has become Crassus's fire brigade (setting fires and then extorting payment for putting them out) on the scale of nation states. And if you think HRC is unaware of this history, you are higher than a kite.
4. Quo vadis
The Paris attacks are yet another round of {"terrorist provocation", ineffectual bombing, MIC profits, creation of more terrorists}. Many people see this, but the deep state is strongly in charge in the US, and a major player in the EU. The rush to bomb some more people, which can only create more attacks inside Europe, is exactly the wrong response. The rush to spend more money on the military, as the GOP and Third Way Democrats starve the rest of our government to death with austerity, is insane. We already spend more on defense than the rest of the world combined. We have more people in jail than any other country in the world. Despite all this, things keep getting worse.
I do not expect Hillary to speak openly about all this "secret" military/intelligence stuff, despite the fact that everyone with access to the internet can find out what is really going on. Nevertheless, I applaud Bernie for putting the issue on the table, however gingerly.
As far as I am concerned, America in 2016 cannot afford to make JFK's mistake of "designating conservatives to do liberal things". In order to change the policy, we have to change the people as well. We need a real liberal, and that real liberal had better be capable of avoiding "being JFKd". Whether he realizes it or not, Bernie’s call to break up the banks is an assault on the bosses of the CIA. Those bosses have demonstrated in the past that they will overthrow governments to stop such threats.
But that is the state of play in America today. I would rather go down fighting than drink a mickey finn and wake up in a dungeon for the rest of my life.
Readings
David Talbot, The Devil's Chessboard
Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes
Russ Baker, Family of Secrets
Stephen Kinzer, The Brothers
Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (also a Showtime TV series)
Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror
Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK
James Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable
Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann, Legacy of Secrecy