public toilet reading room: March 2023

fidelity

subject to manipulation

subject to (unwanted) manipulation (not positive)

subject to modification

subject to (undetected) modification (not positive)

subject to (unverify) modification

subject to (uncheck) modification

reliability

electronic digital The Internet intermediary person-in-the-middle

analog printed work physical book print run multiple copies

oral tradition oral culture Quran poem sing song

writing for ease of memorization

writing for ease of recitation

writing for ease of viral transmission (meme)

writing for fidelity recording of event (to take a picture)

the tradition of rote memorization of great works

writing scripture scriptorium

the tradition of copying great work by hand

printing

physicality

____________________________________

social media

malnutrition

social media is not food (what if we view social media as food)

what is the nutritional quality of the informational exchange

is it compatible with life

is it life affirming or life demeaning (Mister Rogers) (minister)

is this healthy

is it helpful

cui bono (for whose benefit, who will benefit, ... )

cui bono (in criminal law context: the person who commit the act gain ... benefit; therefore, the focus of the investigation is not on the act of commission, but on the beneficiary from the criminal enterprise.)

twitter, facebook, youtube, newsgroup, ...

U.S. post office (postal system)

degree or level of fidelity: high fidelity, low fidelity, no fidelity

informational fidelity rating

moderated, moderation, moderator (human), moderator (A.I. engine), moderator (A.I. engine (machine learning system) + humans (biologic organic))

____________________________________

p.73

basis for diagnosis.

do we have problems?

if so, how big is it?

is it getting worse or better?

what are the underlying causes?

source:

John Schutte, ‘Andrew W. Marshall and the Epistemic Community of the Cold War’, 2015, http://www.au.af.mil/au/aupress/digital/pdf/paper/dp_0016_schutte_casting_net_assessment.pdf

dp_0016_schutte_casting_net_assessment.pdf

Schutte, John M., 1976

Casting net assessment : Andrew W. Marshall and the epistemic community of the cold war / John M. Schutte, Lieutenant Colonel, USAF.

1. Marshall, Andrew W., 1921─ 2. United States. department of defense. director of net assessment ── biography. 3. united states. department of defense ── officials and employees ── biography. 4. rand corporation ── biography. 5. united states ── forecasting. 6. military planning ── united states ── history ── 20th century. 7. military planning ── united states ── history ── 21st century. 8. united states ── military policy. 9. strategy. 10. cold war.

title: Andrew W. Marshall and the epistemic community of the cold war.

UA23.6.S43 2014

355.0092 -- dc23

local filename: casting net assessment.txt

alternative short-cut: Andrew W. Marshall and the epistemic community of the cold war (2)

____________________________________

M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal, 2001

p.232

Through E-mail, the exchange of files, and the sharing of programs, it functioned as the town square, the village market, the Roman forum, and the Athenian agora all in one--the place where citizens gathered to talk, to gossip, to conduct business, to propose ideas, and then to argue until they came up with better ideas.

p.232

Far more than Corbató himself had orignally realized, his open-systems design for CTSS had deep parallels to the notions of free speech in a political democracy, free competition in a market economy, and the free exchange of ideas in scientific research. In each there is a core set of rules that everyone must accept to make the interchange possible at all.

(Waldrop, M. Mitchell.; The dream machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal / M. Mitchell Waldrop., 1. Licklider, J. C. R., 2. microcomputers--history, 2001, )

____________________________________

take away: some truths are stranger than fiction.

____________________________________

pp.468-470

It's a ‘PUBLIC TOILET’ for the Ketherean unconscious.

────────────────────────────────────

pp.468-470

The incubator was created to augment a public order system called “unanimous.”

Even the robots of Robo-Asyl get into fights and deceive each other.

But no Ketherean has committed suicide, or a crime, or even fought, in the last hundred years

Actually, it's dull... but from another perspective it's a pleasant, perfect society!

It's possible thanks to an intracranial security system called ‘unanimous.’

Kethereans have nanomachines called “Peacekeepers” installed in their brains.

On the surface, it's just a handy computer implant that let's you access the Melchizedek Net on the fly for any data you might want.

But it's REAL function is to enforce laws on the synaptic level.

The peacekeeper spies on all synaptic activity. Criminal intent merits a shock to the brain's pain center, good behavior a gentle jolt to the pleasure center.

It's sort of like having an un-bribable cop inside your head supervising you full-time.

Within a year, you're Pavlov's dog.

And the best part? You never realize your free will is being controlled.

Why are we talking about this?

What does it have to do with Lou?

Hold your horses...

...you see unanimous ‘seemed’ perfect--but there was one fatal flaw.

They could control the ‘BRAIN’, but the background noise given off by every cell in the body...

...‘that’ makes up the unconscious, which couldn't be controlled. Unpredicted crimes and suicides broke out.

then a scientist from Tiphares proposed a novel solution to this difficult problem...

Tipharean brains that had previously been tossed out as waste products were recycled and connected, living on in a collective dream world...

...a vast inner fantasy called the ‘Argo Navis’!

They probably don't even know they're nothing but brains.

So Lou... is ‘Dreaming...’

When Kethereans sleep, the peacekeeper is deactivated and they're automatically connected to Argo Navis.

to put it bluntly...

It's a ‘PUBLIC TOILET’ for the Ketherean unconscious.

____________________________________

[pp.69-70]

Although Gutenberg would not share in its rewards, his letterpress would become one of the most important inventions in history. With remarkable speed, at least by medieval standards, move-able-type printing "changed the face and condition of things all over the world," Francis Bacon wrote in his 1620 book Novum Organum, "so that no empire or sect or star seems to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs." 20 (The only other inventions that Bacon felt had as great an impact as the letterpress were gunpowder and the compass.) By turning a manual craft into a mechanical industry, Gutenberg had changed the economics of printing and publishing. Large editions of perfect copies could be mass-produced quickly by a few workers. Books went from being expensive, scare commodities to being affordable, plentiful ones.

In 1483, a printing shop in Florence, run by nuns from the Convent of San Jacopo di Ripoli, charged three florins for printing 1,025 copies of a new translation of Plato's Dialogues. A scribe would have charged about one florin for copying the work, but he would have produced only a single copy. 21 The steep reduction in the cost of manufacturing books was amplified by the growing use of paper, an invention imported from China, in place of more costly parchment. As book prices fell, demand surged, spurring, in turn, a rapid expansion in supply. New editions flooded the markets of Europe. According to one estimate, the number of books produced in the fifty(50) years following Gutenberg's invention equaled the number produced by European scribes during the preceding thousand years. 22 The sudden proliferation of once-rare books struck people of the time "as sufficiently remarkable to suggest supernatural intervention," reports Elizabeth Eisenstein in 'The Printing Press as an Agent of Change'. 23 When Johann Fust carried a large supply of printed books into Paris on an early sales trip, he was reportedly run out of town by the gendarmes on suspicion of being in league with the devil. 24

Fears of satanic influence quickly dissipated as people rushed to buy and read the inexpensive products of the letterpress. When, in 1501, the Italian printer Aldus Manutius introduced the pocket-sized octavo format, considerably smaller than the traditional folio and quarto, books became even more affordable, portable, and personal. Just as the miniturization of the clock make everyone a timekeeper, so the miniaturization of the book helped weave book-reading into the fabric of everyday life. It was no longer just scholars and monks who sat reading words in quiet rooms. Even a person of fairly modest means could begin to assemble a library of several volumes, making it possible not only to read broadly but to draw comparisons between different works. "All the world is full of knowledge men, of most learned Schoolmasters, and vast Libraries," exclaimed the title character of Rabelais' 1534 best seller Gargantua, "and it appears to me as a truth, that neither in Plato's time, nor Cicero's, nor Papinian's, there was ever such conveniency for studying, as we see at this day there is." 25

A virtuous cycle had been set in motion. [...]

("The shallows : what the Internet is doing to our brains", Nicholas Carr., 1. Neuropsychology, 2. Internet-Physiological effect., 3. Internet-Psychological aspects., © 2011, 2010, [612.80285-dc22], pp.69-70)

[pp.71-72]

Elizabeth Eisenstein in 'The Printing Press as an Agent of Change'. 23

It wasn't just contemporary works that were coming off the presses. Printers, striving to fill the public's demand for inexpensive reading material, produced large editions of the classics, both in the orginal Greek and Latin and in translation. Although most of the printers were motivated by the desire to turn an easy profit, the distribution of the older texts helped give intellectual depth and historical continuity to the emerging book-centered culture. As Einsenstein writes, the printer who "duplicated a seemingly antiquated backlist" may have been lining his own pockets, but in the process he gave readers "a richer, more varied diet than had been provided by the scribe." 26

Along with the high-minded came the low-minded. Tawdry novels, quack theories, gutter journalism, propaganda, and, of course, reams of pornography poured into the marketplace and found eager buyers at every station in society. Priests and politicians began to wonder whether, as England's first offical book censor put it in 1660, "more mischief than advantage were not occasion'd to the Christian world by the Invention of Typography." 27 The famed Spanish dramatist Lope de Vega expressed the feelings of many a grandee when, in his 1612 play 'All Citizens Are Soldiers', he wrote:

So many books--so much confusion!

All around us an ocean of print

And most of it covered in froth. 28

Not everyone became a book reader, of course. Plenty of people--the poor, the illiterate, the isolated, the incurious--never participated, at least not directly, in Gutenberg's revolution. And even among the most avid of the book-reading public, many of the old oral practices of information exchange remained popular. People continued to chat and to argue, to attend lectures, speeches, debates, and sermons. 30 Such qualifications deserve note--any generalization about the adoption and use of a new technology will be imperfect--but they don't change the fact that the arrival of move-able-type printing was a central event in the history of Western culture and the development of the Western mind.

____________________________________

“Conditioned reflexes are phenomena of common and widespread

occurrence: their establishment is an integral function in

everyday life. We recognize them ourselves and in other

people under such names as ‘education’, ‘habits’, and

‘training’; and all of these are really nothing more than the

results of an establishment of new nervous connections

during the post-natal existence of the organism.”;

── Ivan Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes:

An Investigation of the Physiological Activity

of the Cerebral Cortex, 1927,

translated from the Russia,

St. Petersburg Military Medical Academy;

Tom Butler-Bowden, 50 psychology classics, 2007,

p.210

“We are what we repeatly do.

Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”;

── ARISTOTLE;

The little book of Talent :

52 tips for improving your skills;

DANIEL COYLE, 2012, author of the talent code.

[p.29]

"Neurons seem to 'want' to receive input," explains Nancy Kanwisher of MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research: "When their usual input disappears, they start responding to the next best thing." 23

____________________________________

Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen, Truth, lies, and o-rings, 2009      [ ]

p.573
James R. Hansen
A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner.
                           --Old English Proverb

What he came to fathom about the subject conformed well to what the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle taught over 2,300 years ago: Human beings are what we repeatedly do.

   (McDonald, Allan J., Truth, lies, and o-rings : inside the space shuttle challenger disaster / Allan J. McDonald with James R. Hansen., 1. challenger (spacecraft)--accidents., 2. whistle blowing--united states., 3. space shuttles--accidents--invesetigation., 4. united states. national aeronautics and space administration., 5. united states--politics and government., 2009, )
   ____________________________________

Kevin Kelly, out of control, 1994 [ ]

p.387

Technology, particularly the technology of knowledge, shapes our thought.

p.388

A blackboard encourages repeated modification, erasure, casual thinking, spontaneity.

p.388

A printed page solicits rewritten drafts, proofing, introspection, editing.

p.388

As Brian Eno, the musician, wrote of Bolter's work, “[Bolter's thesis] is that the way we organize our writing space is the way we come to organize our thoughts, and in time becomes the way which we think the world itself must be organized.”

p.389

The space of early writing was likewise flexible. Texts were ongoing affairs, amended by readers, revised by disciples; a forum for discussions.

(Kevin Kelly, out of control, 1994, filename: ooc-mf.pdf )

____________________________________

Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]

p.99

... Brave New World, as we have seen, Aldous Huxley could already glimpse where the centralization and mechanization of culture was leading. He foresaw culture's future dominated by commerce. He also saw the prospect of global standardization. “In 3000 A.D.” wrote Huxley, “one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking [currently known as Beijing, Peking is an older name of the city] in a few hours. But if the civilisation of these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so.”, p.99, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.

(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )

(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.

____________________________________

────────────────────────────────────

“It is an under acknowledged truism that, just as you are what you eat, how and what you think depends on what information you are exposed to.”, p.13, Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010.

____________________________________

Sue Rodwell Williams, Nutrition and diet therapy., 1981

p.340

Observation and experience, however, have also brought deepened awareness of two important interrelated facts:

(1) food alone is not the answer and

(2) a high standard of living does not necessarily solve the problem ── even in the midst of plenty, malnutrition exists.

p.342

Even in America, the wealthiest of nations, malnutrition exists.

p.343

Many factors work together to produce malnutrition.

p.343

A synergism is, in fact, known to exist between malnutrition and infection. Each compounds the other, and together they cause more serious illness than either would bring alone.

pp.343─345

Some of the many related causes of malnutrition can be classed under the three factors that are classically cited by the epidemiologist as the triad of variables that influences disease:

(1) agent,

(2) host, and

(3) environment.

Agent.

The agent that is the fundamental cause of a malnutrition disease is a lack of food. Because of this lack, certain nutrients in food that are essential to the sustenance of cellular activity are missing. Various factors may cause or modify this lack of food:

1. Food quality.

The total quantity of food ingested may be below the level required to maintain the body tissues. The food deficiency may be partial or complete, seasonal or constant.

2. Imbalance between community food supply and need.

The amount of food available per person may be reduced by natural disaster (drought, flood) or by man-made disaster (war, over population, poor distribution, poverty).

3. Food quality.

The food available may be of poor physical quality or biological value.

4. Food timing.

Food may not be present (as in infant and child feeding) when needed, in proper balance.

Host.

The host is the person ── infant, child, adult ── who suffers from malnutrition. Various characteristics in the host may influence the disease:

1. Presence of other disease.

2. Increased dietary needs.

3. Congenital defects.

4. Personal factors.

Environment.

Many environmental factors influence malnutrition. Some are close at hand and may be controlled by the individual. Many more far-reaching ones are too enormous, too powerful, and too remote in their source to be influenced by a single person. Mass action and extensive study are needed to deal with these problems. The following are some of the environmental problems:

1. Sanitation.

2. Culture.

3. Social factors.

4. Psychological factors.

5. Economic and political structure.

6. Agriculture.

p.366

Methods of combating malnutrition

Malnutrition is the world's primary health problem.

How shall it be resolved?

It is evident that the problem is complex and that there are no simple answers.

The discussion must end as it began with the restatement of the two fold premise:

(1) supplying food alone is not the answer and

(2) the problem is not confined to economically deprived populations.

p.368

Fig. 16-13.

Guatemalan children drinking incaparina at school.

After much experimentation, the Institute of Nutrition of Central America and Panama (INCAP) has succeeded in developing Incaparina, an inexpensive protein product of high nutritive value. It is now well liked and widely used in Central America. (WHO photograph by Todd Webb.)

p.369

Many other national and local groups in the United States and other countries are working toward the same goals. Food supplements such as the protein substance “Incaparina”, which was developed by the Institute of Nutrition in Guatemala city are being studied and used to add needed nutrients to inadequate regional diets (Fig. 16-13). Research and education programs are helping to provide knowledge and tools.

p.369

Ultimately the welfare of a nation rests on the health of its people, George Herbert, an English poet who lived from 1593 to 1633 wrote, “Whatsoever was the father of a disease, an ill diet was the mother”. He was far wiser than ever he knew!

p.376

It was about this same time in the mid-1930s that Toverud of Norway reduced the incidence of low-birth-weight babies in his carefully supervised group to 2.2% with emphasis on nutritional care. He expressed his working hypothesis that “a child is nutritionally nine months old at birth.”10

p.377

Considerations in determining needs

It is evident from this increasing amount of data and from the wide experience of many clinicians that maternal nutrition is critically important to both mother and fetus. Two factors seem responsible for this change in awareness and attitude of greater concern:

(1) the rapidly and expanding knowledge of the role of nutrition in the prevention and treatment of disease and

(2) the realization that the numbers of still births and infant deaths in the United States and Canada are much higher than one would expect.

(Williams, Sue Rodwell, 1922-, Nutrition and diet therapy./ Sue Rodwell Williams, 1. diet therapy., 2. nutrition., includes bibliographies and index., RM216.W684 1981, 641.1, 80-27219, )

____________________________________

career conman

Robert Freegard (wiki ??)

an illusionist, sociopath

all of us have a story we want to be told and if you are told that story at the wrong time by the wrong person, they can have an incredibly powerful hold over you;

magician who is able to look at people, and say what is it you are missing in your life exactly and gives it to them and ...

has this same ability to put forth this huge illusion

these people do exist, they have these power, to be very wary of them;

12 years

what's the dramatic essence of this story

what's the dramatic center that we can tell and how do we do that

screenplay (research) ==> mechanic for the script

articles, trial, Robert Freegard

manipulated

trying to crush emotionally

FBI agent, Scotland yard

Robert Freegard, gifted at manipulation

tending bar, selling car

a woman missing for 10 years

breaking her confidence, breaking her peace of mind

convicted of kidnapping by fraud

as opposed to kidnapping by force

kidnapping by mind control (mind fuck)

he deprived people freedom with his mind rather than by force

that's an incredible concept

Robert Freegard appeal the conviction.

He is loosed and freed.

control, pleasure, reassurance, power

sociopath, does not tip into psychopath

fraud, fear, brainwashing, cult leader

source:

Rogue agent 2021 (movie, DVD format)

____________________________________

Interview with former CIA agent John Stockwell

This is a transcript of a video taped interview of former CIA case officer John Stockwell. He is interviewed by journalist Clete Roberts in 1983 at the University of Southern California's Vietnam Reconsidered Conference. The interview describes the various functions of the CIA, especially its role in disseminating false information to the press and funding authors to promote CIA propaganda in the US literary sphere. Stockwell describes how he and his team would disseminate false stories in the news about the Angolan Civil War and create "totally false" atrocity propaganda about Cubans, recruit journalists to knowingly plant false stories in the press, and described how a CIA Director gave false testimony in Congress that claimed that the CIA does not target the US public with its propaganda and false stories.

The video referenced to create this transcript was uploaded to YouTube by the account Witness To War, under the title "Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere".[1]

Transcript

Interviewer: John, you were in Vietnam for the CIA, and as I understand you were up country. What years were you there?

Stockwell: '73 to '75, right after the troop evacuation, and I came out in the evacuation of April of '75.

Interviewer: How long were you with the CIA?

Stockwell: 13 years. I was a field case officer, served in Africa and Vietnam and then, eventually, on a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington.

Interviewer: You were in Angola, were you not?

Stockwell: Well, I ran the Angolan covert action. But I ran it from Washington. These things are global, and as chief of the Angola task force, my office was in Washington.

Interviewer: When did you leave the CIA?

Stockwell: March 1977. I left to testify to the Senate and go public and try to write a book, which I did.

Interviewer: I'll get into that a little later. I'd like to talk to you about what kind of experiences one has when one leaves the CIA and begins to talk. It must be very, very interesting. Let's talk about the function of the CIA. I think a lot of us have an impression that all the CIA does is gather intelligence. Intelligence is information, of course. Now, one would think that if you obtained information that was based upon fact, and if that is so, what did you do with it?

Stockwell: Well, one of the four principal functions of the CIA is to gather intelligence, and, ideally, forward it to the president--the users of information, the policymakers as they say.

There are other functions, however, some of them more legitimate than others. One is to run secret wars, the covert action that's written and talked about so much, like what's happening in Nicaragua today from Honduras.

Another thing is to disseminate propaganda to influence people's minds, and this is a major function of the CIA. And unfortunately, of course, it overlaps into the gathering of information. You have contact with a journalist, you will give him true stories, you'll get information from him, you'll also give him false stories.

Interviewer: Do you buy his confidence with true stories?

Stockwell: You buy his confidence and set him up. We've seen this happen and recently with Jack Anderson, for example, who has his intelligence sources, and he has also admitted that he's been set up by them, every fifth story just simply being false.

You also work on their human vulnerabilities to recruit them, in a classic sense, to make them your agent, so that you can control what they do so you don't have to set them up. Sort of, you know, by putting one over on them, so you can say, "Here, plant this one next Tuesday."

Interviewer: Can you do this with responsible reporters?

Stockwell: Yes. The Church Committee brought it out in 1975, and then Woodward and Bernstein put an article in Rolling Stone a couple of years later. Four hundred journalists cooperating with the CIA, including some of the biggest names in the business, to consciously introduce the stories into the press.

Interviewer: Well, give me a concrete example of how you used the press this way, how a false story is planted and how you got it published?

Stockwell: Well for example, in my war, the Angola war, that I helped to manage, one third of my staff was propaganda. Ironically it's called "covert action" inside the CIA. Outside, that means the violent part. I had propagandists all over the world, principally in London, Kinshasa, and Zambia. We would take stories which we would write and put them in the Zambia Times, and then pulled them out and sent them to a journalist on our payroll in Europe. But his cover story, you see, would be what he had gotten from his stringer in Lusaka, who had gotten them from the Zambia Times. We had the complicity of the government of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda if you will, to put these false stories into his newspapers. But after that point, the journalists, Reuters and AFP, the management was not witting of it. Now, our contact man in Europe was. And we pumped just dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists--in one case we had the Cuban rapists caught and tried by the Ovimbundu maidens who had been their victims, and then we ran photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country of the Cubans being executed by the Ovimbundu women who supposedly had been their victims.

Interviewer: These were fake photos?

Stockwell: Oh, absolutely. We didn't know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists, you know eating babies for breakfast and the sort. Totally false propaganda.

Interviewer: John, was this sort of thing practiced in Vietnam?

Stockwell: Oh, endlessly. A massive propaganda effort in Vietnam in the '50s and in the '60s, including the thousand books that were published--several hundred in English--that were also propaganda books sponsored by the CIA. Give some money to a writer, "Write this book for us, write anything you want, but on these matters, make sure, you know, you have this line."

Interviewer: Writers in this country? Books sold and distributed in this culture?

Stockwell: Sure. Yeah. English language books, meaning an American audience as a target, on the subject of Vietnam and the history of Vietnam, and the history of Marxism, and supporting the domino theory, et cetera.

Interviewer: Without opening us up to a lawsuit, could you name one of them?

Stockwell: No, I could not. The Church Committee, when they found this out, demanded that they be given the titles so that the university libraries could at least go and stamp inside "Central Intelligence Agency's version of history," and the CIA refused because it's been commissioned to protect its sources and methods, and the sources would be the authors who wrote these false propaganda books, some of whom are now distinguished scholars and journalists.

Interviewer: Well, doesn't the CIA flatly deny--they've admitted that there is some propaganda at first--but, their position is that those are all outside the United States, not in the United States. Isn't that true?

Stockwell: Absolutely. While we were running this Angolan operation and pumping these stories into the world and US press, exactly that time, Bill Colby, the CIA Director, was testifying to Congress, assuring them that we were extremely careful to make sure that none of our propaganda spilled back into the United States. And the very days that he was he was giving this false testimony, we were planting stories in The Washington Post. By that I mean not through Lusaka, but we actually flew a journalist from Paris to Washington to plant a false story. I mentioned it, I give the text of the story in my book.

Interviewer: So, you planted the story in The Washington Post by bringing a man from abroad, and he had no difficulty, got right past the editor with it?

Stockwell: Yeah.

Interviewer: Is this common? Is it easy?

Stockwell: It's easier than then you would think, yes. Yes. If it's on the line of, for example, if it's on the line of Grenada being radical today, we've had articles in The Washington Post, The Star before it closed, Time Magazine, that could only have been written by, originally by the CIA. Soviet submarine base, terrorist training. There's a little island where the major source of income is selling spice to the West, Western tourism, and a large United States Medical School. Tiny little island, 15 miles by 10 miles across, with 70,000 people with US medical students and their cutaways and sandals, and the noses in books wandering all over the island, and yet, major press organs--Time magazine--running stories about their being so radical.

Interviewer: In Vietnam, John, what was your relationship, what was your role, in relation to the press?

Stockwell: Well, mind, being the CIA's role it was multifaceted. There were officers in the embassy, CIA officers, high-ranking officers, Frank Snip was one--not high-ranking, but he was at the in the chief of stations office--who met with the press regularly, and shared information with them, gave them information, and got information from them, and then periodically would put some story into that that would be false. But also, in other cases, very valuable to the journalist.

So, even hard-nosed journalists who would never willfully cooperate with the CIA would consider it a useful source. At the same time, there are all kinds of people, you know, as journalists, and case officers, many other case officers, are really quite afraid of the press. We up country, when journalists would come up nosing around, we would hide and let the AID officer talk to them. We were simply afraid they would photograph us and write some article and have some allusion to what we were doing that would be unfortunate to our careers.

Interviewer: They knew who you were, they knew you were CIA?

Stockwell: Everyone always knows who the CIA people are, let there be no doubt whatsoever. This is one of the biggest farces that the CIA and Congress have put on the American people. We--as Moynihan said, Patrick Moynihan said, in testifying against this Official Secrets Act recently--he said at the UN, he said, they swaggered around like Texas cowboys in 10-gallon hats and high-heeled boots.

In Vietnam we had yellow Datsuns and sequential license plates. So if you had a yellow Datsun and "144" on your license plate, you had to be CIA, and everybody knew it. Up country, we had emerald green Jeeps, and the army had olive drab and AID had gray Jeeps. And if you had a green, green Jeep, you had to be CIA. And any denial of that was only tongue-in-cheek, perfunctory. Certainly, journalists knew the difference.

Interviewer: What a disillusionment. You're telling us that a spook is not a spook.

Stockwell: Allen Dulles wrote in his book The Craft of Intelligence, you know, the famous CIA Director, in the foreword of his book he says an intelligence agent, contrary to popular opinion, has to be known as such, otherwise people with secrets won't know where to take them. He set up the policy, the precedent of traveling the world each year and assembling his case officers in hotels, and having what you could only describe as a sales conference. Meetings in the hotel rooms, breakfast, lunch, and dinner and drinks together in the hotel rooms.

Interviewer: John--

Stockwell: So, you're talking--so, you're talking about not an underworld, you're talking about ranking privileged members of the police brotherhood of the world. CIA officers are not in danger. Tourists don't hit them. In every country where they can, they establish liaison with the local police. And inside the veils of, you know, their secrecy and protection, they're not fearful and they're not playing cover games. They're having lunch with the police chief.

Interviewer: John, I'd like to I'd like to find out what makes a man like John Stockwell tick. One, why were you in the CIA? Two, why did you quit the CIA? And I'd like to find out what has happened since you quit the CIA and began speaking as openly as you've spoken to us.

Stockwell: Well certainly that's a question as complicated as the dilemma facing the society about the CIA today. I went in Marine, Army, Marine captain. Conservative background, my father was an engineer in Africa contracting to build for a Presbyterian mission. And I grew up in the Belgian Congo. About as conservative as you can get, I guess.

Interviewer: A missionary atmosphere?

Stockwell: On a mission station with an engineering father. But, uh, humanist principles, high ideals, false, unrealistic ideals for the world. Education at the University of Texas. My service in the Marine Corps active duty, all very exciting between wars. I was in a force reconnaissance company parachuting and locking out of submarines. Very glamorous, but between wars no one getting shot. No moral issues, if you will.

And then the CIA recruited me right at the end of the Kennedy era. He'd just been shot. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." And all of the propaganda that had been put out on the American people against communism, the height of the domino theory, and my my own naiveté, thinking I was educated when in fact I was not. And I thought going into the CIA, that I was doing the best thing I possibly could with my life, and the noblest ideals of our society. Thinking I was bettering mankind by making the world free for democracy. It just took me 13 years and three secret wars to realize how absolutely false that was--and the church committee's revelation, simultaneously to the Vietnam, and then the Angolan thing--it just took me that long to see the thing from a totally different light. And my basic ideals have certainly never changed, in terms of basic humanism, basic sympathy for the people of the world.

A service to this country that goes back so far I don't even have to deal with detractors, I feel who say I'm a traitor or whatnot. That's silly. With, you know, with the things that I've done with my life. But I think we are drifting from the values that we we teach ourselves in school, of democracy, of freedoms. I think we're selling out to a very small police organization who is absorbing American principals about as fast as the judicial and legislative processes can absorb them--freedoms of speech and press--and at the same time or continuing policies of killing in every corner of the world. Right now in Nicaragua and El Salvador. I think I deplore that morally, but I also think it's extremely dangerous because it could flash so easily into a world confrontation, and with the Soviet--to the Holocaust, to the nuclear war.

Interviewer: Well, what has happened to you since you left the CIA and started speaking like this?

Stockwell: Well, I've been sued by the CIA. I've been threatened by the FBI. I have not been beaten or mauled. I have exercised my right as I see it to speak out, and lectured at length. They've made it very clear they don't appreciate it. And, like I say, I've been warned that dire things could happen to me. But, uh, I don't know if these were bluffs or not. Nothing has yet. I've been sued for damages by the CIA, which has a certain irony when you think about it.

"Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere." Witness to War. YouTube. Archive link.

Categories

References

"Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere." Witness to War. YouTube. Archive link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NK1tfkESPVY

ProleWiki

ProleWiki is a collaborative Marxist-Leninist project aiming to build an anti-imperialist communist encyclopedia with information on current events, communist parties worldwide, countries, as well as hosting a library of texts important to the international communist movement.

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•── Operation Mockingbird as a systematic propaganda campaign with domestic and foreign journalists operating as CIA assets and dozens of US news organizations providing cover for CIA activity.[8]
     ── In the early years of the Cold War, efforts were made by the United States Government to use mass media to influence public opinion internationally.
     ── Operation Mockingbird is an alleged large-scale program of the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that began in the early years of the Cold War and attempted to manipulate domestic American news media organizations for propaganda purposes. According to author Deborah Davis, Operation Mockingbird recruited leading American journalists into a propaganda network and influenced the operations of front groups. CIA support of front groups was exposed when an April 1967 Ramparts article reported that the National Student Association received funding from the CIA.[1] In 1975, Church Committee Congressional investigations revealed Agency connections with journalists and civic groups.
     ── In 1977, the reporter Carl Bernstein wrote an article in the Rolling Stone magazine, stating that the relationship between the CIA and the media was far more extensive than what the Church Committee revealed. Bernstein said that the committee had covered it up, because it would have shown "embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism."[29]
     ── Published in 1976, the committee's report confirmed some earlier stories that charged that the CIA had cultivated relationships with private institutions, including the press.[5] Without identifying individuals by name, the Church Committee stated that it found fifty journalists who had official, but secret, relationships with the CIA.[5]
     ── Bernstein documented the way in which overseas branches of major US news agencies had for many years served as the "eyes and ears" of Operation Mockingbird, which functioned to disseminate CIA propaganda through domestic US media.[7]
     ── the active role the CIA played in influencing the domestic press's output.
     ──
     ── https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
     ── https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mockingbird
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Anthony_Dooley_III

After his death, the public learned that he had been recruited as an intelligence operative by the Central Intelligence Agency, and numerous descriptions of atrocities by the Viet Minh in his book Deliver Us From Evil had been fabricated.
   ____________________________________

https://ourhiddenhistory.org/

https://ourhiddenhistory.org/2017/02/25/john-stockwell-the-secret-wars-of-the-cia.html

The Secret Wars of the CIA

Our Hidden History

CIA Whistleblower John Stockwell — 1986

These things kill people. 800,000 in Indonesia alone according to CIA's estimate, 12,000 in Nicaragua, 10,000 in the Angolan operation that I was sitting in Washington, managing the task force. They add up. We'll never know how many people have been killed in them. Obviously a lot. Obviously at least a million. 800,000 in Indonesia alone. Undoubtedly the minimum figure has to be 3 million. Then you add in a million people killed in Korea, 2 million people killed in the Vietnam war, and you're obviously getting into gross millions of people…

John Stockwell, former CIA clandestine officer turned whistleblower

[The Other Americas Radio; A two-part speech.]

John Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. He ran a CIA intelligence-gathering post in Vietnam, was the task-force commander of the CIA's secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976, and was awarded the Medal of Merit before he resigned. Stockwell's book "In Search of Enemies", published by W.W. Norton 1978, is an international best-seller. This is a transcript of a lecture he gave in June, 1986.

"The Inner Workings of the National Security Council and the CIA's Covert Actions in Angola, Central America and Vietnam"

I did 13 years in the CIA altogether. I sat on a subcommittee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making the important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done....

I testified for days before the Congress, giving them chapter and verse, date and detail, proving specific lies. They were asking if we had to do with S. Africa, that was fighting in the country. In fact we were coordinating this operation so closely that our airplanes, full of arms from the states, would meet their airplanes in Kinshasa and they would take our arms into Angola to distribute to our forces for us....

What I found with all of this study is that the subject, the problem, if you will, for the world, for the U.S. is much, much, much graver, astronomically graver, than just Angola and Vietnam. I found that the Senate Church committee has reported, in their study of covert actions, that the CIA ran several thousand covert actions since 1961, and that the heyday of covert action was before 1961; that we have run several hundred covert actions a year, and the CIA has been in business for a total of 37 years.

What we're going to talk about tonight is the United States national security syndrome. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. manipulates the press. We're going to talk about how and why the U.S. is pouring money into El Salvador, and preparing to invade Nicaragua; how all of this concerns us so directly. I'm going to try to explain to you the other side of terrorism; that is, the other side of what Secretary of State Shultz talks about. In doing this, we'll talk about the Korean war, the Vietnam war, and the Central American war.

Everything I'm going to talk to you about is represented, one way or another, already in the public records. You can dig it all out for yourselves, without coming to hear me if you so chose. Books, based on information gotten out of the CIA under the freedom of information act, testimony before the Congress, hearings before the Senate Church committee, research by scholars, witness of people throughout the world who have been to these target areas that we'll be talking about. I want to emphasize that my own background is profoundly conservative. We come from South Texas, East Texas....

I was conditioned by my training, my marine corps training, and my background, to believe in everything they were saying about the cold war, and I took the job with great enthusiasm (in the CIA) to join the best and the brightest of the CIA, of our foreign service, to go out into the world, to join the struggle, to project American values and save the world for our brand of democracy. And I believed this. I went out and worked hard....

What I really got out of these 6 years in Africa was a sense ... that nothing we were doing in fact defended U.S. national security interests very much. We didn't have many national security interests in Bujumbura, Burundi, in the heart of Africa. I concluded that I just couldn't see the point.

We were doing things it seemed because we were there, because it was our function, we were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with this Larry Devlin, a famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed in 1960, back in the Congo. He was moving into the Africa division Chief. I talked to him in Addis Ababa at length one night, and he was giving me an explanation - I was telling him frankly, 'sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make any sense, we're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people, and everybody knows we're doing it, and that makes the U.S. look bad'.

And he said I was getting too big for my britches. He said, you're trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what's going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have someone in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job, and wait until you have more experience, and you work your way up to that point, then you will understand national security, and you can make the big decisions. Now, get to work, and stop, you know, this philosophizing.

And I said, `Aye-aye sir, sorry sir, a bit out of line sir'. It's a very powerful argument, our presidents use it on us. President Reagan has used it on the American people, saying, `if you knew what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene.'

I went back to Washington, however, and I found that others shared my concern. A formal study was done in the State Department and published internally, highly classified, called the Macomber [sp?] report, concluding that the CIA had no business being in Africa for anything it was known to be doing, that our presence there was not justified, there were no national security interests that the CIA could address any better than the ambassador himself. We didn't need to have bribery and corruption as a tool for doing business in Africa at that time.

I went from ... a tour in Washington to Vietnam. And there, my career, and my life, began to get a little bit more serious. They assigned me a country. It was during the cease-fire, '73 to '75. There was no cease-fire. Young men were being slaughtered. I saw a slaughter. 300 young men that the South Vietnamese army ambushed. Their bodies brought in and laid out in a lot next to my compound. I was up-country in Tay-ninh. They were laid out next door, until the families could come and claim them and take them away for burial.

I thought about this. I had to work with the sadistic police chief. When I reported that he liked to carve people with knives in the CIA safe-house - when I reported this to my bosses, they said, `(1). The post was too important to close down. (2). They weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because that would make problems, political problems, and he was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. (3). Therefore if I didn't have the stomach for the job, that they could transfer me.'

But they hastened to point out, if I did demonstrate a lack of `moral fiber' to handle working with the sadistic police chief, that I wouldn't get another good job in the CIA, it would be a mark against my career.

So I kept the job, I closed the safe-house down, I told my staff that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and I proceeded to work with him for the next 2 years, pretending that I had reformed him, and he didn't do this sort of thing anymore. The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the state department, works with the death squads.

They don't meet the death squads on the streets where they're actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs, and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it's a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they don't talk about the horrors of what's being done. They pretend like it isn't true.

What I ran into in addition to that was a corruption in the CIA and the intelligence business that made me question very seriously what it was all about, including what I was doing ... risking my life ... what I found was that the CIA, us, the case officers, were not permitted to report about the corruption in the South Vietnamese army....

Now, the corruption was so bad, that the S. Vietnamese army was a skeleton army. Colonels would let the troops go home if they would come in once a month and sign the pay vouchers so the colonel could pocket the money. Then he could sell half of the uniforms and boots and M-16's to the communist forces - that was their major supply, just as it is in El Salvador today. He could use half of the trucks to haul produce, half of the helicopters to haul heroin.

And the Army couldn't fight. And we lived with it, and we saw it, and there was no doubt - everybody talked about it openly. We could provide all kinds of proof, and they wouldn't let us report it. Now this was a serious problem because the south was attacked in the winter of 1975, and it collapsed like a big vase hit by a sledgehammer. And the U.S. was humiliated, and that was the dramatic end of our long involvement in Vietnam....

I had been designated as the task-force commander that would run this secret war [in Angola in 1975 and 1976].... and what I figured out was that in this job, I would sit on a sub-committee of the National Security Council, this office that Larry Devlin has told me about where they had access to all the information about Angola, about the whole world, and I would finally understand national security. And I couldn't resist the opportunity to know. I knew the CIA was not a worthwhile organization, I had learned that the hard way. But the question was where did the U.S. government fit into this thing, and I had a chance to see for myself in the next big secret war....

I wanted to know if wise men were making difficult decisions based on truly important, threatening information, threatening to our national security interests. If that had been the case, I still planned to get out of the CIA, but I would know that the system, the invisible government, our national security complex, was in fact justified and worth while. And so I took the job.... Suffice it to say I wouldn't be standing in front of you tonight if I had found these wise men making these tough decisions. What I found, quite frankly, was fat old men sleeping through sub-committee meetings of the NSC in which we were making decisions that were killing people in Africa. I mean literally. Senior ambassador Ed Mulcahy... would go to sleep in nearly every one of these meetings....

You can change the names in my book [about Angola] and you've got Nicaragua.... the basic structure, all the way through including the mining of harbors, we addressed all of these issues. The point is that the U.S. led the way at every step of the escalation of the fighting. We said it was the Soviets and the Cubans that were doing it. It was the U.S. that was escalating the fighting. There would have been no war if we hadn't gone in first. We put arms in, they put arms in. We put advisors in, they answered with advisors. We put in Zairian para-commando battalions, they put in Cuban army troops. We brought in the S. African army, they brought in the Cuban army. And they pushed us away. They blew us away because we were lying, we were covering ourselves with lies, and they were telling the truth. And it was not a war that we could fight. We didn't have interests there that should have been defended that way.

There was never a study run that evaluated the MPLA, FNLA and UNITA, the three movements in the country, to decide which one was the better one. The assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Nathaniel Davis, no bleeding-heart liberal (he was known by some people in the business as the butcher of Santiago), he said we should stay out of the conflict and work with whoever eventually won, and that was obviously the MPLA. Our consul in Luanda, Tom Killoran, vigorously argued that the MPLA was the best qualified to run the country and the friendliest to the U.S.

We brushed these people aside, forced Nat Davis to resign, and proceeded with our war. The MPLA said they wanted to be our friends, they didn't want to be pushed into the arms of the Soviet Union; they begged us not to fight them, they wanted to work with us. We said they wanted a cheap victory, they wanted a walk-over, they wanted to be un-opposed, that we wouldn't give them a cheap victory, we would make them earn it, so to speak. And we did. 10,000 Africans died and they won the victory that they were winning anyway.

Now, the most significant thing that I got out of all of this, in addition to the fact that our rationales were basically false, was that we lied. To just about everybody involved. One third of my staff in this task force that I put together in Washington, commanding this global operation, pulling strings all over the world to focus pressure onto Angola, and military activities into Angola, one third of my staff was propagandists, who were working, in every way they could think of, to get stories into the U.S. press, the world press, to create this picture of Cubans raping Angolans, Cubans and Soviets introducing arms into the conflict, Cubans and Russians trying to take over the world.

Our ambassador to the United Nations, Patrick Moynihan, he read continuous statements of our position to the Security Council, the general assembly, and the press conferences, saying the Russians and Cubans were responsible for the conflict, and that we were staying out, and that we deplored the militarization of the conflict.

And every statement he made was false. And every statement he made was originated in the sub-committee of the NSC that I sat on as we managed this thing. The state department press person read these position papers daily to the press. We would write papers for him. Four paragraphs. We would call him on the phone and say, `call us 10 minutes before you go on, the situation could change overnight, we'll tell you which paragraph to read. And all four paragraphs would be false. Nothing to do with the truth. Designed to play on events, to create this impression of Soviet and Cuban aggression in Angola. When they were in fact responding to our initiatives.

And the CIA director was required by law to brief the Congress. This CIA director Bill Colby - the same one that dumped our people in Vietnam - he gave 36 briefings of the Congress, the oversight committees, about what we were doing in Angola. And he lied. At 36 formal briefings. And such lies are perjury, and it's a felony to lie to the Congress.

He lied about our relationship with South Africa. We were working closely with the South African army, giving them our arms, coordinating battles with them, giving them fuel for their tanks and armored cars. He said we were staying well away from them. They were concerned about these white mercenaries that were appearing in Angola, a very sensitive issue, hiring whites to go into a black African country, to help you impose your will on that black African country by killing the blacks, a very sensitive issue. The Congress was concerned we might be involved in that, and he assured them we had nothing to do with it.

We had in fact formed four little mercenary armies and delivered them into Angola to do this dirty business for the CIA. And he lied to them about that. They asked if we were putting arms into the conflict, and he said no, and we were. They asked if we had advisors inside the country, and he said `no, we had people going in to look at the situation and coming back out'. We had 24 people sleeping inside the country, training in the use of weapons, installing communications systems, planning battles, and he said, we didn't have anybody inside the country.

In summary about Angola, without U.S. intervention, 10,000 people would be alive that were killed in the thing. The outcome might have been peaceful, or at least much less bloody. The MPLA was winning when we went in, and they went ahead and won, which was, according to our consul, the best thing for the country.

At the end of this thing the Cubans were entrenched in Angola, seen in the eyes of much of the world as being the heroes that saved these people from the CIA and S. African forces. We had allied the U.S. literally and in the eyes of the world with the S. African army, and that's illegal, and it's impolitic. We had hired white mercenaries and eventually been identified with them. And that's illegal, and it's impolitic. And our lies had been visible lies. We were caught out on those lies. And the world saw the U.S. as liars.

After it was over, you have to ask yourself, was it justified? What did the MPLA do after they had won? Were they lying when they said they wanted to be our friends? 3 weeks after we were shut down... the MPLA had Gulf oil back in Angola, pumping the Angolan oil from the oilfields, with U.S. gulf technicians protected by Cuban soldiers, protecting them from CIA mercenaries who were still mucking around in Northern Angola.

You can't trust a communist, can you? They proceeded to buy five 737 jets from Boeing Aircraft in Seattle. And they brought in 52 U.S. technicians to install the radar systems to land and take-off those planes. They didn't buy [the Soviet Union's] Aeroflot.... David Rockefeller himself tours S. Africa and comes back and holds press conferences, in which he says that we have no problem doing business with the so-called radical states of Southern Africa.

I left the CIA, I decided that the American people needed to know what we'd done in Angola, what we'd done in Vietnam. I wrote my book. I was fortunate - I got it out. It was a best-seller. A lot of people read it. I was able to take my story to the American people. Got on 60 minutes, and lots and lots of other shows.

I testified to the Congress and then I began my education in earnest, after having been taught to fight communists all my life. I went to see what communists were all about. I went to Cuba to see if they do in fact eat babies for breakfast. And I found they don't. I went to Budapest, a country that even national geographic admits is working nicely. I went to Jamaica to talk to Michael Manley about his theories of social democracy.

I went to Grenada and established a dialogue with Maurice Bishop and Bernard Coard and Phyllis Coard, to see - these were all educated people, and experienced people - and they had a theory, they had something they wanted to do, they had rationales and explanations - and I went repeatedly to hear them. And then of course I saw the U.S., the CIA mounting a covert action against them, I saw us orchestrating our plan to invade the country. 19 days before he was killed, I was in Grenada talking to Maurice Bishop about these things, these indicators, the statements in the press by Ronald Reagan, and he and I were both acknowledging that it was almost certain that the U.S. would invade Grenada in the near future.

I read as many books as I could find on the subject - book after book after book. I've got several hundred books on the shelf over my desk on the subject of U.S. national security interests. And by the way, I *urge you to read*. In television you get capsules of news that someone else puts together what they want you to hear about the news. In newspapers you get what the editors select to put in the newspaper. If you want to know about the world and understand, to educate yourself, you have to get out and dig, dig up books and articles for yourself. Read, and find out for yourselves. As you'll see, the issues are very, very important.

I also was able to meet the players, the people who write, the people who have done studies, people who are leading different situations. I went to Nicaragua a total of 7 times. This was a major covert action. It lasted longer and evolved to be bigger than what we did in Angola. It gave me a chance, after running something from Washington, to go to a country that was under attack, to talk to the leadership, to talk to the people, to look and see what happens when you give white phosporous or grenades or bombs or bullets to people, and they go inside a country, to go and talk to the people, who have been shot, or hit, or blown up....

We're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions [the CIA has performed since 1961]. What I found was that lots and lots of people have been killed in these things.... Some of them are very, very bloody.

The Indonesian covert action of 1965, reported by Ralph McGehee, who was in that area division, and had documents on his desk, in his custody about that operation. He said that one of the documents concluded that this was a model operation that should be copied elsewhere in the world. Not only did it eliminate the effective communist party (Indonesian communist party), it also eliminated the entire segment of the population that tended to support the communist party - the ethnic Chinese, Indonesian Chinese. And the CIA's report put the number of dead at 800,000 killed. And that was one covert action. We're talking about 1 to 3 million people killed in these things.

Two of these things have led us directly into bloody wars. There was a covert action against China, destabilizing China, for many, many years, with a propaganda campaign to work up a mood, a feeling in this country, of the evils of communist China, and attacking them, as we're doing in Nicaragua today, with an army that was being launched against them to parachute in and boat in and destabilize the country. And this led us directly into the Korean war.

U.S. intelligence officers worked over Vietnam for a total of 25 years, with greater and greater involvement, massive propaganda, deceiving the American people about what was happening. Panicking people in Vietnam to create migrations to the south so they could photograph it and show how people were fleeing communism. And on and on, until they got us into the Vietnam war, and 2,000,000 people were killed.

There is a mood, a sentiment in Washington, by our leadership today, for the past 4 years, that a good communist is a dead communist. If you're killing 1 to 3 million communists, that's great. President Reagan has gone public and said he would reduce the Soviet Union to a pile of ashes. The problem, though, is that these people killed by our national security activities are not communists. They're not Russians, they're not KGB. In the field we used to play chess with the KGB officers, and have drinks with them. It was like professional football players - we would knock heads on Sunday, maybe in an operation, and then Tuesday you're at a banquet together drinking toasts and talking.

The people that are dying in these things are people of the third world. That's the common denominator that you come up with. People of the third world. People that have the misfortune of being born in the Mitumba mountains of the Congo, in the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now in the hills of northern Nicaragua. Far more Catholics than communists, far more Buddhists than communists. Most of them couldn't give you an intelligent definition of communism, or of capitalism.

Central America has been a traditional target of U.S. dominion. If you want to get an easy-read of the history of our involvement in Central America, read Walter LaFeber's book, "Inevitable Revolutions" . We have dominated the area since 1820. We've had a policy of dominion, of excluding other countries, other industrial powers from Europe, from competing with us in the area.

Just to give you an example of how complete this is, and how military this has been, between 1900 and W.W. II, we had 5,000 marines in Nicaragua for a total of 28 years. We invaded the Dominican Republic 4 times. Haiti, we occupied it for 12 years. We put our troops into Cuba 4 times, Panama 6 times, Guatemala once, plus a CIA covert action to overthrow the democratic government there once. Honduras, 7 times. And by the way, we put 12,000 troops into the Soviet Union during that same period of time.

In the 1930's there was public and international pressure about our marines in Nicaragua....

The next three leaders of Guatemala [after the CIA installed the puppet, Colonel Armas in a coup] died violent deaths, and amnesty international tells us that the governments we've supported in power there since then, have killed 80,000 people. You can read about that one in the book "Bitter Fruit", by Kinzer and Schlesinger. Kinzer's a New York Times Journalist... or Jonathan Kwitny, the Wall Street Journal reporter, his book "Endless Enemies" all discuss this....

However, the money, the millions and millions of dollars we put into this program [helping Central America] inevitably went to the rich, and not to the people of the countries involved. And while we were doing this, while we were trying, at least saying we were trying, to correct the problems of Central and Latin America, the CIA was doing its thing, too. The CIA was in fact forming the police units that are today the death squads in El Salvador. With the leaders on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA and the United States.

We had the `public safety program' going throughout Central and Latin America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it. Dan Mitrione, the famous exponent of these things, did 7 years in Brazil and 3 in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business, how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.

They developed a wire. They gave them crank generators, with `U.S. AID' written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from. They developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth and the other one in or around the genitals and you could crank and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.

Now how do you teach torture? Dan Mitrione: `I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you'll have to get involved. You'll have to lay on your hands and try it yourselves.'

... All they [the guinea pigs, beggars from off the streets] could do was lie there and scream. And when they would collapse, they would bring in doctors and shoot them up with vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets, to terrify the population so they would be afraid of the police and the government.

And this is what the CIA was teaching them to do. And one of the women who was in this program for 2 years - tortured in Brazil for 2 years - she testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said, `The most horrible thing about it was in fact, that the people doing the torture were not raving psychopaths.' She couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopath. They were very ordinary people....

There's a lesson in all of this. And the lesson is that it isn't only Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, that do inhuman things to other people, it's people that do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things, on a massive basis, to people of the world today. And we do it in a way that gives us this plausible denial to our own consciences; we create a CIA, a secret police, we give them a vast budget, and we let "them" go and run these programs in our name, and we pretend like we don't know it's going on, although the information is there for us to know; and we pretend like it's ok because we're fighting some vague communist threat. And we're just as responsible for these 1 to 3 million people we've slaughtered and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was the people that they've slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide!

Now we're pouring money into El Salvador. A billion dollars or so. And it's a documented fact that the... 14 families there that own 60% of the country are taking out between 2 to 5 billion dollars - it's called de-capitalization - and putting it in banks in Miami and Switzerland. Mort Halperin, testifying to a committee of the Congress, he suggested we could simplify the whole thing politically just by investing our money directly in the Miami banks in their names and just stay out of El Salvador altogether. And the people would be better off.

Nicaragua. What's happening in Nicaragua today is covert action. It's a classic de-stabilization program. In November 16, 1981, President Reagan allocated 19 million dollars to form an army, a force of contras, they're called, ex-Somoza national guards, the monsters who were doing the torture and terror in Nicaragua that made the Nicaraguan people rise up and throw out the dictator, and throw out the guard. We went back to create an army of these people. We are killing, and killing, and terrorizing people. Not only in Nicaragua but the Congress has leaked to the press - reported in the New York Times, that there are 50 covert actions going around the world today, CIA covert actions going on around the world today.

You have to be asking yourself, why are we destabilizing 50 corners of the troubled world? Why are we about to go to war in Nicaragua, the Central American war? It is the function, I suggest, of the CIA, with its 50 de-stabilization programs going around the world today, to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize the American people to hate, so we will let the establishment spend any amount of money on arms....

The Victor Marchetti ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to prepublication censorship of books. They challenged 360 items in his 360 page book. He fought it in court, and eventually they deleted some 60 odd items in his book.

The Frank Snepp ruling of the Supreme Court gave the government the right to sue a government employee for damages. If s/he writes an unauthorized account of the government - which means the people who are involved in corruption in the government, who see it, who witness it, like Frank Snepp did, like I did - if they try to go public they can now be punished in civil court. The government took $90,000 away from Frank Snepp, his profits from his book, and they've seized the profits from my own book....

[Reagan passed] the Intelligence Identities Protection act, which makes it a felony to write articles revealing the identities of secret agents or to write about their activities in a way that would reveal their identities. Now, what does this mean? In a debate in Congress - this is very controversial - the supporters of this bill made it clear.... If agents Smith and Jones came on this campus, in an MK-ultra-type experiment, and blew your fiance's head away with LSD, it would now be a felony to publish an article in your local paper saying, `watch out for these 2 turkeys, they're federal agents and they blew my loved one's head away with LSD'. It would not be a felony what they had done because that's national security and none of them were ever punished for those activities.

Efforts to muzzle government employees. President Reagan has been banging away at this one ever since. Proposing that every government employee, for the rest of his or her life, would have to submit anything they wrote to 6 committees of the government for censorship, for the rest of their lives. To keep the scandals from leaking out... to keep the American people from knowing what the government is really doing.

Then it starts getting heavy. The `Pre-emptive Strikes' bill. President Reagan, working through the Secretary of State Shultz... almost 2 years ago, submitted the bill that would provide them with the authority to strike at terrorists before terrorists can do their terrorism. But this bill... provides that they would be able to do this in "this" country as well as overseas. It provides that the secretary of state would put together a list of people that he considers to be terrorist, or terrorist supporters, or terrorist sympathizers. And if your name, or your organization, is put on this list, they could kick down your door and haul you away, or kill you, without any due process of the law and search warrants and trial by jury, and all of that, with impunity.

Now, there was a tremendous outcry on the part of jurists. The New York Times columns and other newspapers saying, `this is no different from Hitler's "night and fog" program', where the government had the authority to haul people off at night. And they did so by the thousands. And President Reagan and Secretary Shultz have persisted.... Shultz has said, `Yes, we will have to take action on the basis of information that would never stand up in a court. And yes, innocent people will have to be killed in the process. But, we must have this law because of the threat of international terrorism'.

Think a minute. What is `the threat of international terrorism'? These things catch a lot of attention. But how many Americans died in terrorist actions last year? According to Secretary Shultz, 79. Now, obviously that's terrible but we killed 55,000 people on our highways with drunken driving; we kill 2,500 people in far nastier, bloodier, mutilating, gang-raping ways in Nicaragua last year alone ourselves. Obviously 79 peoples' death is not enough reason to take away the protection of American citizens, of due process of the law.

But they're pressing for this. The special actions teams that will do the pre-emptive striking have already been created, and trained in the defense department.

They're building detention centers. There were 8 kept as mothballs under the McCarran act after World War II, to detain aliens and dissidents in the next war, as was done in the next war, as was done with the Japanese people during World War II. They're building 10 more, and army camps, and the... executive memos about these things say it's for aliens and dissidents in the next national emergency....

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, headed by Loius Guiffrida, a friend of Ed Meese's.... He's going about the country lobbying and demanding that he be given authority, in the times of national emergency, to declare martial law, and establish a curfew, and gun down people who violate the curfew... in the United States.

And then there's Ed Meese, as I said. The highest law enforcement officer in the land, President Reagan's closest friend, going around telling us that the constitution never did guarantee freedom of speech and press, and due process of the law, and assembly.

What they are planning for this society, and this is why they're determined to take us into a war if we'll permit it... is the Reagan revolution.... So he's getting himself some laws so when he puts in the troops in Nicaragua, he can take charge of the American people, and put people in jail, and kick in their doors, and kill them if they don't like what he's doing....

The question is, `Are we going to permit our leaders to take away our freedoms because they have a charming smile and they were nice movie stars one day, or are we going to stand up and fight, and insist on our freedoms?' It's up to us - you and I can watch this history play in the next year and 2 and 3 years.

"CIA Covert Operations in Central America, CIA Manipulation of the Press, CIA Experimentation on the U.S. Public"

I just got my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our censorship laws....

In that job [Angola] I sat on a sub-committee of the NSC, so I was like a chief of staff, with the GS-18s (like 3-star generals) Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby (the CIA director), the GS-18s and the CIA, making important decisions and my job was to put it all together and make it happen and run it, an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done....

When the world's gotten blocked up before, like a monopoly game where everything's owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erased the board and started over has been to have big world wars, and erase countries and bomb cities and bomb banks and then start from scratch again. This is not an option to us now because of all these 52,000 nuclear weapons....

The United States CIA is running 50 covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the world today....

By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public record. The 50 covert actions - these are secret, but that has been leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of the Congress. I urge you not to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourself is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying, `them that don't do politics will be done'. If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig it out from the records, go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank and your adrenaline pumps, and you can be mobilized and excited to do things that are not in your interest to do....

Nicaragua is not the biggest covert action, it is the most famous one. Afghanistan is, we spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less than that, but close, in Nicaragua....

[When the U.S. doesn't like a government], they send the CIA in, with its resources and activists, hiring people, hiring agents, to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country, as a technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping that they can make the government come to the U.S.'s terms, or the government will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric of course is fairly textbook-ish. What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market, where children can't go to school, where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside their homes, where government administration and programs grind to a complete halt, where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people, where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt. If you ask the state department today what is their official explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say it's to attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.

To destabilize Nicaragua beginning in 1981, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-national guardsmen, calling them the contras (the counter-revolutionaries). We created this force, it did not exist until we allocated money. We've armed them, put uniforms on their backs, boots on their feet, given them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we've sent them in to de-stabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction they have systematically been blowing up graineries, saw mills, bridges, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.

If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this, and their approach to it, dig up `The Sabotage Manual', that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua, a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt, how you can gum up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a sewage to stop up the sewage so it won't work, things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.

Systematically, the contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. You remember the assassination manual? that surfaced in 1984. It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They use terror. This is a technique that they're using to traumatize the society so that it can't function.

I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your government and its agents are doing. They go into villages, they haul out families. With the children forced to watch they castrate the father, they peel the skin off his face, they put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these things to the children.

This is nobody's propaganda. There have been over 100,000 American witnesses for peace who have gone down there and they have filmed and photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way, mostly women and children. These are the activities done by these contras. The contras are the people president Reagan calls `freedom fighters'. He says they're the moral equivalent of our founding fathers. And the whole world gasps at this confession of his family traditions.

Read "Contra Terror" by Reed Brody former assistant Attorney General of New York State. Read "The Contras" by Dieter Eich. Read "With the Contras" by Christopher Dickey. This is a main-line journalist, down there on a grant with the Council on Foreign Relations, a slightly to the right of the middle of the road organization. He writes a book that sets a pox on both your houses, and then he accounts about going in on patrol with the contras, and describes their activities. Read "Witness for Peace: What We have Seen and Heard" . Read the Lawyer's Commission on Human Rights. Read "The Violations of War on Both Sides" by the Americas Watch. And there are many, many more documentations of details, of names, of the incidents that have happened.

Part of a de-stabilization is propaganda, to dis-credit the targeted government. This one actually began under Jimmy Carter. He authorized the CIA to go in and try to make the Sandinistas look to be evil. So in 1979 [when] they came in to power, immediately we were trying to cast them as totalitarian, evil, threatening Marxists. While they abolished the death sentence, while they released 8,000 national guardsmen that they had in their custody that they could have kept in prison, they said `no. Unless we have evidence of individual crimes, we're not going to hold someone in prison just because they were associated with the former administration.' While they set out to launch a literacy campaign to teach the people to read and write, which is something that the dictator Somoza, and us supporting him, had never bothered to get around to doing. While they set out to build 2,500 clinics to give the country something resembling a public health policy, and access to medicines, we began to label them as totalitarian dictators, and to attack them in the press, and to work with this newspaper `La Prensa', which - it's finally come out and been admitted, in Washington - the U.S. government is funding: a propaganda arm.

[Reagan and the State dept. have] been claiming they're building a war machine that threatens the stability of Central America. Now the truth is, this small, poor country has been attacked by the world's richest country under conditions of war, for the last 5 years. Us and our army - the death they have sustained, the action they have suffered - it makes it a larger war proportionally than the Vietnam war was to the U.S. In addition to the contra activities, we've had U.S. Navy ships supervising the mining of harbors, we've sent planes in and bombed the capital, we've had U.S. military planes flying wing-tip to wing-tip over the country, photographing it, aerial reconnaissance. They don't have any missiles or jets they can send up to chase us off. "We" are at war with "them" . The have not retaliated yet with any kind of war action against us, but we do not give them credit with having the right to defend themselves. So we claim that the force they built up, which is obviously purely defensive, is an aggressive force that threatens the stability of all of Central America.

We claim the justification for this is the arms that are flowing from Nicaragua to El Salvador, and yet in 5 years of this activity, President Reagan hasn't been able to show the world one shred of evidence of any arms flowing from Nicaragua into El Salvador.

We launched a campaign to discredit their elections. International observer teams said these were the fairest elections they have witnessed in Central America in many years. We said they were fraudulent, they were rigged, because it was a totalitarian system. Instead we said, the elections that were held in El Salvador were models of democracy to be copied elsewhere in the world. And then the truth came out about that one. And we learned that the CIA had spent 2.2 million dollars to make sure that their choice of candidates - Duarte - would win. They did everything, we're told, by one of their spokesmen, indirectly, but stuff the ballot boxes....

I'll make a footnote that when I speak out, he [Senator Jesse Helms] calls me a traitor, but when something happens he doesn't like, he doesn't hesitate to go public and reveal the secrets and embarrass the U.S.

We claim the Sandinistas are smuggling drugs as a technique to finance their revolution. This doesn't make sense. We're at war with them, we're dying to catch them getting arms from the Soviet Union, flying things back and forth to Cuba. We have airplanes and picket ships watching everything that flies out of that country, and into it. How are they going to have a steady flow of drug-smuggling planes into the U.S.? Not likely! However, there are Nicaraguans, on these bases in Honduras, that have planes flying into CIA training camps in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, several times a week.

Now, obviously i'm not going to stand in front of you and say that the CIA might be involved in drug trafficking, am I? READ THE BOOK. Read "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" . For 20 years the CIA was helping the Kuomintang to finance itself and then to get rich, smuggling heroin. When we took over from the French in 1954 their intelligence service had been financing itself by smuggling the heroin out of Laos. We replaced them - we put Air America, the CIA subsidiary - it would fly in with crates marked humanitarian aid, which were arms, and it would fly back out with heroin. And the first target, market, of this heroin was the U.S. GI's in Vietnam. If anybody in Nicaragua is smuggling drugs, it's the contras. Now i've been saying that since the state department started waving this red herring around a couple of years ago, and the other day you notice President Reagan said that the Nicaraguans, the Sandinistas, were smuggling drugs, and the DEA said, `it ain't true, the contras are smuggling drugs'.

We claim the Sandinistas are responsible for the terrorism that's happening anywhere in the world. `The country club of terrorism' we call it. There's an incident in Rome, and Ed Meese goes on television and says, `that country club in Nicaragua is training terrorists'. We blame the Sandinistas for the misery that exists in Nicaragua today, and there is misery, because the world's richest nation has set out to create conditions of misery, and obviously we're bound to have some effect. The misery is not the fault of the Sandinistas, it's the result of our destabilization program. And despite that, and despite some grumbling in the country, the Sandinistas in their elections got a much higher percentage of the vote than President Reagan did, who's supposed to be so popular in this country. And all observers are saying that people are still hanging together, with the Sandinistas.

Now it gets tricky. We're saying that the justification for more aid, possibly for an invasion of the country - and mind you, president Reagan has begun to talk about this, and the Secretary of Defense Weinberger began to say that it's inevitable - we claim that the justification is that the Soviet Union now has invested 500 million dollars in arms in military to make it its big client state, the Soviet bastion in this hemisphere. And that's true. They do have a lot of arms in there now. But the question is, how did they get invited in? You have to ask yourself, what's the purpose of this destabilization program? For this I direct you back to the Newsweek article in Sept. 1981, where they announce the fact that the CIA was beginning to put together this force of Somoza's ex-guard. Newsweek described it as `the only truly evil, totally unacceptable factor in the Nicaraguan equation'. They noted that neither the white house nor the CIA pretended it ever could have a chance of winning. So then they asked, rhetorically, `what's the point?' and they concluded that the point is that by attacking the country, you can force the Sandinistas into a more radical position, from which you have more ammunition to attack them.

And that's what we've accomplished now. They've had to get Soviet aid to defend themselves from the attack from the world's richest country, and now we can stand up to the American people and say, `see? they have all the Soviet aid'. Make no doubt of it, it's the game plan of the Reagan Administration to have a war in Nicaragua, they have been working on this since 1981, they have been stopped by the will of the American people so far, but they're working harder than ever to engineer their war there.

Now, CIA destabilizations are nothing new, they didn't begin with Nicaragua. We've done it before, once or twice. Like the Church committee, investigating CIA covert action in 1975, found that we had run several hundred a year, and we'd been in the business of running covert actions, the CIA has, for 4 decades. You're talking about 10 to 20 thousand covert actions.

CIA apologists leap up and say, `well, most of these things are not so bloody'. And that's true. You're giving a politician some money so he'll throw his party in this direction or that one, or make false speeches on your behalf, or something like that. It may be non-violent, but it's still illegal intervention in other countries' affairs, raising the question of whether or not we are going to have a world in which law, rules of behaviour, are respected, or is it going to be a world of bullies, where the strongest can violate and brutalize the weakest, and ignore the laws?

But many of these things are very bloody indeed, and we know a lot about a lot of them. Investigations by the Congress, testimony by CIA directors, testimony by CIA case officers, books written by CIA case officers, documents gotten out of the government under the freedom of information act, books that are written by by pulitzer-prize-winning journalists who've documented their cases. And you can go and read from these things, classic CIA operations that we know about, some of them very bloody indeed. Guatemala 1954, Brazil, Guyana, Chile, The Congo, Iran, Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Equador, Uruguay - the CIA organized the overthrow of constitutional democracies. Read the book "Covert Action: 35 years of Deception" by the journalist Godswood. Remember the Henry Kissinger quote before the Congress when he was being grilled to explain what they had done to overthrow the democratic government in Chile, in which the President, Salvador Allende had been killed. And he said, `The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves'.

We had covert actions against China, very much like what we're doing against Nicaragua today, that led us directly into the Korean war, where we fought China in Korea. We had a long covert action in Vietnam, very much like the one that we're running in Nicaragua today, that tracked us directly into the Vietnam war. Read the book, "The Hidden History of the Korean War" by I. F. Stone. Read "Deadly Deceits" by Ralph McGehee for the Vietnam story. In Thailand, the Congo, Laos, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Honduras, the CIA put together large standing armies. In Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, the Congo, Iran, Nicaragua, and Sri Lanca, the CIA armed and encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight. The first thing we began doing in Nicaragua, 1981 was to fund an element of the Miskito indians, to give them money and training and arms, so they could rise up and fight against the government in Managua. In El Salvador, Vietnam, Korea, Iran, Uganda and the Congo, the CIA helped form and train the death squads.

In El Salvador specifically, under the `Alliance for Progress' in the early 1960's, the CIA helped put together the treasury police. These are the people that haul people out at night today, and run trucks over their heads. These are the people that the Catholic church tells us, has killed something over 50,000 civilians in the last 5 years. And we have testimony before our Congress that as late as 1982, leaders of the treasury police were still on the CIA payroll.

Then you have the `Public Safety Program'. I have to take just a minute on this one because it's a very important principle involved that we must understand, if we're to understand ourselves and the world that we live in. In this one, the CIA was working with police forces throughout Latin America for about 26 years, teaching them how to wrap up subversive networks by capturing someone and interrogating them, torturing them, and then getting names and arresting the others and going from there. Now, this was such a brutal and such a bloody operation, that Amnesty International began to complain and publish reports. Then there were United Nations hearings. Then eventually our Congress was forced to yield to international pressure and investigate it, and they found the horror that was being done, and by law they forced it to stop. You can read these reports - the Amnesty International findings, and our own Congressional hearings.

We do not parachute teams into the Soviet Union to haul families out at night and castrate the father with the children watching, because they have the Bomb, and a big army, and they would parachute teams right back into our country and do the same thing to us - they're not scared of us. For slightly different reasons, but also obvious reasons, we don't do these things in England, or France, or Germany, or Sweden, or Italy, or Japan. What comes out at you immediately is that these 1 to 3 million direct victims, the dead, and in these other wars, they're people of the third world, they're citizens of countries that are too small to defend them from United States brutality and aggression. They're people of the Mitumba mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and now the hills of northern Nicaragua - 12,000 peasants. We have not killed KGB or Russian army advisors in Nicaragua. We are not killing Cuban advisors. We're not killing very many Sandinistas. The 12,000 that we have killed in Nicaragua are peasants, who have the misfortune of living in a CIA's chosen battlefield. Mostly women and children. Communists? Far, far, far more Catholics than anything else.

Now case officers that do these things in places in Nicaragua, they do not come back to the U.S. and click their heels and suddenly become responsible citizens. They see themselves - they have been functioning above the laws, of God, and the laws of man - they've come back to this country, and they've continued their operations as far as they can get by with them. And we have abundant documentation of that as well. The MH-Chaos program, exposed in the late 60's and shut down, re-activated by President Reagan to a degree - we don't have the details yet - in which they were spending a billion dollars to manipulate U.S. student, and labor organizations. The MK-ultra program. For 20 years, working through over 200 medical schools and mental hospitals, including Harvard Medical School, Georgetown, some of the biggest places we've got, to experiment on American citizens with disease, and drugs.

They dragged a barge through San Francisco Bay, leaking a virus, to measure this technique for crippling a city. They launched a whooping cough epidemic in a Long Island suburb, to see what it would do to the community if all the kids had whooping cough. Tough shit about the 2 or 3 with weak constitutions that might die in the process. They put light bulbs in the subways in Manhattan, that would create vertigo - make people have double vision, so you couldn't see straight - and hid cameras in the walls - to see what would happen at rush hour when the trains are zipping past - if everybody has vertigo and they can't see straight and they're bumping into each other.

Colonel White - oh yes, and I can't not mention the disease experimentations - the use of deadly diseases. We launched - when we were destabilizing Cuba for 7 years - we launched the swine fever epidemic, in the hog population, trying to kill out all of the pigs - a virus. We experimented in Haiti on the people with viruses.

I'm not saying, I do not have the slightest shred of evidence, that there is any truth or indication to the rumor that the CIA and its experimentations were responsible for AIDS. But we do have it documented that the CIA has been experimenting on people, with viruses. And now we have some deadly, killer viruses running around in society. And it has to make you wonder, and it has to make you worry.

Colonel White wrote from retirement - he was the man who was in charge of this macabre program - he wrote, `I toiled whole-heartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the blessings of the all highest?' Now that program, the MK-ultra program, was eventually exposed by the press in 1972, investigated by the Congress, and shut down by the Congress. You can dig up the Congressional record and read it for yourself.

There's one book called `In Search of the Manchurian Candidate'. It's written by John Marks, based on 14,000 documents gotten out of the government under the Freedom of Information Act. Read for yourselves. The thing was shut down but not one CIA case officer who was involved was in any way punished. Not one case officer involved in these experimentations on the American public, lost a single paycheck for what they had done.

The Church committee found that the CIA had co-opted several hundred journalists, including some of the biggest names in the business, to pump its propaganda stories into our media, to teach us to hate Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, and the Chinese, and whomever. The latest flap or scandal we had about that was a year and a half ago. Leslie Gelb, the heavyweight with the New York Times, was exposed for having been working covertly with the CIA in 1978 to recruit journalists in Europe, who would introduce stories, print stories that would create sympathy for the neutron bomb.

The Church committee found that they had published over 1,000 books, paying someone to write a book, the CIA puts its propaganda lines in it, the professor or the scholar gets credit for the book and gets the royalties. The latest flap we had about that was last year. A professor at Harvard was exposed for accepting 105,000 dollars from the CIA to write a book about the Middle East. Several thousand professors and graduate students co-opted by the CIA to run its operations on campusses and build files on students.

And then we have evidence - now, which has been hard to collect in the past but we knew it was happening - of CIA agents participating, trying to manipulate, our elections. FDN, Contra commanders, traveling this country on CIA plane tickets, going on television and pin-pointing a Congressional and saying, `That man is soft on Communism. That man is a Sandinista lover.' A CIA agent going on television, trying to manipulate our elections.

All of this, to keep America safe for freedom and democracy.

In Nicaragua the objective is to stop the Cuban and Soviet take-over, we say. Another big operation in which we said the same thing was Angola, 1975, my little war. We were saying exactly the same thing - Cubans and Soviets.

Now I will not going into great detail about this one tonight because I wrote a book about it, I detailed it. And you can get a copy of that book and read it for yourselves. I have to urge you, however - please do not rush out and buy a copy of that book because the CIA sued me. All of my profits go to the CIA, so if you buy a copy of the book you'll be donating 65 cents to the CIA. So check it out from your library!

If you have to buy a copy, well buy one copy and share it with all your friends. If your bookstore is doing real well and you want to just sort of put a copy down in your belt...

I don't know what the solution is when a society gets into censorship, government censorship, but that's what we're in now. Do the rules change? I just got my book back, my latest book back from the CIA censors. If I had not submitted it to them, I would have gone to jail, without trial - blow off juries and all that sort of thing - for having violated our censorship laws....

So now we have the CIA running the operation in Nicaragua, lying to us, running 50 covert actions, and gearing us up for our next war, the Central American war. Let there be no doubt about it, President Reagan has a fixation on Nicaragua. He came into office saying that we shouldn't be afraid of war, saying we have to face and erase the scars of the Vietnam war. He said in 1983, `We will do whatever is necessary to reverse the situation in Nicaragua', meaning get rid of the Sandinistas. Admiral LaRocque, at the Center for Defense Information in Washington, says this is the most elaborately prepared invasion that the U.S. has ever done. At least that he's witnessed in his 40 years of association with our military.

We have rehearsed the invasion of Nicaragua in operations Big Pine I, Big Pine II, Ocean Venture, Grenedara, Big Pine III. We have troops right now in Honduras preparing. We've built 12 bases, including 8 airstrips. Obviously we don't need 8 airstrips in Honduras for any purpose, except to support the invasion of Nicaragua. We've built radar stations around, to survey and watch. Some of these ventures have been huge ones. Hundreds of airplanes, 30,000 troops, rehearsing the invasion of Nicaragua.

And of course, Americans are being given this negative view of these evil Communist dictators in Managua, just 2 days' drive from Harlingen, Texas. (They drive faster than I do by the way). I saw an ad on TV just two days ago in which they said that it was just 2 hours from Managua to Texas. All of this getting us ready for the invasion of Nicaragua, for our next war.

Most of the people - 75% of the people - are polled as being against this action. However, President Eisenhower said, `The people of the world genuinely want peace. Someday the leadership of the world are going to have to give in and give it to them'. But to date, the leaders never have, they've always been able to outwit the people, us, and get us into the wars when they've chosen to do so.

People ask, how is this possible. I get this all the time.... Americans *are* decent people. They *are* nice people. And they're insulated in the worlds that they live in, and they don't understand and we don't read our history. History is the history of war. Of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young men off to fight.

In our country we talk about peace. But look at our own record. We have over 200 incidents in which we put our troops into other countries to force them to our will. Now we're being prepared to hate the Sandinistas. The leaders are doing exactly what they have done time and again throughout history. In the past we were taught to hate and fight the Seminole Indians, after the leaders decided to annex Florida. To hate and fight the Cherokee Indians after they found gold in Georgia. To hate and fight Mexico twice. We annexed Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, part of Colorado, and California.

In each of these wars the leaders have worked to organize, to orchestrate public opinion. And then when they got people worked up, they had a trigger that would flash, that would make people angry enough that we could go in and do....

We have a feeling that the Vietnam war was the first one in which the people resisted. But once again, we haven't read our history. Kate Richards-O'Hare. In 1915, she said about WW I, `The Women of the U.S. are nothing but brutesalles, producing sons to be put in the army, to be made into fertilizer'. She was jailed for 5 years for anti-war talk.

The lessons of the Vietnam war for the American people is that it was a tragic mistake.... 58,000 of our own young people were killed, 2 million Vietnamese were killed. We withdrew, and our position wound up actually stronger in the Pacific Basin.

You look around this society today to see if there's any evidence of our preparations for war, and it hits you in the face....

'Join the Army. Be all that you can be'. Now if there was truth in advertising, obviously those commercials would show a few seconds of young men with their legs blown off at the knees, young men with their intestines wrapped around their necks because that's what war is really all about.

If there was honesty on the part of the army and the government, they would tell about the Vietnam veterans. More of whom died violent deaths from suicide after they came back from Vietnam then died in the fighting itself.

Then you have President Reagan.... He talks about the glory of war, but you have to ask yourself, where was he when wars were being fought that he was young enough to fight in them? World War II, and the Korean war. Where he was was in Hollywood, making films, where the blood was catsup, and you could wash it off and go out to dinner afterwards....

Where was Gordon Liddy when he was young enough to go and fight in a war? He was hiding out in the U.S. running sloppy, illegal, un-professional breaking and entering operations. Now you'll forgive my egotism, at that time I was running professional breaking and entering operations....

What about Rambo himself? Sylvester Stallone. Where was Sylvester Stallone during the Vietnam war? He got a draft deferment for a physical disability, and taught physical education in a girls' school in Switzerland during the war.

Getting back to President Reagan. He really did say that `you can always call cruise missiles back'.... Now, you can call back a B-52, and you can call back a submarine, but a cruise missile is different.... When it lands, it goes boom ! And I would prefer that the man with the finger on the button could understand the difference. This is the man that calls the MX a peace-maker. This is the man who's gone on television and told us that nuclear war could be winnable. This is the man who's gone on television and proposed that we might want to drop demonstration [atom] bombs in Europe to show people that we're serious people. This is the man who likens the Contras to the moral equivalents of our own founding fathers. This is the man who says South Africa is making progress on racial equality. This is the man who says that the Sandinistas are hunting down and hounding and persecuting Jews in Nicaragua. And the Jewish leaders go on TV the next day in this country and say there are 5 Jewish families in Nicaragua, and they're not having any problems at all. This is the man who says that they're financing their revolution by smuggling drugs into the U.S. And the DEA says, `It ain't true, it's president Reagan's Contras that are doing it'....

[When Reagan was governor of California, Reagan] said `If there has to be a bloodbath then let's get it over with'. Now you have to think about this a minute. A leader of the U.S. seriously proposing a bloodbath of our own youth. There was an outcry of the press, so 3 days later he said it again to make sure no-one had misunderstood him.

Read. You have to read to inform yourselves. Read "The Book of Quotes"; "On Reagan: The Man and the Presidency" by Ronnie Dugger. It gets heavy. Dugger concludes in his last chapter that President Reagan has a fixation on Armageddon. The Village Voice 18 months ago published an article citing the 11 times that President Reagan publicly has talked about the fact that we are all living out Armageddon today....

[Reagan] has Jerry Falwell into the White House. This is the man that preaches that we should get on our knees and beg for God to send the rapture down. Hell's fires on earth so the chosen can go up on high and all the other people can burn in hell's fires on earth. President Reagan sees himself as playing the role of the greatest leader of all times forever. Leading us into Armageddon. As he goes out at the end of his long life, we'll all go out with him....

Why does the CIA run 10,000 brutal covert actions? Why are we destabilizing a third of the countries in the world today when there's so much instability and misery already? Why are our leaders now taking us into another war? Why are we systematically taught to hate and fight other people?

What you have to understand is the politics of paranoia. The easiest... buttons to punch are the buttons of macho, aggression, paranoia, hate, anger, and fear. The Communists are in Managua and that's just 2 hours from San Diego, CA. This gets people excited, they don't think. It's the pep-rally, the football pep-rally factor. When you get people worked up to hate, they'll let you spend huge amounts of money on arms.

Read "The Power Elite" by C. Wright Mills. Read "The Permanent War Complex" by Seymour Melman. CIA covert actions have the function of keeping the world hostile and unstable....

We can't take care of the poor, we can't take care of the old, but we can spend millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to destabilize Nicaragua....

Why arms instead of schools? .... They can make gigantic profits off the nuclear arms race because of the hysteria, and the paranoia, and the secrecy. And that's why they're committed to building more and more and more weapons, is because they're committed to making a profit. And that's what the propaganda, and that's what the hysteria is all about. Now people say, `What can I do?'....

The youth *did* rise up and stop the Vietnam war....

We have to join hands with the people in England, and France, and Germany, and Israel, and the Soviet Union, and China, and India - the countries that have the bomb, and the others that are trying to get it. And give our leaders no choice. They have to find some other way to do business other than to motivate us through hate and paranoia and anger and killing, or we'll find other leaders to run the country.

Now, Helen Caldicott, at the end of her lectures, I've heard her say, very effectively, "Tell people to get out and get to work on the problem.... You'll feel better" ....

'What can I do?'.... If you can travel, go to Nicaragua and see for yourself. Go to the Nevada test site and see for yourself. Go to Pantex on Hiroshima day this summer, and see the vigil there. The place where we make 10 nose-cones a day, 70 a week, year in and year out. He [Admiral LaRocque] said, "I'd tell them, if they feel comfortable lying down in front of trucks with bombs on them, to lie down in front of trucks with bombs on them." But he said, "I'd tell them that they can't wait. They've got to start tomorrow, today, and do it, what they can, every day of their lives."

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https://ourhiddenhistory.org/2017/02/25/john-stockwell-the-secret-wars-of-the-cia.html

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https://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock2.html

The CIA and the Gulf War

by John Stockwell

A speech delivered on 1991-02-20 at the

Louden Nelson Community Center, Santa Cruz, California

INTRODUCTION

John Stockwell is a 13-year veteran of the CIA and a former U.S. Marine Corps major. He was hired by the CIA in 1964, spent six years working for the CIA in Africa, and was later transferred to Vietnam. In 1973 he received the CIA's Medal of Merit, the Agency's second-highest award. In 1975, Stockwell was promoted to the CIA's Chief of Station and National Security Council coordinator, managing covert activities during the first years of Angola's bloody civil war. After two years he resigned, determined to reveal the truth about the agency's role in the Third World. Since that time, he has worked tirelessly to expose the criminal activities of the CIA. He is the author of In Search of Enemies, an exposé of the CIA's covert action in Angola.

Stockwell is a founding member of Peaceways and ARDIS (the Association for Responsible Dissent), an organization of former CIA and Government officials who are openly critical of the CIA's activities. His latest book is entitled The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.

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JOHN STOCKWELL: Thank you from the bottom of my heart for inviting me back. This is one of my favorite places in the nation. My growth, as I have come out of the CIA quite a few years ago now and learned to speak, and learned confidence — some of my early appearances were right here, in fact. And the response that I got, and the support that I got helped me to grow as I continued to travel and lecture and debate and read and read and read, and write things, some of them successfully published.

We've got a book coming out right now called The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order. And it's in the trucks across the nation right now. It'll be in the bookstores, they say, in about three weeks. That's apparently how long it takes.

I want to commend you for your energy and your interest in the world. And I apologize for having my back to you. I'm just glad you could get in. We just turned away about 500 people. And that's a tragedy, when communication is so important on such important issues. And so, of course, I went out to tell them that if anyone wants to organize it, and if the energy is still there, I'll come back in three days or two weeks, or whatever is viable.

What's so important about your being here, and this kind of interest is the basic principle that I realized a long time ago and that many of you realized long before I did, is that we are, in fact, programmable creatures. We can be taught from childhood. And we are taught, in this country, in such a way that we're conditioned — that we'll respond when someone else reaches inside our breast to poke buttons and make us march off to war and kill people, or cheer when others go off to kill people. And the only way to defend yourself and your loved ones against that is to program yourself. And you do that by reading books and by sharing conversations with serious people and by lectures and events like this one, and all the other ones that you've been doing. And certainly, this great engine of information and energy [in this audience] is just awesome.

Now what we're going to talk about here tonight is what I call "The Good War Number Two." I'm sure you remember Studs Terkel's book, THE GOOD WAR, about World War II, where the rationales were so solid that the nation was pretty well behind it and even the Communist party (and [though] Karl Marx had challenged to boycott, and the people had challenged to boycott the big capitalist war) .... even the Communist party got behind it, as well. Everybody got behind it, just about, except for a very few hard-core pacifists. And [back then too it was called] "the New World Order." This [now] is being fought in the name of "the New World Order", George Bush being the chief thereof.

First, before I get into this .... and I'm going to have to move pretty fast tonight because the subject is dense: what we want to cover. I will plow through it, and then we'll get into questions. And again, feel free — if you're shy or something — to write down the question. But it's more fun if we have the energy of people standing up and making short statements so that others can speak, as well: questioning, challenging. We'll have the energy going back and forth between us.

But first, how many people have read ..... The last time I was here, I asked you to ..... How many people actually read Howard Zinn's bookA People's History of the United States? ..... That's better! Everybody else: Tomorrow, call in sick. Don't go to class. Read this book! Quite simply, you will never understand the U.S. System as completely until you read it. And once you read it, you will be able to understand what's happening, broadly, for the rest of your life. It's extremely well-written, extremely well- documented, tremendously moving, with quotes on every page: every phase of our history, as viewed, not from the interests of the country and big business — as our high school textbooks are and as our college textbooks are — but from the viewpoint of the people who died in the wars, who fought in the wars, who paid for the wars, and who profited from the wars, of course.

This war we're going to talk about tonight is called the "Persian Gulf War" — the "SuperBowl War" — the "Made-for-Television War" — the "Pentagon-Edited War" — the "Women-Have-a-Right-to-Kill,-Die- and-Be-Captured-Too War" — "the Censored War" — the "Saddam Hussein-is-So-Evil-We-Have-to-Do-It War" — and the "I've-Got-to-Support-Our-Troops-Right-or-Wrong War".

Now this thing was thoroughly prepared for six months, overtly, by the United States Government, the Pentagon, and the Media — CNN [Cable News Network] getting into it many weeks ago with heavy coverage. We covered it so thoroughly that on January 14th ..... and I've been writing screenplays and things, trying to make a living, with CNN on ..... On the 14th, waiting for the kick-off, they had an Emory University professor on who gave us advice on how to play Wall Street to profit from the war before it happened. His advice is very simple — in case you're sitting on a bundle of money and you don't want to give it to the Christic Institute or to me — He said: "Jump now." That was on the 14th. He said: "Don't wait a few days because then, other people will be jumping. Go in right now!" And then, he said: "The U.S. dollar will go up temporarily, so buy Japanese yen. Wait `til it goes up, then buy Japanese yen because by the end of the year the dollar will be back down and the yen will have doubled in value again and you can make a bundle on that.

Every obscene coverage that we could possibly do!

And then the whole world waited, on the 15th and 16th, for the kickoff of this great modern war. Now, some people waited, or had been waiting, longer than others. I found myself in the position (albeit a country boy from Texas who grew up in Africa; but you know) reading books and having seen a little bit of this stuff from the National Security Council level, I had been able to predict, nine months ahead of time, that the U.S. would invade Panama. And this was not a shot in the dark. This was an analysis of the United States and George Bush — for whom I worked, at the end of the "Angola Secret War", where I was the task force commander for a subcommittee of the National Security Council, and he was the CIA Director responsible for fending off the Congress.

Let me hasten to say that this is a very nice man to be around. He's considerate. He's personable. He has high positive energy. If your child gets sick, even if you're way down on his staff, you'll get a postcard in the mail very promptly, saying:

"Very sorry about Johnny ..."

shaking hands with people and remembering their names; a considerate, decent person at the human level. And then, of course, he has rationales for what he does, and we're going to be talking about these things. But I gave speeches at American University in November, and then at the House of Commons in England in early December. Again, C-SPAN managed to get a film of this, a video, and they played it on national television eight times when the invasion occurred, because in those speeches, I had predicted the invasion and analyzed why. Then, about a year ago, I predicted this war. And again, this was not a shot in the dark. This was a cold, sober, careful analysis of the United States: where it was, and why it would need a war; and of George Bush: and why he would take the nation into war.

Now that's what I want to go through tonight, if I possibly can, is to give you all the essential elements and understanding of how I was able to make those predictions, so that you will be able to predict the next war. Because there certainly will be another one after this one, unless we can intervene and break the cycles, and make a profound change in the United States System. My point is that we know how these things work. It isn't magic. It isn't classified. It isn't secret. Since the Vietnam War, the Establishment — the Military Establishment, as I call it — Eisenhower called it the Military-Industrial Complex — the Military Establishment, which is the very powerful central engine in our society, in our permanent War Complex, has been working to erase the stigma of the Vietnam War and has been telling us that it was doing that.

President Reagan came into office saying that he would teach the nation how to fight war again, to make us stand tall — and then, of course, pouring huge resources into the Military, and glamorizing the Military, bombing Libya, invading Grenada, and [waging] low-intensity warfare against Nicaragua, but rehearsing for the invasion of Nicaragua. Interestingly enough, they were prohibited by the Military, by the Pentagon, by the Defense Department, from invading Nicaragua, actually, because the [American] People were solidly against it. And so, the Secretary of Defense, in public speeches, said: "No, not with my Defense Department, unless you can persuade the People to support it." They couldn't make their sale, and we were spared the horror of our doing this thing on Nicaragua.

Now at the same time, through these years, people like Harry Summers, a colonel, teaching at the War College, writing his book on strategy, analyzing the Vietnam War for the failures of the Vietnam War, not apologetic, not that it was a wrong war. Not at all! He was saying that what we'd done wrong was we had failed to orchestrate the war and to organize and motivate the American People to support it; and that it went on too long, and we didn't win, and we didn't go in decisively enough with a major military strike. The Military has always maintained that if they could have gone in, all out, they would have won in Vietnam very efficiently, and that they were hamstrung by the politicians, and were prevented from fighting a good war. Dean Rusk, when he came out of office and retired, he said that the next war cannot be fought in the eye of the television camera with the Public second-guessing the generals as they're making decisions on the battlefields.

Now, you'll notice the interesting thing about that is, One: that he was wrong. He didn't understand that they could so captivate the nation that they could fight the war in the eye of the television camera. But it was a censored television camera, with the media playing along in the censorship. But perhaps the most significant thing about his statement was the fact that he was absolutely, blithely confident that there would BE another war.

Most of us were presuming that, because of the trauma of the Vietnam War, we had learned that these things are not cool, that they don't work, that we should never do them again. They maintained — the Military — that if the United States had gone in massively in Vietnam, with nukes, if they had to, and won in a few months time, the American People would have supported it, and there would have been no trauma. General Gavlett[sp], in the South Command in Panama, when they were trying to invade Nicaragua, he was saying: "The American People love a good bash, but you've got to get it over with in about six weeks time or it'll go sour on you. You can't afford to have the war still going on while the body bags start coming home."

Now since then, as part of this preparation for this war, this enormously successful preparation for this war — leading the nation into war and restoring the Military Complex — they've been preparing for greater control of our society. Now this is where it gets a little creepy:

They've been laying down a series of laws. I don't have time in the lecture to go through them, but as a matter of fact, I do list all of them that I was aware of in one chapter of this book that's coming out now [The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order.] — the National Security laws, which work to give them control of the Press, control of passports; they can stop Jane Fondas and Seymour Hershes from traveling and reporting from places like Hanoi, or My Lai scandals, and such.

You've got to understand that the United States is and has always been a war-loving nation, a warring nation. But one with a smile. We've learned how to put a twist on it so we can feel good about doing what other nations have done that we consider to be evil.

This is part of my analysis. And the CIA, in our training ..... when we were novices, people from the analytical side came to talk to us and they said:

"If you're trying to figure out what a nation is going to do, you don't take the circumstances on the table in front of you and say, the logical thing is that they'll do this. What you do is you look at the history of the country, its cycles of war or whatever. If it's a country that's gone to war frequently in its past, you expect it to go to war again. If it's a country that never goes to war, you expect it to find a peaceful solution."

And with that analysis, about ten years ago (although most of my growth, intellectually, has been since then) I began to just sit down and doodle how many wars the United States has been into. And I noticed there are a whole bunch of them. We've done a lot of this thing. A very warring nation! [War is] very deep in our history. Fifteen wars, as I count them. And this gets semantical. They didn't call Korea a war. They tried not to call Vietnam a war. But [the United States'] major military actions: I count about fifteen, give or take two, if you want to call them minor, but nevertheless, let's say fifteen wars. We've spent fifty years or so at war. We've had two hundred-plus military actions, about once a year, in which we put our troops into other countries to force them to our will. The longest period between wars was between World War I and World War II. The second longest period was between the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War.

Now, during the first period, the longest period, we put 12,000 troops with an Allied Force to invade Russia and we put our Marines repeatedly into Latin and Central American countries, again, to force them to our will. And then, of course, we've had low-intensity conflicts, almost uncountable — hundreds and hundreds of them, in between, for example, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf War.

As you begin to read these things (and Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is extremely good on following this kind of detail to really give you the punch lines of how the leadership orchestrated the nation into other wars) in each war there was a trigger. If you look at page 290 of that book, [Pres.] Harry Truman wrote a friend, quote:

"In strict confidence, I should welcome almost any war, for I think the country needs one."

You have the Battleship Maine ....

[JD: If the USS Maine was sunk on the orders of powerful people in the U.S. Government, it's not as glaring as the fact that they used the sinking as their excuse for the war that they desired.]

You have the battleship Maine, sunk under mysterious conditions in the Spanish-Cuban-American War. And the Press got into it [creating war hysteria], and we roared down there — Teddy Roosevelt and all that.

The Lusitania in World War I ....

[JD: The passenger ship Lusitania was sunk by a German U-boat. But why was it sent into hostile waters? Because men of money and power dearly desired to embroil the United States in a most profitable war by using that very effective tool: emotion, provoking outrage that impels commonfolk of decency to go into combat against "the huns" who drowned seven hundred terrified men, women and children.]

In 1915, Kate Richards O'Hara ... Remember, she said:

"The women of the United States are nothing but brood sows, producing sons to be put into the Army, to be turned into fertilizer."

And she was sentenced to five years in jail for anti-war talk. And then there was Pearl Harbor, which set off "the Good War," with the rationale so strong. And NOW, we have the absolute historical proof that our leadership DID know where the Japanese fleet was, where it was headed, and what its plans were — that it was going to sink our fleet in Pearl Harbor. And they did not warn the admiral to get the ships out to sea. They let the ships be sunk and [made] two thousand three hundred soldiers and sailors die so that it would galvanize the nation into the war that they wanted to go into.

And then you have, of course, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in [the instigation of] the Vietnam War.

[JD: President Lyndon Johnson lied to the Congress, and he admitted privately that he lied in his declaration that North Vietnamese gunboats had fired upon the USS Maddox in the Tonkin Gulf. Johnson's bosses were trying to provoke an attack that would be the justification for goading the Congress into granting the president the authorization to initiate this protracted and highly lucrative war with North Vietnam. But the North Vietnamese wouldn't bite. So Johnson invented the attack. In point-of-fact, the USS Maddox was never fired upon at all.]

In the Mexican War (we relate to that in Texas, and I'm sure you do here because it's very much a part of your heritage), they offered two dollars-a-head to every soldier who would enlist. They didn't get enough takers, so they offered a hundred acres of land to anyone who would be a veteran of that war. They still didn't get enough takers, so [future President] Zachary Taylor was sent down to parade up and down the border — the disputed border — until the Mexicans fired on him. And the headlines read:

~~~~~ "MEXICANS KILLING OUR BOYS IN TEXAS" ~~~~~

And the nation rose up, and we fought the war, and we took away from Mexico: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and part of Colorado.

And then, of course, you have the Persian Gulf War: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. This bald aggression, this very evil thing, this very evil man, who is the incarnation of Hitler himself, gave George Bush the vehicle he needed for this war that I had predicted that he was shopping around for.

We'll get into that in more detail in just a minute, but first you have to proceed to understand our system and how the conditioning works in a little bit more detail.

The conditioning to war in this country begins at the age of two, when we put our children in front of the one-eyed baby-sitter, and we turn it on and we go wash dishes or sweep the floor or clean the car — and we teach them. Actually, little kids (I don't know if you've done this recently), they're bored with TV at first. You have to get them hooked on it. We teach them, actually, to watch television. And very quickly they learn. And then they get to where they're watching 10 to 15 to 20 shows a day, all of them the same show, the same story with different characters. I call it the "American Syndrome." I'm talking about ..... We're raising a little boy who's 12 now. And he's heard my lectures. And I have to sit down and watch some of his TV with him so I can understand. You know, he says, "Daddy, c'mere." So, we've watched, over recent years: HE-MAN, SHEENA, THE THUNDERCATS, SCOOBY-DOO, and now it's the NINJA TURTLES, and THE RAIDERS — I forget. Always the same plot: Nice little people — attractive, usually light-skinned or light- complected, who are put upon by ugly, dark, evil forces like Skeletor. And they always say: "Please be nice. We don't want trouble." And the evil forces always insist. And at the last minute they leap around and miraculously defeat the evil forces. Cut! Commercial! And we plunge back into the same story with other characters. The "American Syndrome" of the nice people who loathe war, who wouldn't go to war, ever, except it's drummed into Americans from the age of two, that we're a nice, peace-loving nation, the good guys of the World who very reluctantly go to war when evil forces force it upon us.

Then you get into the stuff that we've treated ourselves to in the eighties during this cycle of war-mongering: RAMBO, COMMANDO, RED DAWN, ROCKY series, UNDER SIEGE, DELTA FORCE, AMERIKA, MISSING IN ACTION, TOP GUN, HEARTBREAK RIDGE, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR, PLATOON, HAMBURGER HILL, TOUR OF DUTY, CHINA BEACH, and the list is going on and on and on with the violent war movies.

Now once again, to analyze one of these, to give you ..... How many people saw the movie, RED DAWN? Now this is fun. How many people, when you saw it, knew that this was intended to be a war propaganda movie? The producer went around the nation, going on television, saying: "I wanted to make a movie that would make people feel positive about war." So this is an up-front, propaganda commercial, propaganda movie. So, we can analyze it to see: How do they motivate us to war when they want to make such a movie. And so, you take the plot. It's science fiction. They have a scenario set up — which you buy into in the first minute — that's impossible, unreal. There's a force of Russians, Cubans and Nicaraguans that has invaded the United States and gotten all the way to the Rocky Mountains, and blown off our nuclear weapons. Our Army doesn't exist. They're just there. And the people are struggling against them. AMERIKA, of course, had the same plot, a little bit. Now, so you've asked: "Why did they pick Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua?" It had to be Russia, of course, but a better plot would have been Russia, Canada and Mexico, or at least Russia, Canada and Cuba, because you know they could be coming across this vast border with Canada and pinning us up against Cuba and you could, you know, almost get into that as science fiction. So why Nicaragua? They [the U.S. Government] had decided to fight a [real] war in Nicaragua. So, it was essential that they begin to condition people to see Nicaragua as an enemy who would invade us if they could. This is science fiction. Nicaragua has never indicated any desire whatsoever to invade or hurt the United States. So this force gets all the way to the Rocky Mountains where they're eventually stopped by the high school football team, with the cheerleaders helping out, drinking deer's blood in the mountains.

Now see. This is off base. The eighties was the decade of the middle-aged woman. You know: DALLAS, DYNASTY, THE GOLDEN GIRLS, MURDER, SHE WROTE — Lynda Evans working out. Joan Collins is older than me, and she's a sex symbol, and this is wonderful. So, they should have made a movie, a modern war movie, where they get to the Rocky Mountains and they're stopped by high school football teachers. But they didn't do that. And so you ask: Why? And the answer is obvious. Because, one: They're not going to get US, the 50-year-olds, to fight any of their wars. Because we've seen wars of the past, and the cynicism. And with some exceptions, there are too many of us who are aware of the cynicism and wouldn't do it.

In addition to which, societies have always reached out and grabbed the 18-year-olds. In some societies, it's the 15-year-olds whose minds are empty, their bodies are healthy and they have a high level of testosterone and adventure and excitement and romanticism about war, which they have been taught to feel. And so, they're ripe and ready, programmed to be sent into war. And this movie, in fact, was shown to National Guard units as they were going down to Honduras to rehearse the invasion of Nicaragua. And it was shown at the Air Force Academy. It's a basic military movie that they're showing in boot camp to get people motivated into war.

Then you get into the TV ads that we've been saturated with over the last ten to fifteen years: "Join the Army. Be all that you can be." And you have these tanks jumping ditches and these helicopters that go 150 miles an hour, and people playing with computers, and lasers, and night vision, and television-radar-guided missiles. And I watch these things — as an old soldier who's really turned off by war. And I'm sitting up and saying: "Wow! That would be fun, you know, to get in one of those tanks." I mean, the tanks we had back then would jump a very small ditch and crash and break down. And now, they jump bigger ditches at 60 miles an hour — and crash and break down.

But the point is that these things are tremendously motivating, as they're intended to be. But how many people remember seeing the ad on television in which they showed the young men and women soldiers with their legs blown off at their knees, and their intestines wrapped around their necks? How many people saw that one? Didn't exist, did it? See, that's what war is really all about!

We have a whole generation of people over there now — a lot of them didn't want to go to war. They wanted to enjoy all the perks and fun, and join the Army and "be all they can be." And they weren't shown what war was really about. And now (gulp, swallow), they're over there right now, tonight, getting ready to kill people. And they'll carry the karma of the dead people with them for the rest of their lives — or be killed. And that's pretty heavy stuff.

Now, there's another fascinating ad, by the way. Did anyone see the ad that was massively on television that said: "War is bad. Work for peace. Resist the war incentives and the war instincts and the war motives?" How many people saw that one? Played on television six times a day for ten straight years — [paid] with U.S. tax dollars. Nobody? Has anybody EVER seen an ad run by our Government, with our tax dollars, advocating peace? Hasn't happened! And yet, HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of DOLLARS spent on these ads, with our tax dollars, to motivate us to war.

Then there's the one about the young man who's coming home on leave on the train. I don't know who rides trains anymore, but, you know. And he is met by his younger brother, and he says: "You know, Dad never did understand why I had to join the Army." How many people have seen this one? And then they're in the car, and he is saying: "Do you think Dad will ever forgive me?" And then they go into the house, and Dad is standing there smoking a pipe, and he turns and he melts and he hugs his son, and all is forgiven. Now they played that thing for ten straight years, SuperBowl, prime time, all the sports events, [knowing] that the men, especially young men, would be watching. Why would they spend hundreds of millions of dollars altogether on that particular ad with that theme? You see, the problem is that because of the Korean War and its cynicism, and the Vietnam War and its cynicism, there were too many dads who were telling their sons: "Don't join the Army!" And so, they had to float the message out to the society that in this society it's okay to defy your father's wisdom and join the Army. And if you do, he'll forgive you, and hug you, and embrace you, and respect you, and love you afterwards, anyway.

Now, since the "Good War One," World War II, we've had the CIA's Secret Wars. We've had two serious wars: Korea and Vietnam. But we've had the CIA running its low-intensity conflicts, its secret wars around the Globe. A lot of them. I'll mention that, kind of in passing, tonight because we have so much ground to cover. We've been destabilizing target governments in every corner of the Globe. We set up a system of governing by oligarchies — proxy government working through oligarchies in these countries who are permitted to become fabulously rich. This is the case in the Persian Gulf, the oil emirates who have 0.5 percent of their population of billionaires and millionaires, and the rest of the people share less or none at all of the country's wealth.

In Latin America, Central America, this same system is working. If the people don't like it, you organize the police into death squads, as we've done in many countries, including, conspicuously, El Salvador, and you kill enough of them that they are emasculated. They can't do anything about it. They are crippled. They are repressed, suppressed and oppressed, and you can get by with this system of milking the countries to your will and to your way.

The [Sen. Frank] Church Committee of 1975 ..... Again this is not a lecture about the Secret Wars of the CIA. That's a separate lecture. I could give it again, but it takes a full hour in its own right. But you must know how the CIA weaves into this war complex — this war machinery of ours. The Church Committee of 1975 investigated CIA "actions" and found that we had run — if you extrapolate the figures — about thirteen thousand-plus [covert operations] since we've had the CIA — since World War II. Now, a lot of these are fairly benign, and some of them fairly trivial. But a lot of them are VERY violent, and some of them lead into wars. A long destabilization/propaganda campaign led us into the Korean War, and another one led us into the Vietnam War. Now, scholars, including myself, reading these things — and we have so many of them in the public record that it's obviously very difficult to know exactly how many people died in Vietnam or in Korea or in Nicaragua or in the Congo — but still, working with conservative figures we come up with a minimum figure of SIX MILLION PEOPLE killed in the Secret Wars of the CIA through its destabilizations over these past forty years:

One million people killed in the Korean War;

Two million people killed in Vietnam;

One to two million people killed in Cambodia;

Eight hundred thousand people killed in Indonesia;

Fifty thousand people killed in Angola.

Now that began with the war that I organized as Commander of the Angola Task Force, working for a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Fifty thousand is the number that the Sandinistas and The New York Times pretty much agreed on were killed and wounded in Nicaragua in the ONE BILLION DOLLAR Contra destabilization in that country that we effected in the 1980s.

Now, these six million [people killed from] CIA activities, are all part of the Cold War in which probably about TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE were killed. And that makes it the second or third bloodiest war in all of human history, which is saying a lot. I call it also the Third World War. You could call it the Forty Years War of the twentieth century.

I call it the "Third World" War because when you analyze these things and read through them in the public record, which, again, is massively documented .... And by the way, the last third of this book [The Praetorian Guard] is a bibliography of the best 120 books on the subject, organized to make it easy for you to access each one with a mini-review, so you can decide which book will be most interesting and useful to you, and what this theme is all about. [When you analyze these crimes] you find that we do not do these massive bloody things against the Soviet Union. Torture and death squads we do not run in England or Canada or Belgium or Sweden or Switzerland. They are, virtually all of them, done against countries of the Third World where the governments of those countries are not strong enough to prohibit us, to prevent us from brutalizing their people. The six million people killed are people of the Third World: people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of Nicaragua. And now, of course, the Middle Eastern deserts, in a new wrinkle on this system.

The casualties in Nicaragua — fifty thousand people — they were not Russians. They were not Cubans. They were not even mostly Sandinistas. They were mostly rag-poor peasants, including a high percentage of women and children. Communists? They were mostly ROMAN CATHOLICS! Enemies of the United States? Nah. We had thousands of Witnesses [for Peace] who went down to live with them — to see. And they invariably came back and told us that the Nicaraguan People are the warmest people on the face of the Earth. They couldn't understand [why], but the Nicaraguans love the United States — the people from the United States; and that these people had trouble understanding why our Government would want to hire an army to send down there to brutalize them: to haul them out of their homes, and rape them, and slash off their breasts, and cut off their testicles while their children were forced to watch, which is what the Contra program did. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of documented cases.

This is where I came up, then, in writing about the Angola War, with my thesis, the title of my first book: In Search of Enemies. We were taking this war in Angola to people who did not want to be our enemies — as we did in Vietnam — as we did in Cuba and other places. The point of the CIA's activities is they .....ten thousand, thirteen thousand operations — three thousand major, gory, bloody operations, killing six million people .... they [the CIA] have made the world unstable. The six million people each leave behind an average of perhaps five loved ones who are traumatically conditioned to violence, who will go on continuing violence and keeping the world unstable and violent for the rest of their lives. And in an unstable world that's brimming and teeming with violence, you can spend trillions of dollars on the arms that you could not spend if the world were, in fact, peaceful.

Now again, I'm moving pretty fast. In other lectures I go into that in considerable detail. But getting into the 1980s, we had a constant conditioning, militarizing, and destabilizing under the Reagan Revolution. We spent TWO-AND-A-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS, according to our Government, on the largest military buildup in any peacetime period in history; perhaps, arguably, the largest military buildup in all of history.

Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan, the great orator, was selling this program to the American People by focusing our paranoid attention on Nicaragua. He spent more time talking about his Contra progam in Nicaragua than any other aspect of his presidency. He told us that America is feeling great again. He railed at the "Evil Empire" [the Soviet Union]. He said there's a Russian base in Nicaragua — in our own back yard. He said the Soviets are flying airplanes in this hemisphere for the first time in all of history. Of course, that wasn't true. Aeroflot has been flying out since World War II. But this is rhetoric! He hammered away. And the truth had nothing whatsoever to do with it. He said it was a two-day drive from Managua, Nicaragua to Arlington, Texas. He said it was closer from Managua to Houston than it was from Houston to Maine. He said it was a two-hour flight from Managua to San Diego. You could almost see the fighter-bombers sizzling up there to bomb San Diego. He said there will be a million communists coming up across our borders from the south. [Presidential aide] Ollie North volunteered, according to Pat Buchanan, to be put in command of the forces that would fight off the million communists as they came up from Central America through Mexico to invade this country.

Meanwhile, in 1988, President Bush, George Bush, my old boss, inherited the presidency. He won the election. He also inherited big political problems and economic problems because he had been vice-president under Ronald Reagan. And he inherited a four-and-a- half trillion dollar debt. Now, in the 1970s, we had been the richest country in the world — a creditor nation. In the middle of the `80s, under this policy of big spending on credit, we crossed the line and became a debtor nation for the first time since World War One. The debt was run up to four-and-a-half trillion dollars, the largest debt in the history of the world. And it is double-compounding, effectively, with the interest and with the continuing deficit. So you can look for it to jump to ten trillion and twenty trillion dollars, and NOBODY has the faintest idea of what, in fact, will happen to this thing, or what can be done with this thing.

What I'm saying is very simply this: President Reagan — great irony — President Reagan and Vice-President George Bush, and then President George Bush, SOLD OUT the United States in the production of arms. They rendered this country into a condition where other people control our economic future. And again, the irony is that they sold it through patriotism and making us feel great again.

George Bush inherited a situation in which the People were waking up. They were realizing the debt and feeling this ominous burden that we're going to have, which we'll pass on to our children. They were also realizing (even TIME Magazine published discussions on the decade of greed of the `80s, under Reagan and Bush) that the People's pockets had been picked. There has been a MASSIVE shift of wealth from the poor and middle-classes to the ultra-rich, in this period of time. The ultra-rich, for example, their taxes were cut from seventy percent to thirty-two percent. And President Reagan called it a tax cut. But for the poor — the bottom half of the society — it was a tax increase of five percent.

This is the key to understanding the Savings & Loan Crisis. The bankers encouraged irresponsibility. And remember, TWO HUNDRED officials in the Reagan Administration were forced to resign under the threat of trial — criminal proceedings for their corruption. And some of them were prosecuted and, in fact, jailed. And this irresponsibility trickled down into the savings and loan industry, which the Central Intelligence Agency was using to launder its money into Central America and to launder drug money into its programs. And the result, of course, is that they were BLOWING our money. We invested our money, and they would blow it, steal it, declare bankruptcy, open up another S&L bank.

And this became the norm until eventually they collapsed the industry. The bankers, the CIA, the Mafia and Neil Bush, George Bush's son: all involved in this great scandal, this massive bilking of the American People.

And now they're telling us that this is what George Bush inherited, and that what we need to do is .... They are NOT (the bankers, and George Bush and his cohorts) they are NOT going to pay that money back! But they say WE can't afford to lose the Public trust in the banking industry, so WE have to recondition the industry with five hundred billion to ONE TRILLION DOLLARS! And they're going to make the PEOPLE pay for it. And it was the PEOPLE whose money was stolen by these thieves to begin with! And they are NOT putting them in jail!

You know, when I see this thing, I say: "Where is the scream?" You know? "Huh?" How will it restore MY confidence in the banking industry to take MY money to replace what the thieves stole to begin with while they're proceeding to do it some more.

Meanwhile, because we couldn't afford everything, they made a religion out of cutting every social service that they could. Ronald Reagan bragged that he had cut a thousand social services. George Bush's first statement, when he took the Presidency, is that he would cut a thousand more.

How many people saw the movie LEAN ON ME ? Joe Clark, the principal, you know, with the baseball bat, holding children off the third story of the school building, locking the fire doors, intimidating people, berating people. It closes with the woman on welfare, and the students are cheering him, the hero, for breaking the law and brutalizing them. And they're calling the woman on welfare, who's been organizing to try to get a sane principle ... they call her "the witch," the "welfare witch." And she's laughed at and scorned, and she sneaks off.

The real Joe Clark was had to dinner at the White House. And this movie was shown in the White House. And Reagan advocates it because the message that it's floating out to the society is:

"Do it for yourself. Don't depend on the Government because the Government won't give you the money. Be independent. Be Proud. Don't ask the Government to build schools and give you good principals, and stuff like that."

They're gutting our Social Security! We can't afford to take care of the sick, the old, the poor, the handicapped, the farmers, or to really help students get through school or to build up our school system so that it's truly competitive. In this period of time, the United States' standard of living has dropped to tenth and twentieth in the world. Twenty-five percent of the people in this country are functionally illiterate. We're ranked sixth in the percentage of children in school. We're tenth in the quality of education. We're seventeenth in life expectancy. We're twentieth in infant mortality. The poor island communist country of Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than our own nation's capital.

I submit to you that the United States only looks rich to ourselves because we compare ourselves with refugees from Central America. If you go to Europe — and I challenge you to do so .... Before, I was saying: "Go to Nicaragua and see for yourself." Now I say to people: "Go to Germany and see for yourself." This is not a communist country. It is not a socialist country. It is one of the two most successful capitalist countries in the world today.

They have guaranteed sick leave.

They have guaranteed maternity leave.

They have one month's vacation guaranteed each year.

They have guaranteed medical care and hospitalization.

They have higher salaries.

They have better social services, and

they spend a lot more money on building up the infrastructure of their society.

These are all things that President George Bush has been stubbornly, consistently vetoing — bill after bill after bill — depriving us of these things, telling us that we are communists if we want these kinds of services from our society.

Meanwhile, the destruction of the environment continues, full-speed ahead. FIFTY YEARS of nuclear pollution! Just to give you one example (and you've all read into this, I'm sure), in Pantex, Texas, near Amarillo, I've ridden bicycles up there, protesting. One year, on a recumbent bicycle that was built, by the way, right down the road in Freedom, California, near here, that was loaned to me for that purpose .... protesting in Pantex, they had this problem with liquid [nuclear] wastes. They didn't want to go to the Congress and ask for billions of dollars to figure out how to store it or get rid of it because that would draw attention to the problem. So, brilliant, cheap solution: they took bulldozers and scooped what we call tanks in the prairie up there, and poured the liquid into it, so that it could evaporate up; so that it could blow into neighboring fields, so that it could drip down into the Oglala aquifer.

Meanwhile, we're responsible, too. We all have to have automobiles. Very few of us are willing to walk or ride bicycles. A great gluttony of consumption in this country, as we all have to buy more and more and more. And partially feeding that is the felling of the rain forests throughout the world, cutting off the world's supply of oxygen. We're not just chopping down forests at the rate of an area the size of the state of Maine each year. We're burning them. So that puts carbon up into the air, which again is blocking out the sun and changing substantially the environment.

You all know that we still have sixty thousand thermonuclear weapons boobytrapping this planet, just as we did in the mid-eighties, when we worried about it. Now, how many of you have marched, protested, or done anything about the nuclear arms race in the last six months? That's good! Most people have just forgotten. I wrote a book about it, and people have been racing on, and people have been supporting it. I won't name them, but some very prominent people have been encouraging it for three years. And they said: "Well, it's not really an issue now." And I said, "Huh?" It hasn't gone away. They've just SUCCESSFULLY DISTRACTED the world from this problem!

We've had six [nuclear] submarines sink into the bottom of the ocean. We've had seven nuclear weapons dropped by accident! The I.P.S. [Institute for Policy Studies] published, about a year ago, that there were fifty-two — I believe it was — parts of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors now scattered across the bottom of the ocean, leaking this terrible polluting, radioactive material into the bottom of the ocean right now. No way on the face of the Earth to recover it! And it will be poisoning and polluting the bottoms of the oceans FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS from now, presuming we haven't managed to do in the whole planet in that period of time.

Meanwhile — great victory over war and conflict. The Cold War was over. And we all celebrated. And we were all happy. Actually, not quite all of us because I studied this thing out, and I said, "Ehh." And some prominent peaceniks beat me on the head and shoulders and said, "C'mon. Give peace a chance!" But my assessment of it was that there was one cynicism. And [that is], because we had solved nothing, the seeds of continuing conflict and instability [remained].

But the point is, in terms of my analysis of the Persian Gulf War, my prediction of it is that communism had capitulated and the Soviet Union's economy was broken. And the United States Military Complex was desperate for new rationales. How could we justify continuing to spend a huge segment of our budget on a continuing military buildup if the enemy was gone, and communism no longer existed? So we had the United States War Complex facing severe cuts. They were put in a position of having nothing to lose. They had resisted the invasion of Nicaragua because the spigots were wide open, and the money was flowing, and they knew that if the body bags began to come back, people would get angry and they would shut off the spigots. And they would lose this great access to the flow of OUR money: this welfare program we have for the Military-Industrial Complex and the so-called "defense" corporations. Once the Cold War was over and we began to cut the budget, they had nothing to lose. And they had tons of new equipment to test. And they needed to inspire the nation and recapture our imagination and our love for war.

Meanwhile, President George Bush, this nice man, came into the presidency haunted by this image of being a wimp, which is a little bit of a red herring. This has never been a weak man! He's been intensely ambitious. There's a certain gawkiness about him, which he's outgrowing, as a matter of fact. But we saw it in the CIA. There were a lot of jokes. But, in fact, he was a brilliant man — a brilliant director. He would take our Angola program, where we had broken the law and we had lied to cover it up, and he would go to the Congress and say: "Those nice people I'm meeting out there — I just can't believe they would do that." And he could sell this to the Congress. And he got us off the hook. He did not investigate. He did not punish any of us for breaking the laws. Instead, he was building friendships and relationships that continue today. When he became president, he appointed CIA officers to assistant secretarial posts and to ambassadorial posts throughout the Government.

Meanwhile, this man, who was stung by the wimp image, had inherited all the problems and all the responsibility for the wrecking of the U.S. economy that he and President Reagan had done. Meanwhile, at the same time, he is a confirmed internationalist. He was desperate to get the nation distracted from the internal problems. But also, his solution to any problem: he's going to be happy working with all these hundreds and hundreds of contacts that he's built up internationally, overseas, telephoning chiefs-of-state all over the world, and saying: "Hi Joe. Hi Ahmad. How are things going? What can we do about this problem or that one?" He's proud of his heritage in the British Nobility, Yale's "Skull and Bones Society," the Council on Foreign Relations, the Knights of Malta. World War II: he was in the Pacific. He was ambassador to China, ambassador to the United Nations, CIA director, and a successful Texas and international oilman, never having really slaved and focused on social problems or domestic problems in the United States.

And there ARE NO solutions to these problems which they've created: the debt and the deficit.

How internationalist is he? I would say totally — ninety percent. He's NOT concerned about the people of the United States. SIXTY MINUTES did a segment on him, during the 1988 election campaign, in which they revealed that eighteen members of his campaign staff had collected six- and seven-figure honoraria from foreign countries and foreign companies in the eighteen months before that election. He had surrounded himself with internationalists who were plugged into the international financial and business community.

Meanwhile, since he's been president, he's been consistently vetoing bills — more bills than any other president in history. Every bill that, in any way, grants a reprieve to the people of this country: he vetoes it! And any bill that in any way tries to curtail the greed of the upper one percent: he vetoes it!

Hence, adding all of these things together — the U.S. cycle and its nightmare of an economic situation that we have, the sliding into recession, the Savings & Loan crisis, in which his own family was involved, the malaise that was setting in, the recession again, and his own problem with his own masculinity — it was safe to predict that he would look for an overseas solution: a war! It's been done time and time again, as you'll see if you read Howard Zinn's book, A People's History of the United States.

Bush was able to say that we were fighting for cheaper gasoline. I don't know if you know this, but immediately, in the first week of August, my gasoline prices shot up by 30 percent. And there was no shortage of oil in the World. And the Arab emirs were not getting that extra 30 percent tax on gasoline. This was the middleman, the oilman, of whom George Bush and his family are members, as a matter of fact. And magically, in order to make us feel good about this war, guess what happened when we went to war in mid-January? The prices were dropped down. So everybody is saying: Hey, we're at war and the gasoline prices have gone down.

So they feel a little good about it, obviously without understanding.

Once again, if I may repeat Senator Hiram Johnson's book of 1917:

"WHEN WAR COMES, THE FIRST CASUALTY IS THE TRUTH."

What we're dealing with here is the power of the football pep rally, as matched against the power of a seminar on political science, if you will, or this meeting, or the intellectual grappling with the issues. Very intelligent people can forget their intelligence when they go to a football pep rally and they begin to cheer:

"Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!"

And they get into it. And they get excited. And this is the war spirit that Lyndon Johnson wouldn't tap, refused to tap, in the Vietnam War, that George Bush has successfully tapped in this war.

I submit to you that this is not, in fact, "a good war." There's nothing good about it, as far as I can see. The oil, for example, that we're supposedly fighting for, is not our oil. It belongs to the oligarchies of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. And they sell it to Japan and Germany. We get seven percent of our oil from that region altogether, and we have alternatives, even there. Japan, which depends on that oil, didn't want this war because the war would interrupt the flow of oil and endanger the sources and installations. And they can buy the oil from Saddam Hussein just as well as they can buy it from the Saudis or the Kuwaitis. The United States insisted on proceeding into this war for our own reasons. And there was a great rift in our society because even the Commandant of the Marine Corps and General Schwartzkopf himself, were against the war. They were saying: "Let sanctions work. This is a dangerous thing — an unnecessary thing. We shouldn't do it." We were orchestrated into it because George Bush, the politician, and the people that he would rally to him, needed it and wanted it.

"We are fighting for democracy and freedom in the Middle East."

Come again? This is what they said, of course, lying, in Nicaragua and in Panama: "We were fighting to restore democracy." But certainly, there isn't even a pretense of democracy in the Middle East. Our allies over there in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait ..... Forgive me if this sounds chauvinistic. It's not. I've lived seventeen years overseas and laid my life on the line for people of the Third World. But the leaders of Saudi Arabia, for example, are not, by my humanist standards, nice people. They stone women to death for adultery. How many people saw the docudrama, THE DEATH OF A PRINCESS? This is a true story. A granddaddy billionaire there ordered his 19-year-old granddaughter shot in a village square because she had sex with her lover. These are the people that we're fighting and dying for, to restore their oil and their source of billions of dollars to them. I can't see it. I wouldn't spend five dollars for one American life to defend their oil interests. But nevertheless, of course, they're saying that we're fighting for peace — that we'll restore peace into the Middle East.

Now, given the reaction among the Arab Peoples, we are thinking: How could George Bush have miscalculated the response of the Arab People, of the Moslems around the World, to this war? And I submit to you that one thing is obvious: We have controlled so much of the World through oligarchies until this date — and we've done it successfully over there using brutal death squads when we had to — that they could easily think: "We'll just go on doing it. If people don't like it, we'll slap them down." But I submit to you that there may be a deeper point. They may have predicted and expected this reaction, in fact. Because what is now guaranteed in the Middle East is that there will be another war in five years or ten years, and another one, and another one. There are thousands of babies being born named Saddam Hussein right now, today. And the anguish and the horror and the empathy for the ones who are dying in it will go on in [the form of] conditioned violence. So we have absolutely laid it out on the line: the rationales for our new arms race, if you will, or for continuing the military dominance over our society.

We have the new rationale — set up now against the Arab World and against countries of the Third World — to actually build a more expensive army than the one that we had in Europe, as a matter of fact, which had confronted the Soviet Union. THEN, by the summer of 1990, the military budget was facing massive cuts. We were talking about a peace dividend, and the columnists, because of these problems, were calling George Bush "a one-term president". And then, in September, we had the budget fiasco, for which he has NO solution, and it frustrated him enormously. He changed his mind eight times in one day on one of the key issues. The newspapers were reporting, or observing, that if we had a parliamentary system, he would be out that soon after coming into office because he had no solution. He didn't have the votes to stay in office, if we had had the system of England, for example.

Now, we have the war going, and seven months later, this one-term president is so strong that two days ago in the L.A. Times they had a prominent article saying that there was no point in the Democrats running a candidate in 1992. There's no one who could run who would have any chance of winning against George Bush. And the Military's budget was being slashed largely back then, with talks about bigger cuts. And now it's back up to an all-time, all-nation, all-history high, in our next budget. We'll talk about that again in just a minute.

The popularity of George Bush, the Military and CNN is sordid! The media pageant that we're seeing right now has been carefully rehearsed during these years of preparation for our next war. After Grenada (Remember? the island?) the Press couldn't get in to cover it, so, with frustration, they published clippings given to them by the sidebar of the Army. And afterwards, they had a meeting with General Seidel, the Seidel Commission, in which they agreed that in the next war there would be a press pool that would cover the war with a task force, reporting what that task force approved for them to report. And we're getting just that, exactly, in the coverage of the Middle Eastern war in the Persian Gulf right now, today: a censored, Pentagon-edited view of what's happening.

The commentators' love affair with the Military now .... Of course, they've gotten into it, after some debate and doubt at first, because the Establishment was divided on this war. Once the war was joined, of course, their word, their party line is that we have to support the nation and the troops once we're at war, even if we didn't want it. And so, they've closed ranks, and the media is faithfully trumpeting what the Pentagon tells them to say.

Now I ask you: What is the degree of distortion of the truth about what's happening in the desert over there right now in this air war today? We've not been shown one single miss of this new equipment in any of the raids that they've shown us endlessly on television. And so, are they really 100 percent infallible? I'll give you an example that will give you a measure of these eighty-three thousand (actually, it's over eighty-five thousand) air strikes that they've launched so far. The Pentagon made a mistake. They made one slip-up that gave us a reading on this. They announced, about two weeks ago in a briefing, that, in preparing for the ground war, they had to knock out thirty-six strategic bridges that would cut the supply lines into Kuwait. They said that they had flown seven hundred and ninety surgical strikes against those bridges, and that they had knocked out thirty-two bridges. Now that's twenty-four strikes per bridge, with a kill factor of eight percent and a miss factor of ninety-two percent. And these are the surgical weapons that are supposed to be so precise that you could put them through the window of a Fiat. Now, the other weapons that they're dropping over there — the bombs and things — can be five miles, and even fifty miles off-target.

Peeling back the layers of untruth in the rationales of this war, how many people have seen Ralph Schoenman's article, unfortunately published in an obscure paper in Berkeley [California] called The Socialist Action? This is a renowned intellectual who worked with Bertrand Russell at one time. And [there is] Charlie Reese, reporting in the Houston Post down there. And now we have the studies coming out with excellent documentation: how the United States and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia LURED Saddam Hussein and Iraq into this war.

First, we encouraged them to engage Iran in the Iran-Iraq War, beginning in 1980, for eight years. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia financed that war, encouraging Iraq in that war. They ran up an eighty- billion-dollar debt. After the war, the country [Iraq] [ was] in [a] very precarious economic condition. They [Kuwait] began calling in the money and they began driving down the oil prices so that Iraq had lost sixteen billion dollars in revenues, and they were faced with bankruptcy. There's also the factor that Saddam Hussein, with his massive testosterone problem, was building up his army again, instead of building up the infrastructure of the country.

Nevertheless, during that war, Kuwait had actually expanded its floating desert border by nine hundred square miles to reach over the Rumaila oil fields that belonged to Iraq, and they bought the Santa Fe Drilling Company of California, for 2.3 billion dollars, that specializes in slant oil drilling. And Saddam Hussein was protesting this formally to every public body: to Kuwait, to Saudi Arabia, saying: "This is economic warfare." And I submit to you: How long do you think it would take us to respond with the U.S. Marines if Mexico or Canada captured, took, nine hundred square miles of our land and began slant oil drilling into our oil fields? Like about twenty-four hours for them to get the tanks and the planes down there, bombing and strafing! We would be at war in a minute! This was a clear provocation to war!

So this past summer, Saddam Hussein called in the U.S. Ambassador, April Glaspie, and asked her what the U.S. position was on Kuwait — on the defense of Kuwait. She did not know that she was being tape-recorded, and she told him ten times in this conversation that we had no defense agreement with Kuwait. At one point, she said that the Secretary of State [James Baker] had ordered her to emphasize this instruction. She said she had conferred with the President about it. Congressman Lee Hamilton concluded, from hearings on this, that we had DELIBERATELY given Saddam Hussein the green light to invade Kuwait. Again, that's not my observation. That was the congressman who was running the committee to investigate this thing: "We gave him, Saddam Hussein, the green light to invade Kuwait."

Meanwhile, the Assistant Secretary of State was saying publicly, in hearings at the same time, that we had no defense agreement with Kuwait. So Hussein thought he was being permitted to go in and take Kuwait. And he did it. And he thought that we would not react.

And, of course, if he had bothered to ask me, I would have said: "You're walking under the Great Mallet, and they're going to drop it on you." Because I knew they were shopping for a war! And you've seen him. He is not a stupid man at all. But you've seen him floundering around throughout this process because he doesn't understand, even today apparently, that the United States wants a war — at least our leadership does. They want the full orgy and pageantry of a bloody war. Once he went in there, they would not LET him off the hook!

Now we're in the position .... they [U.S. leaders] are frustrated that Gorbachev has come up with a peace plan that might, in fact, let this thing be solved peacefully without the slaughter of troops on the ground. And the White House is admitting, they're discussing openly, that this is a big PROBLEM for the United States because peace might, in fact, happen. They are determined to go in on the ground, but they're under enormous pressure from the Coalition, from the Allies, from people in the United Nations who gave us the green light to go to war against him, to accept this peace overture and to find a peaceful solution. And it's a big frustration to George Bush. My estimate is that they would probably be engaged in the war right now, but a massive storm has set in in the desert. The annual rains were happening when Dan Rather was on the News, just a couple of hours ago tonight. That storm will blow over about Friday. And unless there's some miracle, which there could be, in the form of peace negotiations, they will probably launch this thing about Friday or thereabouts.

The score today, in this war, in the Superbowl War: the Military is backed with an all-time-high annual budget. We have the new rationale for a long-term continuation of the Military Machine. [And that rationale is] now The Third World, especially the Arab Third World and the Moslem Third World. The United States is now once again, finally, after the Vietnam War, back to being a lean, mean, fighting machine.

This Third World rationale thing: just understand now, how long, how carefully do they plan these things? Do they stumble into them? Let me point out that George Kennan, in the late 1940s after World War II, said that eventually conflict in the World would evolve to conflict between the haves of the Northern Hemisphere and the have-nots. And this, of course, is what has happened.

The Rapid Deployment Force that we exercised to get our forces over there: Was it brought together by Ronald Reagan? No, by Jimmy Carter. And the first rehearsal of this technique was under Jimmy Carter in joint exercises with Egypt, as a matter of fact. That's how far back they were preparing our Military for this type of conflict, and for the new rationales, as communism subsided.

Meanwhile, because of some aspects of this war, the Peace Community is paralyzed. There is simply none of the anger that was in the Peace Community towards the end of the Vietnam War protest. Jane Fonda, of course, is very quiet on this one. But, you see, you learned about Jane Fonda in 1981 when Israel put its troops into Lebanon. She and Tom Hayden went to Israel and spoke out publicly in support of what Israel was doing. So she wasn't against war, she was just against the Vietnam War. Or maybe it's because she was young and what she was doing was fun. But she's clearly not against war. Meanwhile, she's engaged to — guess who? Ted Turner, of CNN, who is profiting HUGELY from this thing. And the magic of this "Good War" is such .... Now Ted Turner's a fine man, and Jane Fonda is, in fact (although we're on different sides in this one), a fine person. But Ted Turner is and has been, a champion of Glasnost, working before Glasnost, to get better relations between the [two] countries and to deter the arms race. And he is a personal friend of Fidel Castro. And yet, on this one, because of the rationales and the glamor and what-not — he's turned CNN into the major cheerleader for the Pentagon in this war.

The Peace Community, of course, is wearing yellow ribbons in support of the troops over there. Now this is a very complicated issue. There's no one, at least not me, who can look at the troops over there without feeling some sympathy for them, especially the ones who were so naive that they allowed themselves to watch those ads on TV and get sucked into the Military without ever thinking that the purpose of the Military is to fight. And once you go into the Military, for whatever reason — to go to college or whatever reason — if the nation goes to war, you can no longer claim to be a conscientious objector.

But let me just suggest to you .... and I don't mean to be hard- nosed about this, but I'll give you two ideas to think about. When you are living history, it's hard to read history books and compare. Germany did evil things in 1920 and 1930, but that was somehow different because we're nice people. Let me just point out to you that,

ONE: Germany was a Christian country;

TWO: Germany was a democracy that allowed a segment to take over and direct it into a war mode.

A lot of the German People did not like the leadership, did not like the Nazi party, and had doubts about the war. But once the nation joined in the war, they buckled down and sacrificed to support their country and their troops, as they proceeded to get THIRTY MILLION PEOPLE KILLED!

Now the soldiers that we have over there today are volunteers. In Vietnam, a lot of them were draftees. This is a significant difference, although I would certainly agree that they were seduced into this thing, as I was at a comparable age. But I also note, when I start saying: "Okay, I support the soldiers," (you know) "but not the war," — but then I say: "But what about the Iraqi soldiers, and what about the Iraqi People and the Kuwaiti People, and all the others?" And then I also look back in my own history, when I was a determined member, an energetic member, of the "White male killer establishment," as Helen Caldicott calls it. And I would come home and my friends would embrace me and love me and support me. They would say:

"We don't know what you're doing. We're not sure about it over there. But we support you."

And I would go back, feeling supported, as we got drunk, as we got raunchy, as we organized the killing of people.

Now, I've analyzed carefully and even written a book about what made me change. And there were four people whom I can remember, who significantly altered my thinking. And they were people who punched me in the intellectual belly. They were close friends who said:

"What you're doing with your life is dead wrong! You are participating in EVIL! And you DO have a choice, and you CAN redirect your life."

And I raged. I hurt. I was upset. I had insomnia. It was painful. But they had made me think, and the thinking led me to break away. It's called "tough love."

I AM NOT GOING TO WEAR A YELLOW RIBBON!

[applause and cheers]

In a lecture in L.A. last week, Ron Kovic [paraplegic Vietnam War veteran, whose life is the subject of the movie, BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY] was there, and a couple of people took me on. Richard Macer stood up and said: "I want to feel GOOD about this war." And I said: "You know — I don't feel good about anything about this war." But you know, so I'm a hard-ass. So, Ron Kovic — afterwards, I asked him, I said, "Am I off-base?" He said:

"No! You're ABSOLUTELY right! We have to stick these people who are over there. They DO have a choice, and they have to be reminded that what they're doing is WRONG! Don't embrace them with war and love. They're going to come back ten feet tall, with all the the drums beating, and the media and the bands playing. And what is that going to do to the ten-year-olds who see this happening? They're going to want to join the Army, and they're going to be begging for a war so they can have fun like their uncles did."

The losers today, in this score card: The Kuwaiti people, for sure. The Iraqi people, for sure. The Israelis, who are living under the Scud missiles and the fear, and having to teach their kids about gas masks. The Palestinians, who are having to live under a 24-hour curfew. What if your baby gets sick and you can't get out, and you don't have the money and you can't go out to buy penicillin? And they are facing possible expulsion from where they're living, right now. King Hussein of Jordan, a long-time ally of the United States, is facing possible overthrow. Arab leaders, long-term allies, are facing a period of severe instability. And our Administration is now recognizing this and talking about the fact that we're going to have a massive problem keeping the peace in the Middle East, and we'll probably have to leave a massive force there for an indeterminate period of time to enforce a Pax Americana. And think about how that dynamic is going to build and make the people there love us.

The environment: Remember, they [Iraq] did have a nuclear weapons development plant. And it's been bombed massively. And plutonium doesn't disintegrate when you bomb it. All of those little plutonium molecules are flipping through the environment and floating in the air right now. And they will be toxic ten thousand years from now — fifty thousand years from now. The Persian Gulf: massively polluted. The oil fields that are burning in Kuwait — they estimate that it will take a year to put them out, once we can get to them, and we can't get to them anytime soon. And they are dumping millions of tons of soot into the air, which is the darkest substance in the world, which is going up into the atmosphere, blocking the sun's rays again.

And other losers are the United States People. I mean the below-the-50-percent-line. WE are funding this war! The ultra-rich are NOT paying their share of the support of this society, and they're NOT paying their share of this war itself! And we have gone back under the [mass media propaganda] line of our devotion to the Military and the military budget, which is restored to an all-time high. Now you notice George Bush, in his 1984 newspeak, he announced the budget for the next year last week, and he said it amounted to a three-and-a-half percent cut of the military budget. And he said that we would address infant mortality under this program. If you just read down a little bit in his speech on the subject, it becomes clear that they're handling this war under a separate allocation, so that it [the war budget] is not part of the military [budget]. And it also becomes clear that the Rapid Deployment [Force] ships and airplanes that they have to build to fight more wars in the Third World in the Middle East are being handled under a supplementary budget. So the budget is a cut, he says? In fact, it is an ALL-TIME HIGH [military] budget — an all-nation, all-history forever [all-time high military budget]. Just a flat, bald manipulation of the truth is what he's done in this thing!

Now, I submit to you that both the United States and the U.S.S.R. (again) lost the Cold War. What you have to understand is that in the United States, the corporations who spent the TWO-AND-A-HALF TRILLION DOLLARS building all of these missiles in a forty-one percent increase of our nuclear capability — our so-called "defense" corporations — ARE NOT, IN FACT, U.S. corporations. The U.S. has not profited from these things. We've had a massive welfare program in which we gave money to these corporations for a military buildup in which they made 20 to 24 percent profit, which is twice what is the norm in this society. But the key to understanding this system is that these ARE NOT U.S. corporations. Not anymore! They are multinational corporations, on a welfare dole from the U.S. taxpayers, producing MX missiles which are put in holes in the ground, which can never be used, and producing Tomahawk missiles and everything that we're pouring into the desert at a million dollars a shot, now which are not being sold, and cannot be sold to other countries of the world.

Meanwhile, once again, Ronald Reagan ... when he was building this thing up and hyping it, talking endlessly about Nicaragua, a country with two elevators .... meanwhile, in that same period of time, we were building these MX missiles, and Japan was building Toyotas and Sonys, passing us by, in terms of trade balances and trade goods, so that our money was going overseas, so that we plunged into the status of massive debt as a massive debtor nation.

These corporations that are taking our capital and leaking it out of the country are happy to do this to the United States because they are TRANSNATIONAL CORPORATIONS. The tradition of this goes back into history. In World War II .... Remember? Read the book: Trading with the Enemy, by Charles Higham[sp], Dell Press, 1982 (based on documents gotten out of the Government under the Freedom of Information Act), about how the major corporations in the United States were trading with Hitler's Germany throughout the war; how Standard Oil [of New Jersey] supplied him with more oil at a better price than they sold it [at] to the United States, for example. So you have these multinational corporations SUCKING UP CAPITAL from the United States to build these things that are poured into the desert or put in holes in the ground, while, in fact, they are investing in the production of cars and trade goods in countries overseas, as part of the World Financial Order.

The FOUR-AND-A-HALF TRILLION DOLLAR DEBT that is double-compounding. I'm sure you've wondered why is it that our Government is not more upset and concerned, viscerally, with such a staggering debt which probably can never be repaid? And talking to Admiral Carroll at the Center for Defense Information — he and I came up with a key to understanding this thing. [It's] their contempt for the American People, and for America itself, [by] the people who essentially spent this money.

The multinational corporations are part of the same World Order, the World Financial Order that holds the paper on this loan, which means that the interest that's being paid is exactly like taxes to them, if you will, or at least, [this interest is like] enforced debts and loans where it's guaranteed by law that they will be paid at the interest rates that are fixed. And that's why they're not afraid of this debt. Because they're making money off of it, from US! The second or third line item on the budget now is the interest that we're paying to them on this debt for building up this military thing for their own profit and policing of the World.

Now, what we have is the United States rendered into a position, because of these policies — because of the Cold War and the arms race and Reagan and Bush's policies — into a position where we're no longer in control of our economic future. However, we still are the World's military superpower. And even the Soviet Union, in its state of semi-collapse, is the World's second military superpower. But we're still going strong while they're imploding and lapsing into chaos. The World Financial Order can't move us too far, or at least, it can't move without us because we're still a major player. But also we have the might. It's a symbiotic relationship of money and might.

And so then, you come up with an understanding of what we're doing in the Persian Gulf. The United States has now become the Praetorian Guard of what George Bush calls "THE NEW WORLD ORDER", policing the World for the people who own the World, effectively, [the world] of today and tomorrow.

Now, in closing, let me point out that this New World Order will clearly NOT be more peaceful. That would not suit them economically for it to be peaceful. It will NOT bring greater freedoms. To the contrary. It will bring continuing repression and forfeiture of our basic freedoms that we've enjoyed for so long. It will certainly NOT bring a greater equity in the distribution of wealth. To the contrary. The wealth will continue to flow from the poor and the middle class to the ultra-rich. And it certainly will NOT bring greater social services in this country because the New World Order is letting us go to the Persian Gulf to fight this war for them, and they are letting us bear the lion's share of financing this thing, as we fight the war in their interests over there right now.

Now to close .... and I won't go on for long. But just on a note of motivation and hope — and I hope some of the questions will get into what we can do .... I want to remind you of what I said the last time I was here. Admiral LaRocque, when I went to ask him: "Admiral, what can I tell people to do about these problems." And he said: "This is a wonderful question. Tell them that you know what you're capable of, what your skills are, what you can do." He said: "I tell people, if they can write, to write letters. Write articles. Write books. Write telegrams. If they can travel, go to Nicaragua. Go to Germany. See for yourself. Understand the World so that you can witness and discuss this intelligently."

He said he tells people: "If you feel comfortable lying down in front of trucks with bombs on them, do it." But he said: "YOU'VE GOT TO DO WHAT YOU CAN DO EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE, BEGINNING TODAY, BECAUSE" (He didn't say this, but this is what he was concerned about.) the course that we are on will definitely lead, eventually, to rendering this planet UNINHABITABLE. Now, it won't happen in five years or ten years. But eventually, unless we profoundly change what we are doing, there will BE NO MORE warm-blooded life on this planet. Sooner or later, we MUST change or we will destroy ourselves.

So you have to GET ENGAGED. And Helen Caldicott, that wonderful, wonderful speaker who tells us so beautifully, she says: "Get involved. You'll feel better than sitting back in frustration." Get out and work on this problem — what she calls "the public health problem of this planet." And she points out that "if you WILL get involved, you'll feel better, and you can — if the thing, or when the thing, finally blows apart — if there's a few minutes before the bombs land on your town, you can turn to your loved ones and hug them and say: `Honey, at least we tried.'"

Now we'll discuss some specifics in the question and answer period which is coming up right now. But for openers, I urge people — because of the frustration and the anger and the fear and the anxiety that we're subjected to — I urge people to remember to hug someone every day of your life. And hug some animal every day of your life, because they share this dilemma with us. Now, I've noticed, at the end of rallies and lectures, in some confusion, a lot of people like to hold up the "V" for victory. And I reject that because I don't think there will every be a victory over evil, or a victory of peace, at which time the World will be okay — in addition to which, I don't like the concept of victory because I don't think that would be a peaceful solution in and of itself.

I give you the open hand of peace, and thank you very much for hearing me out. Thank you.

https://www.serendipity.li/cia/stock2.html

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War Is A Racket
By Major General Smedley Butler

Smedley Darlington Butler
   • Born: West Chester, Pa., July 30, 1881
   • Educated: Haverford School
   • Married: Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia, June 30, 1905
   • Awarded two congressional medals of honor:
       1. capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1914
       2. capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti, 1917
   • Distinguished service medal, 1919
   • Major General - United States Marine Corps
   • Retired Oct. 1, 1931
   • On leave of absence to act as
       director of Dept. of Safety, Philadelphia, 1932
   • Lecturer -- 1930's
   • Republican Candidate for Senate, 1932
   • Died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia, June 21, 1940
   • For more information about Major General Butler,
       contact the United States Marine Corps.

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