by Husayn Al-Kurdi
When my mother was growing up in Egypt, mothers would quiet their children at night with the specter of the then-occupying forces. "The British are coming" was the refrain. Nowadays, the word is out around the world that it is the Americans who are coming. The savage assault on Iraq in 1991 ushered in the New World Order and gave a frightening message to anybody daring to disobey the orders of what William Blum calls the "Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex." Blum has authored a compendium of U.S.-sponsored atrocities and outrages committed in the past years, providing an engaging portrayal of CIA operations throughout the world. What emerges is a truly frightening picture of an organization capable of assuming any form at any given moment, chameleon in its pervasiveness and its ability to crush, co-opt and subvert its way to success. Liberals, conservatives, progressives, populists, secularists, religious fundamentals, Left and Right-all and more have been manipulated and deployed as CIA "assets" in a variety of schemes. One of the Brazilian officers engaged in doing the M-I-I-C's bidding, Gen. Breno Borges Forte, indulged in simple projection when he characterized his victims in a manner which could be readily applied as a descriptive for the operations of his own sponsors and colleagues:
The enemy is undefined-it adapts to any environment and uses every means, both licit and illicit, to achieve its aims. It disguises itself as a priest, a student or a campesino, as a defender of democracy or an advanced intellectual, as a pious soul or as an extremist protester; it goes into the fields and the schools, the factories and the churches, the universities and the magistracy if necessary, it will wear a uniform or civil garb; in sum, it will take on any role that it considers appropriate to deceive, to lie, and to take in the good faith of Western peoples.
Assassination, violent mass persecutions, over- throws of governments ("democratically elected" ones as often as not), the use of media, labor, educational and social organizations as fronts, sabotage, organizing death squad and systematic torture activities-these are the marks of the CIA in action. If there is political turmoil or unrest somewhere in the world, if there is war or significant drug trafficking going on, if people are demanding their rights and freedoms in such a way as to impinge on the organized plunder which the transnational corporations are undertaking, then it is highly likely that the CIA is prowling around the vicinity. This book is a useful chronicle of a good many of the depredations which the Agency has indulged in. William Blum has done a good job in rounding up the materials and sources for this book. He does not stray off into speculation or hypothesizing about events. He stays with events which are thoroughly confirmed and documented.
The United States has become the world's great misery generator, launching wars, coups, counter-revolutions and systematic repression, inducing famines, disease and mass starvation through the use of embargoes and IMF/World Bank economic pressures and otherwise subjugating the silenced majority of people in the world. While the U.S. State Department issues statements claiming that "international terrorism" has accounted for some few hundred casualties affecting United States interests directly, millions are dying on an ongoing basis as a result of government and CIA action around the world. However, the American people are largely ignorant of its activities, having undergone the "mushroom-growing" treatment: they are kept in the dark with lots of misinformational manure packed in. This book provides a much-needed corrective to this situation.
A variety of the M.O.s deployed in the course of world domination are brought to light in Blum's case-by-case narrative. These operations are all fully available options at the present time--be it in the context of "neutralizing" Asia, plundering Russia and Eastern Europe, extracting Africa's fabulous wealth in natural resources, or maintaining cheap labor in Latin America and the Caribbean, there is no shortage of activity for the CIA and related agencies to pursue.
Front organizations have carried out CIA operations in America and Europe in addition to what is illogically called the "third world." The Congress for Cultural Freedom, launched in 1950 in Berlin, worked through hundreds of channels worldwide, publishing more than thirty periodicals, among them The New Leader, Encounter, and Socialist Commentary. Its tentacles reached into the international writers organization, Pen, the precursor to the German press agency DPA, the International Federations of Journalists, and a variety of press services and magazines in all corners of the globe. Hundreds of books have been CIA-subsidized, including The New Class by Milovan Djilas and Richard Gardner's In Pursuit of World Order. The many "secondary conduits" and "final disbursers" for the Agency have included AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees), NEA (National Education Association), NSA (National Student Association), the International Commission of Jurists, the American Newspaper Guild, the University of Southern California, and regional front groups, such as "American Friends of the Middle East." AIFLD (American Institute for Free labor Development) has played key roles in propping up repressive regimes throughout Latin America.
Political leaders who did not perform in the manner sanctioned by the "Complex" have been subject to removal by death, coup, or both. A poison cigar was prepared for Fidel Castro, a poison ring to liquidate French leader Charles de Gaulle. Others who have been targets range from India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to Haitian strong man Papa Doc Duvalier (the attempt frightened him into absolute subservience to the perpetrators). CIA hits were successfully carried out on Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos. Hundreds of governments have been overthrown or otherwise replaced in an extra-legal manner. Election tampering by the CIA to ensure results favorable to the M-I-I-C has been carried out in numerous places, nineteen of which are documented in the book. Populations who were not subservient enough were severely punished. Grenada, Panama, the Dominican Republic, and Iraq were hit hard. Vietnam was destroyed along with millions of people.
The weak coverage in this book is the Middle East, as frequently happens to be the case, even in progressive circles. Blum reprises the CIA caricature of Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan leader and social revolutionary, when he characterizes him as "an artless braggart mouthing revolutionary rhetoric so juvenile he could serve equally well as bogey man or buffoon." Blum totally misses Qadaffi's point of departure when he speaks of "his fierce anti-communism, which stemmed basically from his taking Marxism's implicit atheism at face value . . . [therefore] at odds with his Islamic faith." It is Qadaffi's distaste for oppression and all forms of domination which has led him to seek an alternative way to the (still dominant) world capitalist system and its recently defeated false alternative exemplified and "led" by Russia. Blum misses the main point in Afghanistan as well: the Russians replicated the mode of the dominant imperialism by colonizing and occupying that country. The Russian puppets are wrongly portrayed as popular reformers, the Afghan resistance as hopelessly reactionary thugs and villains capable of any atrocity. Russian horrors are glossed over. The Kurds enter the stage as hapless pawns of the CIA due to actions by a small, mercenary minority as agents doing its bidding. The big picture involving the fiercely raging Kurdish struggle for national liberation which these "assets" are deployed to help crush is not there.
The case of Haiti is not adequately described or discussed. Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his associates are not clearly revealed as the new breed of puppet which the CIA keeps on hand as what is actually in many cases a preferred option in ruling foreign countries. "Progressive" leaders with credentials earned through long years of struggle and resistance can help in more effective pacification of their subjects. Nelson Mandela is the prototype. Another volume should come out on the "Plan B" options of this sort which will be increasingly coming to the fore, along with NATO-style incursions, "Coalitions" such as the one formed to destroy Iraq and "Peace-keeping" missions such as the one the UN had going in Bosnia as 200,000 Muslim residents there were rubbed out.
The conservative Scottish historian Arnold Toynbee saw the approaching advent of the New World Order when he commented:
America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign countries that fell under her sway . . . and since the poor have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice and for the least happiness. America's decision to adopt Rome's rule has been deliberate, if I have gauged it right.
In spite of warnings from some of the "Founding Fathers" against meddling in intrigues abroad, the United States has had a long history of international adventurism. More than one hundred interventions were launched in the period 1798-1895 alone. There was the "opening of Japan" with the Perry Expedition in 1853, a put-down of "attempted revolution" in Uruguay in 1855. In 1860, America had to intervene in Angola where the "natives became troublesome." There have been over a dozen invasions of Nicaragua in the last century. Of course, the United States itself is founded on the remains of the victims of what are arguably the two greatest genocides in known human history: those against the Blacks and the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The international mayhem organized by the CIA is well within the spirit of this tradition, whose roots were let slip by former Secretary of State John Foster Dulles when he revealed that "For us, there are two sorts of people in the world: there are those who are Christians and support free enterprise and then there are the others."
Americans should read this book. It contains truths which can help set them, as well as everybody else, free. There are very few books on the history of the CIA. Until more are produced, this volume will serve as an excellent introductory compendium on this critical subject.
Husayn Al-Kurdi is an internationally published writer and journalist who resides in San Diego, California.
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