DICTATORS
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see authoritarian, coup assassination, cia
aha just added vlad, dutarte, trump wannabe, turkey; did not think of these guys as dicks till now, see tucker
bak 8 22 html endit1
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aha/doh close assoc w. gop, PR, oil; note playbook neutralize judicuary
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note kim jung un, bibi and putin all disobey trump; ordered no strike iran; refused love ltr?
86’d his leverage when he trashed nato and imposed tariffs? switch side in cold war with zelensky ambush? TAco? NO ONE TRUSTS HIM?
an 6 25
'Kremlin-owned puppet': Critics slam Trump for jetting off to Canada to defend Putin at G7
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an 5 25
Never Trump conservatives often attack President Donald Trump and the far-right MAGA movement as a toxic departure from the conservatism of the past and a betrayal of what President Ronald Reagan and Arizona Senators Barry Goldwater and John McCain represented. And they will applaud National Review founder William F. Buckley for distancing himself from the far-right conspiracy theorists of the John Birch Society.
But in an opinion column published on May 14, liberal New York Times opinion writer Jamelle Bouie argues that Trumpism didn't really start with Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — and that the right's dark side was there all along.
Bouie takes a close look at the second Trump Administration, stressing that its policies aren't new ideas for the American right.
READ MORE:Revealed: Republican tax gifts to the rich would explode deficit they always complain about
:{"Of the endless torrent of illegal, unconstitutional — and anti-constitutional — actions flowing from the Trump Administration," Bouie observes, "there are three that stand out for their contempt for the rule of law. There is the president’s ongoing assault on the right to due process, seen in his administration's refusal to facilitate the return of Kilmar Ábrego García, the Maryland man who was arrested in Baltimore in March and removed to a prison in El Salvador…. The second incident is the suggestion, by the White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, that the president might suspend habeas corpus to keep federal courts from releasing the (Trump) Administration's detainees — thus blocking its efforts to remove, among others, some lawful residents from the country….
The last, and by comparison relatively minor, instance of constitutional subversion by this administration is the president's plan to accept a $400 million luxury aircraft to temporarily replace Air Force One, provided to the United States by the royal family of Qatar."}:
But no matter how many dangerous lines Trump crosses, Bouie argues, much of the American right refuses to stand up to him.
"The Republican Party is, with only a few quibbles and some occasionally timid disagreement, united in support of Donald Trump," Bouie warns. "Conservative intellectuals have spent the last decade spinning endless excuses for the president and his allies. They treat his tyrannical aspirations as little more than a curiosity, or even a justified response to some imagined revolutionary movement of the political and cultural left. }:}:
Both the MAGA cheerleaders of the Claremont Institute and the Trump rationalizers in the nation’s premier publications agree: Nothing Trump has done, or wants to do, is beyond the pale…. This attitude, while shocking in its moral and ethical decadence, is not all that surprising. As the writer and editor Jacob Heilbrunn shows in 'America Last: The Right's Century-Long Romance with Foreign Dictators,' the conservative movement has always had a soft spot for despots of various stripes."}:
Bouie continues, "The political and intellectual antecedents of the Trump movement, stretching all the way back to the early 20th Century, have often had nothing but praise for those despotic rulers who extinguished the freedom of the many for the liberty of the few, from Gen. Francisco Franco in Spain and Gen. Augusto Pinochet in Chile to, at this moment, Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary…. There is no 'Trumpified' conservative movement. There never was. There is only the conservative movement that was, we can see now, waiting for its Donald Trump."
READ MORE:'This is a bribe': Trump buried for saying Qatar jet would save American taxpayers' money
*Jamelle Bouie's full New York Times column is available at this link (subscription required).
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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/tucker-carlsons-embrace-foreign-authoritarian-leaders
pulldown menu?!
In the past two years, Tucker Carlson has repeatedly hosted global leaders with authoritarian tendencies and embraced anti-democratic regimes on his Fox News and Fox Nation shows.
In interviews with Hungary’s president Victor Orbán, El Salvador’s president Nayib Bukele, Poland’s president Andrzej Duda, and most recently, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro, Carlson has pitched softball questions, praised anti-democratic ideas, and allowed lies about some of the regimes to go unchallenged. Carlson has also repeatedly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, excusing his regime’s aggression in Ukraine.
By promoting and celebrating anti-democracy leaders to his audience of over 3 million viewers, Carlson is whitewashing their authoritarian tendencies and inaccurately covering the implication of their policies. Reeling from the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection, the majority of voters believe American democracy is already at risk. Carlson's embrace of authoritarian ideologies from around the world only further threatens its future.
no lnx many some vid
Russia
Fox News has a documented pattern of supporting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and Tucker Carlson has clearly led this charge.
A month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Carlson praised Nigel Farage for saying, “Whatever we may think of him [Putin] as a human being,” he is “actually on our side.”
Video CitationFrom the March 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Media Matters has documented Carlson’s extensive history of pushing pro-Kremlin talking points on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
He has mocked criticism of the Russian president and downplayed the significance of his invasion of Ukraine. He also suggested the Biden administration backs Ukraine only because of Hunter Biden’s ties to the country and questioned the U.S.’s efforts to support Ukraine, asking, “Why do we care so much” about “Russia messing around in Ukraine or Estonia or Crimea or whatever?” and “Why wouldn’t we be friends with Russia?”
He even went so far as to throw a jab at his Fox News colleague Jennifer Griffin’s reporting on the region, accusing her of “lying” while not bothering “to do any reporting whatsoever.”
Putin leads an authoritarian state in which he cannot be prosecuted and officials in his government are protected under strict confidentiality laws. The country has cracked down on free internet access by limiting access to social media platforms, and critics of the Kremlin are labeled “foreign agents” and silenced. A Media Matters report from April 2022 found that Facebook videos featuring 5 pro-Russian segments from Carlson received more than 2 million views and nearly 200,000 interactions.
In 2019, Carlson asked on his show, “Why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Which I am,” in reference to the conflict with Ukraine. (Later in the show he claimed he was joking.)
Video CitationFrom the November 25, 2019 edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight:
In return for his fealty, the Kremlin has praised Fox and Carlson, amplifying segments of Carlson’s show on its state-run social media accounts and state-run television. A leaked Kremlin memo distributed to Russian media outlets instructed broadcasters to use as many clips from Tucker Carlson as possible.
Brazil
In June, Carlson traveled to Brazil to film a new documentary for his “Tucker Carlson Originals” series. While there, he interviewed Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who, since he assumed the presidency in 2019, has created a government in Brazil that is anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black, and anti-woman, once even stating he would rather see his son “die in an accident” than have a gay family member.
Despite international attention on Bolsonaro’s anti-democratic regime, Carlson hosted the Brazilian president for a friendly interview, during which they promoted a variety of false claims and conspiracy theories. Bolsonaro and Carlson embraced their similar ideologies, with Bolsonaro praising Carlson’s show and Carlson suggesting Brazil gets its own Fox News Channel.
Video CitationFrom the June 30, 2022, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Carlson and Bolsonaro pushed a number of other right-wing talking points.
Carlson cheered on Brazil’s pro-life and Christian ideology, and Carlson and Bolsonaro agreed “the left” in Brazil will be responsible for the downfall of the good, Christian-centric society. Carlson implied the same would happen in the United States.
Carlson falsely claimed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “arms Nazis,” saying Bolsonaro is not like him.
Carlson claimed Bolsonaro is a “liberal” and has “done nothing to stop civil liberties in Brazil” although the president is known to arrest and investigate his critics under a vague national security law.
Carlson and Bolsonaro repeatedly called a man who attacked Bolsonaro in 2018 “leftist” and claimed the stabbing was politically motivated although a judge ruled the attacker was mentally ill after he told investigators he was “acting on the orders of God.”
Bolsonaro shared false claims that he did not need the COVID-19 vaccine because he had previously had the virus.
Bolsonaro also promoted both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine as effective COVID-19 treatments.
Bolsonaro repeated the generally discounted theory that COVID-19 was started in a “laboratory on the other side of the world.”
Responding to a Carlson question about the expansion of gun ownership in Brazil, Bolsonaro claimed an increase in civilian gun ownership is what caused a “drop in the number of people who are killed by firearms in Brazil,” though the president though in reality states where civilian gun ownership increased the most did not see crime fall by any significant amount in comparison to states with less growth of gun ownership.
Dubbed “Trump of the tropics,” Bolsonaro campaigned on heavy military presence, after years of supporting Brazil’s military dictatorship, and violent policing. He had a plan to appoint military leaders to top government posts and following the election he did just that. Bolsonaro also claimed he would not accept the results of the election if he lost and has “threatened to destroy, jail or drive into exile his political opponents.”
During the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil, Bolsonaro spread narratives meant to discredit the country's democratic voting system after his party’s candidates lost. He has begun to push for restricting votes to paper ballots only for the 2022 election, echoing Trumpworld’s conspiracy theories about compromised electronic voting machines.
On his first day as president in 2019, Bolsonaro targeted Indigenous lands by preventing new lands from becoming demarcated for protection and has since dismantled the country’s environment ministry through cutting the budget, and overseen increased deforestation.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro’s failed policies resulted in hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths. Bolsonaro spread false narratives about the pandemic, refused to follow the World Health Organization’s recommendations, and even blocked local or state governments that attempted to follow prevention advice such as implementing mask mandates. Federal police have investigated multiple people who criticized the president’s COVID-19 response in public media.
Hungary
Carlson’s coverage of President Viktor Orbán and his governance in Hungary has garnered a flurry of mainstream media press attention in the American press. He has interviewed Orbán, filmed an antisemitic documentary targeting philanthropist George Soros, and spoken at a conference put on in Hungary by a right-wing organization tied to the Orbán government.
Carlson has shown his enthusiasm for authoritarian ideas and frequently connects Hungary’s move to the right as an example the U.S. should follow.
Carlson suggested the U.S. adopt Hungary’s nationalistic immigration policies while calling immigrants “chaos and filth and crime growing all around us.”
He hosted Hungary’s Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto in an interview titled “Here's what America should learn from Hungary” in which they discussed Hungary’s extreme immigration policies.
Carlson suggested that without Orbán’s strict immigration policies, “there will be no more Hungarians” and claimed that “neoliberals” would rather “import a replacement population from the Third World,” once again pushing the fascist great replacement theory.
Carlson celebrated Orbán’s election victory in 2022, noting, “Orban described the victory as a win for sensible nationalism -- which it certainly is.”
Carlson claimed on his nightly show that calling Orbán a “facist” or “authoritarian” is “the greatest of all” lies. Orbán is widely known for minimizing democratic freedom in Hungary.
While in Hungary, Carlson claimed “left-wing NGOs” are vilifying Orbán for his facist policies and claimed it’s “insane” to consider Hungary less free than South Africa. He was referring the nongovernmental organization Freedom House’s 2022 list saying Hungary was “partly free” due to “antimigrant and anti-LGBT+ policies, as well as laws that hamper the operations of opposition groups, journalists, universities, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)” created by Orbán’s government.
Carlson has repeatedly promoted Orbán’s policy ideas and supported his political career while repeatedly pushing for similar change to come to the U.S. In an introduction to one his interviews with the Hungarian president, Carlson claimed the U.S. media frequently lies about Orbán and “how repressive Hungary is.” Carlson went on to imply Hungary is a more free nation than the U.S., saying people who “loudly and publicly attack Joe Biden’s policies” are “silenced” and “might very well have to hire armed bodyguards” and falsely claiming “opposition figures here [in Hungary] don’t worry that they’ll be hurt for their opinions.” Carlson commended Orbán’s conservative policies and bashed U.S. leaders who “vilified” him for them.
Video CitationFrom the August 5, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
The admiration goes both ways. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary in May, Orbán described Carlson as a “friend” and told his audience that Carlson’s show should be “broadcasted day and night.”
Orbán recently gave a widely condemned speech during which he railed against “race mixing,” prompting one of his closest advisers to resign. He has downplayed Hungary’s involvement in the Holocaust and promoted antisemetic stereotypes as propaganda.
Orbán’s government has pushed far-right legislation, including banning LGBTQ representation in educational materials and media for kids and passing extreme anti-migrant legislation that goes against the European Union’s policies. Orbán has also undermined free and fair elections in Hungary and tightened his control over national media.
Mainstream media in the U.S. have closely covered Carlson and Orbán’s close relationship. The New York Times has published multiple articles drawing connections between Orbán and the political right in the U.S., and the relationship has inspired a number of think pieces by other media outlets.
El Salvador
Carlson has also interviewed Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on his Fox News show. Carlson focused on Bukele’s promise to curb gang violence in the country by increasing police funding and military presence while also applauding Bukele’s conservative stances and pushing for similar policies in the U.S.
Bukele claimed his solution for MS-13 gang violence is to “give more funds to the police, apply tougher dynamics, get the criminals, and put them in jail” and compared El Salvador’s crime rates to those of popular Fox News target Chicago, saying under his new tactics, crime in the country has fallen below that of the city.
Carlson applauded Bukele’s efforts and called the supposed solution to crime rates “obvious.”
In the past, Carlson has repeatedly referenced MS-13 when fearmongering about supposed white replacement and immigration in the U.S.; most well-known was his claim that Biden would release gang members into U.S. neighborhoods. Carlson also defended Trump when he made comments about immigration from “shithole countries,” even suggesting that El Salvador was indeed a “shithole country” or it wouldn't need immigration protections.
Carlson focused his interview with Bukele on his response to gang violence in El Salvador, praising him for cracking down through police and military power. However, Bukele policies has resulted in human rights violations in many of El Salvador’s jails including torture and death of prisoners, according to Amnesty International.
According to the Journal of Democracy, Bukele’s measures to limit judiciary independence following his rise to power in 2019 were a “serious blow to Salvadoran democracy” and his actions include “classic authoritarian behavior.” He claimed electoral authorities and the media were part of a voting fraud conspiracy during the 2021 election despite his party winning a legislative supermajority. As a candidate, Bukele avoided public debates and press interviews during the campaign, which left many to believe he was “intolerant.”
Since his election, Bukele has used the country’s military to bully opposition into voting for his budget and disbanded an anti-corruption body. Bukele has used his supermajority power to consolidate his power, firing high level judges and the attorney general. After his attacks on the judicial system, the top court in the country announced sitting presidents will be able to run again, even though El Salvador’s constitution states otherwise.
Poland
Carlson also interviewed Poland’s President Andrzej Duda and claimed Duda is an example of leaders “who actually care about their people” and who “defended their populations against international interference.” The interview included staples of Carlson’s conversations with conservative foreign leaders including comparisons to the United States, promotion of conservative and Christian ideals, and blatant lies.
VideoCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Carlson started the interview by describing Duda’s efforts to stop the European Union from resettling refugees in Poland in 2015 as fighting back.
When asked about the power of technology companies in Poland, Duda stated the government has never introduced any kind of social media restrictions. Buth in 2021 the government planned to create a “Freedom of Expression Council” as a workaround to social media platforms’ power to ban accounts in the country, shortly after Twitter suspended Trump’s account. They ended the interview discussing the importance of pro-heterosexual family and Christian conservative ideals in government.
Video fileCitationFrom the September 27, 2021, edition of Fox News' Tucker Carlson Tonight
Duda has eroded judicial independence in Poland, forcing out sitting judges by establishing age limits and taking control over judicial appointments. An outspoken homophobe, Duda is known for his so-called “Christian values.” His administration has banned gay parents from adopting children, and under his regime “LGBT-free zones” have appeared across the country. Duda himself has called LGBTQ rights a “more destructive” ideology than communism.
His anti-abortion laws prevent abortion in almost all cases — recently, a bill was introduced to ban abortions for cases of fetal abnormalities — and they have rallied pro-abortion protestors and political opposition against the president. Duda’s government has also cracked down on the free press by introducing a new law that makes it impossible for media entities to be controlled by anyone outside the EU and has amended laws to allow the government to choose the heads of state-run media organizations.
With similar ideologies taking hold in the U.S., Fox News is giving Tucker Carlson free reign to embrace authoritarian leaders from around the world. Carlson has gone out of his way to promote false and conspiratorial narratives that have been repeatedly debunked while pushing these ideas onto his audience.
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https://theconversation.com/nobel-peace-prize-for-journalists-serves-as-reminder-that-freedom-of-the-press-is-under-threat-from-strongmen-and-social-media-169579
PI ~ duterte, ~ vlad
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nacla
Even as word of the genocide leaked out, Ríos Montt maintained friendships with prominent U.S. evangelical Christians Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. Ronald Reagan had won the presidency in 1980 by flipping the evangelical vote away from the Democrats, who had helped elect Carter four years before. In 1982, Reagan traveled to Guatemala during the genocide anddismissed reports of abuses, saying that Ríos Montt was “totally dedicated to democracy in Guatemala.” Reagan said “frankly I’m inclined to believe” Ríos Montt has been “getting a bum rap.”
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ggl doc
Dictators
9/4/15
Dictators may seem like an odd inclusion to a work on climate change, since we think of them part of the Bad Old Days (or Good Old Days, depending on your POV) of WWII or the Cold War.
However, they are relevant for a number of reasons
1) dictators are symptomatic of the dangers of ideologies. The Khmer Rouge and Nazis were quite willing to commit genocide in the name of purity and eliminating a perceived threat.
2) Perhaps in part as a reaction to such genocides, the US Cold Warriors could justify nearly any action as a way to ward off global communist domination. This includes embracing dictators who would even give lip service to anti-Communism (as in, he's a sonovabitch, but he's our sonovabitch]
We also see the Wrecking Crew/ Gang of 5 making their bones being an anti-commie renta-mob on college campus which warmed the hearts and opened the wallets of JBS'ers like Coors. They later expanded to be hitmen for hire to corporations, such as Campbell's Soup to attack unions. Then they took it out on the road:
IFF funded/rented out by Apartheid South African intel, which gave us Jamba (Woodstock in the jungle) for "Freedom Fighters" (Central American death squads, Mugabe, Savimbi, the Muj (who would morph into Taliban and Al Qaeda]. Inhofe had only a minor role here, but would later become the most important politician on the planet in terms of climate; Abramoff, Norquist, BKSH actually took on dictators as PR/lobbying clients, and helped funnel money to Contra death squads after Congress got disgusted and cut them off [Reagan's brain (and the evidence) traded arms with Iran to fund them too, though his heart told him and us he didn't].
May be xian strain operating here: godless commies; humans cannot destroy the world, only God. Rev Moon WTimes
One more contemporary, but also historical aspect, is the Cold War served as cover for imperialism and corporate power. Fighting Quaker Gen Smedley regretted that he had been a “gangster for capitalism” in participating in the invasion of dozens of mostly Latin American countries, Banana Republics, to protect American businesses like the United Fruit Co (Dulles boys); he also blew the whistle on a US coup by corporations to get rid of FDR and the New Deal. If the "14 Families" oligarchs did screw up and let a president elected who even talked about reducing inequality by say, land reform as did Guatemalan President Arbenz, he was deposed in a CIA backed coup (modelled on the successful one the previous year in Iran which installed the brutal Shah and ensured free flow of cheap oil).
IFF “Freedom Fighter” Savimbi fought Cubans/Angola (heritage Fdn, JA, Norquist, Stone). Bringing to White House gave them street cred [Grover Norquist shed his cammi's quickly when there was gunfire?]
Mobutu outed and killed elected president Lumumba w/ CIA backing calling him a commie (Belgian Congo, uranium for A-Bomb]. Supported by Savimbi.
The slaughter (along with mass rape as terror weapon) continues in some of the same African counties, fuelled by sometimes kleptocratic governments fighting with sometimes genocidal rebels for control of conflict minerals, gold, diamonds, oil and coltan for cell phones and laptops. This led to
Dodd-Frank not a ban, just label. fought in court by CoC/NAM:
{ Since 1998, more than 5 million people have died in the Democratic Republic of Congo in what has been described as the deadliest documented conflict in African history. Much of the fighting has been over precious minerals including tantalum, tin, tungsten and gold. Tantalum has become a precious commodity in the digital age — it’s found in cellphones, DVD players, laptops and hard drives. Human rights groups have long pushed for mandatory labeling of so-called "conflict minerals" in order to allow consumers and investors to avoid fueling the bloody conflict through the purchase of their products. The mandatory disclosure policy became law as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. But this week a federal appeals court [Santelle, FedSoc FREE dude ranch] ruled the Securities and Exchange Commission cannot force companies to disclose whether minerals come from the Democratic Republic of Congo because the mandatory labeling would violate the companies’ freedom of speech. DN }:
US supported Saddam (gave him intel if not arms to fight brutal war of attrition with Iran) until he threatened a oil supplier we liken more [Kuwaiti incubators scam] and then took him down as a scapegoat for 911 [US co's sold biological warfare pathogens? fedex?] 911 also the pretext more massive security buildup, but since they won;t go after actual domestic terrorists such as McVeigh [Brownie/Allbaugh pal defended as lawyer] militia wackos, much safer to o after eco-terrorists such as animal rights activists. because of privatization, huge numbers of contractors have access to classified documents, but proliferating companies (especially Silicon valley Big data like Thiel's CIA funded Palantir will rent themselves out to corporate clients to go after activists like Greenpeace as well (who were the victims of French state sponsored terror). Note this repeats what Gang of 5 did back in the day, see above).
So if PR firms are willing to front for genocidal dictators, you know they have no problem working for fossil fuel companies who have the potential due to famines, floods, hurricanes and droughts (not to mention sea level rise) caused by climate disruption which could result in much higher death tolls. Norquist fronts for BP, CoC, AEI, Edison (coal utilities) and lobbies for Keystone XL. (briefly stood up for cap and trade as a way to cut taxes, but quickly ran for cover when spanked by Koch front).
But rather inexplicably, seeing as the old foe USSR has collapsed (assets privatized for oligarchs, but the country is basically in the oil business) and our other big commie foe, China, is our banker anti-communism is back! This is in part because the Tea Party cannot deal with a (half) Black president, he’s either a Muslim, a commie, a foreigner or some combination (8/15 GOP polls amazing numbers/%). This is most relevant in Agenda 21, the secret UN conspiracy to take over US with bike paths. A scary number of states have passed laws against this (presumably the same ones that ban Sharia law), and virtually all GOP candidates for president in 2012 as well as official GOP/RNC platform.
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nolnx
‘Dirty trickster’ revealed: Here are 5 of the sleaziest things Roger Stone did before joining the Trump Campaign
Image via Fox News.
Written by Alex Henderson February 20, 2020
long before he became known for some of the shadiest machinations in the ongoing Trump-Russia scandal, the 66-year-old Stone, who returned to the GOP in 2015 after being registered as a Libertarian for three years, had a dark history in right-wing politics dating back to the Nixon era.
Stone is a self-described “dirty trickster,” and he takes great pride in it. Here are five of Stone’s sleaziest pre-Trump campaign activities.
Stone was fired by Sen. Bob Dole in the ‘70s for being a Nixonian ‘dirty trickster’
Stone, born in 1952, was in his late teens when he became an aide for President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign. Although Stone has insisted that he never did anything illegal during the Watergate scandal, he has described his work during that period as “trafficking in the black arts.” After Nixon stepped down as president in August 1974 because of Watergate, Stone went to work for Sen. Bob Dole. However, he wasn’t in Dole’s employ very long; the Kansas senator fired him after he was identified by syndicated columnist Jack Anderson as being a “dirty trickster” for Nixon. One of Stone’s tricks was hiring a Republican operative to infiltrate the 1972 presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern, who suffered a landslide defeat when Nixon was reelected.
Stone is a self-described ‘Nixonite’
During Watergate, many prominent Republicans — including Sen. Barry Goldwater — distanced themselves from President Nixon. But Stone is one GOP operative who is openly proud of his work with Nixon and has bragged about being a “Nixonite.” In 2008, the New Yorker quoted Stone as saying, “The reason I’m a Nixonite is because of his indestructibility and resilience. He never quit. His whole career was all built around his personal resentment of elitism. It was the poor-me syndrome.”
Stone and Paul Manafort represented Ferdinand Marcos and other corrupt dictators
Stone and Paul Manafort — Trump’s former 2016 campaign chairman and another major target of Mueller’s Russia investigation — go way back: when a 24-year-old Stone became president of the Young Republicans in 1977, Manafort was the one managing his campaign. And they went on to work together on Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In 1980, Stone and Manafort, along with their associate Charlie Black, formed the right-wing Washington, DC lobbying group Black, Manafort & Stone, which not only represented Republicans in the U.S. but also corrupt dictators ranging from Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines to Mobuto Sese Seko in the Congo. As bad as the Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs Manafort worked with in the 2000s and 2010s were, some of the dictators, tyrants and thugs that Stone and Manafort represented in the 1980s were even worse.
Stone was a lobbyist for Angola’s brutal Jonah Savimbi
In addition to working with dictators like Marcos and Seko, the firm Black, Manafort & Stone represented Jonah Savimbi — whose National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA in Portuguese) tried to overthrow Angola’s Marxist government in the 1980s. According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA was ruthless and “used terror as a policy to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA.”
Stone advised Al Sharpton in 2004 — hoping to divide Democrats
In his 2004 Democratic presidential primary campaign, the Rev. Al Sharpton had an unlikely advisor: Roger Stone, who helped the civil rights activist craft a message against Howard Dean (another Democrat who ran in that primary). When Sharpton stressed that Dean, as governor of Vermont, hadn’t had any blacks or Latinos in his cabinet, that messaging came from Stone — who, in a 2004 interview with the New York Times, said of Sharpton, “There has not been a candidate with this much charisma since Ronald Reagan.”
But Stone had an ulterior motive: he wanted to divide Democrats. Sharpton eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who won the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination but lost to incumbent Republican President George W. Bush in the general election.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/trump-a-wannabe-dictator-in-training/
no lnx
Trump: A wannabe dictator-in-training
Written by John C. Waugh / History News Network September 16, 2019
In a view shared by many, it is easy to believe that what Donald Trump really wants is not to be president of the country, but dictator of it.
Indeed, he has suggested how good it might be for him to enjoy a third term, perhaps more, even though the Constitution forcefully forbids it.
In a Fathers Day tweet he fantasized over the possibility, suggesting the public might “demand” that he serve a third term. The [good news], he wrote, “is that at the end of six years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House (do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT)….”
After Chinese president Xi Jingping abolished term limits in his own country, Trump said he liked the sound of that. “President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have give that a shot some day.” Just joking? It is not all that laughable. [The quotes in these two paragraphs are from an article by Gabrielle Bruney in Esquire, July 16, 2019. They have also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post.]
So what does a wannabe dictator who wants to give that a shot some day have to do day-by-day to reach his miserable goal? And how is Trump measuring up?
It is not an easy jump from democracy to dictatorship in our country. There is that dratted Constitution in the way. There are laws to be violated. There are critics, opponents, Democrats, immigrants, and the unfaithful to be purged.There is the critical mainstream media to be done away with. There are many lies to be told. It is hard, nasty work and Trump is fast running out of time.
A dictator must as soon as possible, by any means, shut down the media or control it. No dictatorship can exist in the presence of a free press. So far Trump has only been able to call the media names—”the fake news media,” “the enemy of the people,” “the opposition party.” From the time of announcing his candidacy to the end of his second year in office he had tweeted 5,400 times. Some 1,339 of those tweets were attacks of some kind on the media or individual reporters. This doesn’t count the times he has harangued the media in his speeches. He has turned many of his supporters into media haters like himself.
He is particularly incensed by the Washington Post and the New York Times, both of them highly critical of him. He has said that in the event that the public did demand that he stay, “both of these horrible papers will quickly go out of business & be forever gone!”
A dictator must be an avid hater of some minority group and wanting to purge it. Trump hates Muslims. He is not too crazy about blacks and Hispanics either. But there are now many of them, a very tall purging job. On the other side of this coin, Trump seems in no mind to purge white supremacists, who love him as one of their own.
A dictator must tell lies, lots of lies. Trump is far and away the champion liar in presidential history. It is said by news outlets who keep track of such things, that Trump averages about six lies per day.
A dictator must be willing to exterminate people, lots of people. Since this is forbidden in a democracy, Trump can only slander them with a tweet or in a speech or fire them. In a successful dictatorship you just shoot anybody you want any time you want. Trump can only fire them, or tweet insults at them. But it is not a far jump to think of Trump’s firings and insults as symbolic exterminations. Nor is it a far leap to think of the would-be immigrants pinned up and families separated on our southern border as concentration camps.
A dictator often has an affinity with other established dictators. Trump admires and is on friendly footing with two elite of the world’s dictators—Vladimir Putin of the Soviet Union and Kim Jong-Un of North Korea. He has met and spoken kindly of both. And there is that admiration of China’s Xi Jinping for making himself president for life.
A dictator is narcissistic, in love with himself and glory seeking, demanding and getting total obedience and acclamation from his followers. In his first cabinet meeting Trump invited each member to praise and celebrate his greatness. He loves his many rallies out in the country, where he basks in the acclamation of his many avid followers, which are said to be a strong third of the country’s population.
A dictator is lawless, often pushing the limits of his power. Breaking a law seems meaningless to Trump.Whether intentionally or ignorantly, he has violated a host of laws, many later challenged or overturned by the courts, thwarted by the judiciary. That is why it is so important for Trump and the Republican Party to appoint sympathetic judges to as many courts as possible. As for the Constitution, it can perhaps be questioned whether he has ever read it, much less whether he worries about violating it.
A dictator questions the legitimacy of his opponents, demonizing them and curtailing or abolishing their rights. In the 2016 campaign for president, Trump suggested he might not accept the legitimacy of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, if she won the election, and suggested several times that she ought to be thrown in prison. He has tweeted hatred of many of his detractors and has encouraged brutality against anti-Trump demonstrators at his rallies.
As a wannabe dictator in training he has been doing reasonably well.
John C. Waugh is the author of One Man Great Enough: Abraham Lincoln’s Road to Civil War.
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Turkey has issued over 1,100 arrest warrants to people with suspected ties to exiled cleric Fethullah Gülen, whom the government blames for a failed coup in 2016. Since 2016, at least 77,000 people have been arrested and around 130,000 fired from government and public sector jobs such as teaching, in a purge by the Turkish government.
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https://www.newsweek.com/heres-where-paul-manafort-did-business-corrupt-dictators-1061470
no lnx pix
WORLD
HERE’S WHERE PAUL MANAFORT DID BUSINESS WITH CORRUPT DICTATORS
BY CRISTINA MAZA ON 8/7/18 AT 3:11 PM
Manafort Trial: Rick Gates Testifies He Committed Crimes With Former Trump Campaign Aide
As the trial against Paul Manafort enters its sixth day, many observers are focusing on his work for Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs and politicians. However, he has had a long history of dealing with unsavory foreign leaders during his decades-long career as a political lobbyist.
Prosecutors in Virginia’s federal court claim that President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager avoided paying taxes on millions of dollars he made working for a pro-Russian political party in Ukraine—the Party of Regions of former President Viktor Yanukovych.
Much has been made of Manafort’s connections to figures like Yanukovych, who fled Ukraine for Russia after being ousted from power by a pro-Western uprising in 2014, and Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch whom Manafort offered to brief on the Trump campaign. After all, Manafort’s allegedly illegal activities were revealed after special counsel Robert Mueller began investigating potential links between Russia and the Trump campaign.
Manafort has previously worked in other continents. His first lobbying firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly, which he ran with fellow Trump aid and political consultant Roger Stone, has been nicknamed the"torturers’ lobby" for having represented so many political leaders involved in human rights abuses.
“Last year, Kenya received $38 million in U.S. foreign aid, and spent over $1.4 million on Washington lobbyists to get it. Nigeria received $8.3 million and expended in excess of $2.5 million. Whom did both countries call upon to do their bidding before the U.S. government? The lobbying firm of Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly Public Affairs Co., which received $660,000 from Kenya in 1992-1993 and $1 million from Nigeria in 1991,” details a report from the Center for Public Integrity published in the early 1990s.
166202411-594x594
Former Nigerian President General Sani Abacha (right) and his Gambian counterpart attend a summit. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for Abacha.
“Former Reagan political operative Paul Manafort oversees foreign accounts; his partner, Charles R. Black, was a senior political strategist in the 1992 Bush-Quayle campaign. Their firm's fees to represent Nigeria, Kenya, the Philippines and Angola's UNITA rebel group in 1991 totaled more than $3 million. All four receive U.S. aid and abuse human rights,” the report continued.
The lobbying firm’s work with dictators predates the 1990s, however. Established in 1980, Manafort’s lobbying firm began working for the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, a kleptocratic dictator from the Philippines, in 1985. During the two decades Marcos was in power, around 34,000 people were tortured while he amassed a fortune of at least $10 billion, worth around $22 billion in today's money. His regime paid Manafort’s company almost $1 million a year, or around $2.2 million today.
Later, in 1998, Nigeria’s former president, the Army Officer Sani Abacha, turned to Manafort’s team to help clean up his public image. Manafort personally handled his account, according to reports. The U.N. noted that Abacha’s regime “carried out widespread repression of human rights advocates, pro-democracy activists, journalists and critics of his government,” and that “extrajudicial killings, torture, assassinations, imprisonment and general harassment of critics and opponents were the hallmark of his administration.”
Meanwhile, former Democratic Senator Bill Bradley, of New Jersey, accused Manafort’s lobbying firm of having lengthened the civil war in Angola by supporting Jonas Savimbi. The firm helped secure support in Washington for Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), which was trying to oust a Marxist government from power in the 1980s. According to Human Rights Watch, UNITA “used terror as a policy, to obtain supplies and coerce and intimidate civilians. Indiscriminate killings, mutilation of limbs or ears, and beatings were used by rebels to punish suspected government sympathizers or as a warning against betraying UNITA.”
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Indonesian students hold a rally as they protest against the decision to drop the graft case against former dictator Suharto (right), in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, on May 18, 2006. Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort worked for Suharto.
BAY ISMOYO/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Manafort has also worked for Indonesian military leader and former president Suharto—who has been described as one of the most brutal and corrupt leaders of the 20th century—and forSomalia’s dictatorial leader Siad Barre, whose regime committed widespread atrocities in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Generally, these brutal leaders shared one thing in common: a fierce opposition to communism. Support for figures fighting communist movements was generally in line with the foreign policy goals of the Republican Party at the time. Nevertheless, Manafort’s decision to work with Russians and pro-Russian politicians in the former Soviet Union was a notable departure from his party’s priorities.
According to one of his former employees, Manafort’s work has been characterized by his lack of moral compass and motivation for money and influence.
“I told Manafort it didn’t seem like a promising strategy to march into a murderous dictator’s office and point out to him and his lieutenants that he had a public relations problem. ‘Are we sure we want this guy as a client?’ I asked, in a garish display of naïveté,” K. Riva Levinson, who worked for Manafort early in her career, wrote in an op-ed last year.
“Manafort sounded annoyed, as if I had asked the right question at the wrong time. He waved off my concerns as he settled into his large leather armchair in his spacious corner office overlooking the Potomac River, the walls adorned with photos of past presidents, senators, congressmen and other notables,” Levinson described.
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yikes: The reach of these technologies is astonishingly broad: governments can listen in on cell phone calls, use voice recognition to scan mobile networks, read emails and text messages, censor web pages, track a citizen’s every movement using GPS, and can even change email contents while en route to a recipient. Some tools are installed using the same type of malicious malware and spyware used by online criminals to steal credit card and banking information. They can secretly turn on webcams built into personal laptops and microphones in cell phones not being used. And all of this information is filtered and organized on such a massive scale that it can be used to spy on every person in an entire country.
This is a phenomenon that spans the globe and implicates dozens of corporations. Over the past year, and partly in response to the uprisings that have swept the Arab world, concerns about these exports have been amplified in media reports and by digital rights organizations, sparking a debate as to the appropriate course of action.
For example, Narus, a Boeing subsidiary, was revealed to have sold to Egypt sophisticated equipment used for surveillance. California’s BlueCoat Systems, Inc was found to have equipment being used in Syria.
Germany-based Trovicor has sold technology to a dozen Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Bahrain, dozens of activists were tortured before and after being shown transcripts of their text messages and phone conversations captured from this technology.
Cisco Systems is facing litigation in both Maryland and California based on its alleged sales of surveillance equipment to the Chinese to track, monitor and otherwise facilitate the arrest, detention, or disappearance of human rights activists and religious minorities who have been subjected to gross human rights violations. EFF has issued a petition calling on Cisco to stop aiding China's human rights abuses.
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digby 2016
Perhaps one of the most unnerving political developments over these last few days has been the beginning of the reluctant acceptance of Donald Trump among the Republican establishment. Watching the likes of Senator Bob Corker on television praising his "foreign policy" and seeing influential House members like Bill Schuster endorse him is more than a little bit unsettling. It stands to reason that this would happen now that Trump is looking more and more like the winner, but considering just how unpopular Trump is among the political establishment, it's more likely due to the hard work of his recently hired senior adviser, Paul Manafort.
According to this fascinating, must-read profile by Franklin Foer in Slate, Manafort "is among the most significant political operatives of the past 40 years, and one of the most effective. He has revolutionized lobbying several times over, though he self-consciously refrains from broadcasting his influence." He's the most important Republican campaign consultant and lobbyist the general public has never heard of.
Manafort was mentored by Bush family consiglieri James Baker and partnered with the notorious political operative Lee Atwater. He ran Republican campaigns and conventions for decades, including Reagan's legendary "Morning in America" convention in 1984. Everyone assumed he was hired by Trump to perform the specialized task of suppressing a convention insurgency, which he performed on behalf of Gerald Ford in the 1976 convention. But this man is so much more than that.
He went on to run Reagan's southern operation in 1980, remembered for its clever racist dogwhistle of opening the campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, famously known as the murder site of three civil rights workers 16 years before. After the campaign, Manafort and Roger Stone (along with another successful GOP operative Charlie Black) then opened their campaign consultant/lobbyist firm, perfecting the dubious business of electing politicians and then lobbying them on behalf of their corporate clients. Trump was one of them, using the firm to help him stave off the threat of Indian gaming. It was an ugly, racist campaign that culminated with Governor George Pataki fining Trump and Stone $250,000 and requiring a public apology.
Report Ad
So Manafort and Trump are a match made in heaven for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is Manafort's long association with oligarchs, despots and tyrants all over the world. As much as he's been a GOP operative, his real business is selling evil men to American politicians and power brokers.
Joe Conason compiled a partial list of his greatest hits at the National Memo:
Manafort first drew public attention during the Reagan era, when he and his lobbying partners represented Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, a world-class kleptocrat whose theft of enormous amounts from his country’s treasury I helped to expose in The Village Voice more than 30 years ago (with my esteemed colleague William Bastone, who later created The Smoking Gun website). Few official criminals in the 20th century were as audacious and greedy as Marcos and his shoe-fetishist wife Imelda, but when their image cratered after our investigation, Manafort gladly took nearly a million dollarsto apply lipstick to those pigs.
Not content with the tainted Marcos lucre, Manafort and company also advocated on behalf of international gangsters such as Mobutu Sese Seko, the kleptocratic dictator known as the “King of Zaire”; Jonas Savimbi, the reputed cannibal and blood-diamond purveyor who tried to seize power in Angola; Said Barre, the authoritarian crook who left the failed state of Somalia to pirates and jihadis; and Ukrainian overlord Victor Yanukovych, the corrupt, Kremlin-backed autocrat thrown out by massive street protests two years ago for fixing a national election.
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guate pres deposed 9/15
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Norquist--who sits on the board of directors of the National Rifle Association (NRA)--has lived the NRA's mantra: "The guys with the guns make the rules."
For starters, he has a sordid history of promoting a vile brand of "democracy" abroad. During the 1980s, he supported anti-Communist movements even when "Freedom Fighters" were perpetrating human rights abuses against the very countrymen they were "liberating." Two of the organizations Norquist backed were UNITA andRENAMO. RENAMO has been accused of killing over one million civilians in Mozambique. UNITA employed child soldiers throughout the Angolan Civil War,including during the time that Norquist was a registered lobbyist for the organization. Norquist also lobbied for the interests of a number of African dictators in the United States, including Omar Bongo of Gabon, Pascal Lissouba of the Republic of Congo, Mobutu Sese Seko of (then) Zaire, and France-Albert René of Seychelles. Norquist's firm also represented a Hamas and Hezbollah supporter now serving a 23-year prison sentence for his role in a terrorist plot. Norquist was candid about the anti-democratic character of these tyrants, even describing René as "a guy who preferred not to have elections for a number of years."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-horwitz/the-nras-biggest-gun-grov_b_1107271.html
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http://www.alternet.org/world/7-fascist-regimes-enthusiastically-supported-america
By Alex Henderson [1] / AlterNet [2]
February 4, 2015
7 Fascist Regimes Enthusiastically Supported by America
President Barack Obama inspired a great deal of debate when, in December, he asserted that it was time for the United States to begin to normalize relations with Cuba and start loosening the embargo that has been in effect since the early 1960s. And many hard-right Republicans and neocons, from Texas’ Ted Cruz and Florida’s Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate to House Speaker John Boehner, have been vehemently critical [3] of Obama’s stand. Boehner has insisted that “relations with the Castro regime should not be revisited, let alone normalized [4], until the Cuban people enjoy freedom,” and Cruz has maintained that because Fidel and Raul Castro are “brutal dictators,” the embargo must remain. But given the United States’ long history of supporting one fascist dictatorship after another in Latin America, the embargo of Cuba has been the height of hypocrisy on the U.S.’ part. While it’s true that Amnesty International has often been critical of the Castro regime over the years, many of the other Latin American dictatorships that Amnesty International has criticized have been U.S. allies—and Cuba has hardly had the market cornered on human rights abuses in Latin America.
Below are seven of the worst fascist regimes in Latin America that the U.S. enthusiastically supported.
1. Chile: Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Military Junta, 1973-1990
In 1970, socialist Salvador Allende was democratically elected president of Chile as the leader of the Unidad Popular (a coalition of leftist parties). Allende had been in office for three years when far-right forces in the Chilean military staged an armed insurrection with the help and encouragement of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Richard Nixon Administration (Allende, who evidently committed suicide by shooting himself, was found dead in the presidential palace in Santiago on September 11, 1973). A U.S.-backed military dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet (a fascist greatly influenced by Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco and Italy’s Benito “Il Duce” Mussolini) came to power, and thousands of Allende supporters were killed and tortured during Pinochet’s reign of terror. Not until 1990, after 17 years of fascist rule [5], was democracy restored in Chile.
2. Guatemala’s Military Dictatorships
For decades, the U.S. supported harsh military dictatorships in Guatemala, and its reasons for doing so can be summed up in three words: United Fruit Company. The UFC, a huge American corporation, made considerable profits from fruit plantations in various Latin American countries, including Guatemala—and when Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz (who won by a landslide in Guatemala’s 1951 election) pushed a program of agrarian reform, the UFC lost some of the uncultivated land it had in that country. Árbenz was popular among indigenous Mayans but very unpopular with the UFC, which lobbied the U.S. government to remove him from power. The UFC got its way: in a coup orchestrated by the U.S. State Department and the CIA, Árbenz’ democratically elected government was overthrown in 1954 and replaced by the repressive military dictatorship of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas. And the U.S.-backed military regimes that followed Armas’ assassination in 1957 proved to be even worse. Tens of thousands of Guatemalans were slaughtered by fascist military forces and far-right death squads [6] in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.
The CIA/State Department-orchestrated overthrow of Árbenz in 1954 might have been great for UFC profits, but it led to considerable bloodshed in Guatemala.
3. Nicaragua: The Somoza Dynasty, 1930s-1979
The fascist regimes of Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain became the blueprint for a long list of fascist dictators in Latin America, from Juan María Bordaberry in Uruguay to Tuburcio Andino in Honduras to Fulgencio Batista (another U.S. ally) in Cuba. And the Mussolini/Franco model of governing was also a major influence on the Somoza dynasty, which ruled Nicaragua with an iron fist for decades and did so with the blessing of the U.S. government. Torture was the norm under the Somozas.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, revolutionary Augusto Sandino led a rebellion against U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua; Sandino’s assassination by Nicaraguan National Guard forces under Gen. Anastasio Somoza, Sr. in 1934 was followed by the long-lastingrule of the Somoza family [7]—which, in 1979, was overthrown by the Sandino-influenced Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) or Sandinista National Liberation Front . The Somozas were close allies of the U.S., and although so-called “free elections” were held in Nicaragua during the Somoza years, the reality is that the Somozas operated a U.S.-backed military dictatorship [8] with little in the way of checks and balances.
After coming to power in 1979, the FSLN went from being an armed insurgent movement to being an actual political party and have since competed with other parties in Nicaraguan elections. The Sandinistas were detested by the Ronald Reagan Administration and the CIA, who aggressively supported the Contras (a rightist coalition that included remnants of the Somoza regime) in their efforts to overthrow the new government. Reagan often denounced Sandinista President Daniel Ortega as heavy-handed and dictatorial, which was truly ironic in light of the cozy relationship the U.S. had with the Somozas for many years.
4. El Salvador’s Military Dictatorship: 1979-1992
Like its neighbor Guatemala, El Salvador has a very painful history—and one of the most painful parts is the civil war that lasted from 1979-1992. During those 13 years, a U.S.-supported military junta wasn’t shy about using death squads and torture [9] in its efforts against the leftist guerillas of el Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional or FMLN. The same American politicians who insisted on maintaining a boycott of Cuba had no problem with supporting the Salvadoran junta, which did not except U.S. citizens from its brutality: on December 2, 1980, three American nuns (Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford) and American lay missionary Jean Donovan were kidnapped and killed by one of the death squads while doing charitable work in El Salvador. Donovan had, in March 1980, attended the funeral of Archbishop Óscar Romero, a Catholic priest who was assassinated after being critical of the junta—and to the death squad’s members, that alone made all of the women enemies. But despite the killings of Romero, Donovan, Clarke, Kazel, Ford and countless others, U.S. support for the junta continued under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Sr. And by the time a ceasefire was declared in 1992 (when the FMLN became a legal political party), thousands of Salvadorans had been killed and/or tortured.
5. Argentina: The Dirty War, 1976-1983
The military junta that ruled Argentina from 1976-1983 was infamous for its human rights abuses: an estimated 30,000 people were killed. And one U.S. politician who was on very friendly terms with the junta, according to declassified U.S. State Department documents, was Henry Kissinger [10] (secretary of state during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford). Meeting with Argentina’s foreign minister, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, in 1976, Kissinger assured him that he could count on U.S. support [11]. Kissinger obviously knew what type of brutality the junta was capable of, but he didn’t care: like so many other U.S. politicians during the Cold Way, he had no problem with butchers in Latin America as long as they were staunchly anti-communist.
6. Bolivia: The Hugo Banzer Dictatorship, 1971-1977
When the policies of Bolivia’s socialist president, Juan José Torres, angered the Nixon Administration in the early 1970s, the U.S. helped to overthrow him and install the fascist military dictatorship of Gen. Hugo Banzer. The Banzer regime lasted until 1977, and during Banzer’s rule, torture and false imprisonment [12] were common. Torres fled Bolivia after the coup and settled in Argentina, where he became one of the early casualties of the Dirty War: in June 1976, Torres was kidnapped and killed by one of the Argentinean junta’s death squads.
Torres’ killing was part of Operation Condor, an unholy alliance of fascist forces and military juntas whose stated goal was to eradicate any type of Marxism in South America. Pinochet, Guzzetti, Banzer, Bordaberry and Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner were all participants in the program, which the CIA enthusiastically promoted.
7. Paraguay: The AlfredoStroessner Regime, 1954-1989
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, who was in power from 1954-1989, was a strident anti-communist—and that was enough for the U.S., which pumped millions of dollars into his regime in the 1950s and 1960s and had a close relationship with the Paraguayan military for many years. Torture, kidnappings and other human rights abuses were common under the Stroessner regime, which authorized Pastor Milciades Coronel (who oversaw Stroessner’s secret police) to commit numerous atrocities. In 1975, Stroessner even listened on the phone while Miguel Soler, head of the Paraguayan Communist Party, was being dismembered with a chainsaw [13] by Coronel’s policía secreta.
Alex Henderson's work has appeared in the L.A. Weekly, Billboard, Spin, Creem, the Pasadena Weekly and many other publications. Follow him on Twitter @alexvhenderson.
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/7-fascist-regimes-enthusiastically-supported-america
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/alex-henderson
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://dailysignal.com/2015/01/26/ted-cruz-marco-rubio-surround-rand-paul-opposing-obamas-cuba-policy/
[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/17/marco-rubio-cuba-obama_n_6342348.html
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/674313.stm
[6] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/10/efrain-rios-montt-convicted_n_3256070.html
[7] http://www.pri.org/stories/2011-11-09/new-somoza-nicaragua
[8] http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/resources/torture/grossman.html
[9] http://www.nytimes.com/1998/04/03/world/4-salvadorans-say-they-killed-us-nuns-on-orders-of-military.html
[10] http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/01/new-memo-kissinger-gave-green-light-argentina-dirty-war
[11] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/06/argentina.usa
[12] http://www.theguardian.com/news/2002/may/06/guardianobituaries.bolivia
[13] http://www.anphoblacht.com/contents/18450
[14] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 7 Fascist Regimes Enthusiastically Supported by America
[15] http://www.alternet.org/
[16] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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spy mag, c/o stone hell
art levine "publicists of the damned"
http://books.google.ca/books?id=qnVC8yS4N_AC&lpg=PP1&rview=1&pg=PA90#v=onepage&q&f=false
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AlterNet [1] / By Nicolas J.S. Davies [2]
35 Countries Where the U.S. Has Supported Fascists, Drug Lords and Terrorists
March 4, 2014 |
The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism, drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S. government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists, dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global power.
Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, "The notion of an honest puppet is a contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world since 1945." What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that failure.
1. Afghanistan
In the 1980s, the U.S. worked with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to overthrow Afghanistan's socialist government. It funded, trained and armed forces led by conservative tribal leaders whose power was threatened by their country's progress on education, women's rights and land reform. After Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces in 1989, these U.S.-backed warlords tore the country apart and boosted opium production to an unprecedented level of 2,000 to 3,400 tons per year [3]. The Taliban government cut opium production by 95% in two years between 1999 and 2001, but the U.S. invasion in 2001 restored the warlords and drug lords to power. Afghanistan now ranks 175th out of 177 [4] countries in the world for corruption, 175th out of 186 [5] in human development, and since 2004, it has produced an unprecedented 5,300 tons of opium per year. President Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was well known as a CIA-backed drug lord [6]. After a major U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in 2011, Colonel Abdul Razziq was appointed provincial police chief, boosting a heroin smuggling operation [7] that already earned him $60 million per year in one of the poorest [8] countries in the world.
2. Albania
Between 1949 and 1953, the U.S. and U.K. set out to overthrow the government of Albania, the smallest and most vulnerable communist country in Eastern Europe. Exiles were recruited and trained to return to Albania to stir up dissent and plan an armed uprising. Many of the exiles involved in the plan were former collaborators with the Italian and German occupation during World War II. They included former Interior Minister Xhafer Deva [9], who oversaw the deportations of "Jews, Communists, partisans and suspicious persons" (as described in a Nazi document) to Auschwitz. Declassified U.S. documents have since revealed that Deva was one of 743 fascist war criminals [10] recruited by the U.S. after the war.
3. Argentina
U.S. documents declassified in 2003 [11] detail conversations between U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentinian Foreign Minister Admiral Guzzetti in October 1976, soon after the military junta seized power in Argentina. Kissinger explicitly approved the junta's "dirty war," in which it eventually killed up to 30,000, most of them young people, and stole 400 children from the families of their murdered parents. Kissinger told Guzzetti, "Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed... the quicker you succeed the better." The U.S. Ambassador in Buenos Aires reported that Guzzetti "returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no real problem with the US government over that issue." ("Daniel Gandolfo, [12]" "Presente!")
4. Brazil
In 1964, General Castelo Branco led a coup that sparked 20 years of brutal military dictatorship [13]. U.S. military attache Vernon Walters, later Deputy CIA Director and UN Ambassador, knew Castelo Branco well from World War II in Italy. As a clandestine CIA officer, Walters' records from Brazil have never been declassified, but the CIA provided all the support needed to ensure the success of the coup, including funding for opposition labor and student groups in street protests, as in Ukraine and Venezuela today. A U.S. Marine amphibious force on standby to land in Sao Paolo was not needed. Like other victims of U.S.-backed coups in Latin America, the elected President Joao Goulart was a wealthy landowner, not a communist, but his efforts to remain neutral in the Cold War were as unacceptable to Washington as President Yanukovich's refusal to hand the Ukraine over to the west 50 years later.
5. Cambodia
When President Nixon ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia [14] in 1969, American pilots were ordered to falsify their logs to conceal their crimes. They killed at least half a million Cambodians, dropping more bombs than on Germany and Japan combined in World War II. As the Khmer Rouge gained strength in 1973, the CIA reported that its "propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes." After the Khmer Rouge killed at least 2 million of its own people and was finally driven out by the Vietnamese army in 1979, the U.S. Kampuchea Emergency Group [15], based in the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok, set out to feed and supply them as the "resistance" to the new Vietnamese-backed Cambodian government. Under U.S. pressure, the World Food Program provided $12 million to feed 20,000 to 40,000 Khmer Rouge soldiers. For at least another decade, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency provided the Khmer Rouge with satellite intelligence, while U.S. and British special forces trained them to lay millions of land mines across Western Cambodia which still kill or maim hundreds of people every year.
6. Chile
When Salvador Allende became President in 1970, President Nixon promised to"make the economy scream" [16] in Chile. The U.S., Chile's largest trading partner, cut off trade to cause shortages and economic chaos. The CIA and State Department had conducted sophisticated propaganda operations in Chile for a decade, funding conservative politicians, parties, unions, student groups and all forms of media, while expanding ties with the military. After General Pinochet seized power, the CIA kept Chilean officials on its payroll and worked closely with Chile's DINA intelligence agency as the military government killed thousands of people and jailed and tortured tens of thousands more. Meanwhile, the "Chicago Boys," [17] over 100 Chilean students sent by a State Department program to study under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, launched a radical program of privatization, deregulation and neoliberal policies that kept the economy screaming for most Chileans throughout Pinochet's 16-year military dictatorship.
7. China
By the end of 1945, 100,000 U.S. troops [18] were fighting alongside Chinese Kuomintang (and Japanese) forces in Communist-held areas of northern China. Chiang Kai-Shek and the Kuomintang may have been the most corrupt of all U.S. allies. A steady stream of U.S. advisers in China warned that U.S. aid was being stolen by Chiang and his cronies, some of it even sold to the Japanese, but the U.S. commitment to Chiang continued throughout the war, his defeat by the Communists and his rule of Taiwan. Secretary of State Dulles' brinksmanship on behalf of Chiang twice led the U.S. to the brink of nuclear war with China [19]on his behalf in 1955 and 1958 over Matsu and Qemoy, two small islands off the coast of China.
8. Colombia
When U.S. special forces and the Drug Enforcement Administration aided Colombian forces to track down and kill drug lord Pablo Escobar, they worked with a vigilante group called Los Pepes [20]. In 1997, Diego Murillo-Bejarano and other Los Pepes' leaders co-founded the AUC (United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) [21] which was responsible for 75% of violent civilian deaths in Colombia over the next 10 years.
9. Cuba
The United States supported the Batista dictatorship as it created the repressive conditions that led to the Cuban Revolution, killing up to 20,000 of its own people [22]. Former U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith testified to Congress [23] that, "the U.S. was so overwhelmingly influential in Cuba that the American Ambassador was the second most important man, sometimes even more important than the Cuban president." After the revolution, the CIA launched a long campaign of terrorism against Cuba [24], training Cuban exiles in Florida, Central America and the Dominican Republic to commit assassinations and sabotage in Cuba. CIA-backed operations against Cuba included the attempted invasion at the Bay of Pigs, in which 100 Cuban exiles and four Americans were killed; several attempted assassinations of Fidel Castro and successful assassinations of other officials; several bombing raids in 1960 (three Americans killed and two captured) and terrorist bombings targeting tourists as recently as 1997; the apparent bombing of a French ship in Havana harbor (at least 75 killed); a biological swine flu attack that killed half a million pigs; and the terrorist bombing of a Cuban airliner [25] (78 killed) planned by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, who remain free in America despite the U.S. pretense of waging a war against terrorism. Bosch was granted a presidential pardon by the first President Bush.
10. El Salvador
The civil war that swept El Salvador [26] in the 1980s was a popular uprising against a government that ruled with the utmost brutality. At least 70,000 people were killed and thousands more were disappeared. The UN Truth Commission set up after the war found that 95% of the dead were killed by government forces and death squads, and only 5% by FLMN guerrillas. The government forces responsible for this one-sided slaughter [27] were almost entirely established, trained, armed and supervised by the CIA, U.S. special forces and the U.S. School of the Americas. The UN Truth Commission found that the units guilty of the worst atrocities, like the Atlacatl Battalion [28] which conducted the infamous El Mozote massacre [29], were precisely the ones most closely supervised by American advisers. The American role in this campaign of state terrorism is now hailed by senior U.S. military officers as a model for "counter-insurgency" in Colombia and elsewhere as the U.S. war on terror spreads its violence and chaos across the world.
11. France
In France, Italy, Greece, Indochina, Indonesia, Korea and the Philippines at the end of World War II, advancing allied forces found that communist resistance forces had gained effective control of large areas or even entire countries as German and Japanese forces withdrew or surrendered. In Marseille, the CGT communist trade union controlled the docks that were critical to trade with the U.S. and the Marshall plan. The OSS had worked with the U.S.-Sicilian mafia and Corsican gangsters during the war. So after the OSS merged into the new CIA after the war, it used its contacts to restore Corsican gangsters to power in Marseille, to break dock strikes and CGT control of the docks. It protected the Corsicans as they set up heroin labs [30] and began shipping heroin to New York, where the American-Sicilian mafia also flourished under CIA protection. Ironically, supply disruptions due to the war and the Chinese Revolution had reduced the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. to 20,000 by 1945 and heroin addiction could have been virtually eliminated, but the CIA's infamous French Connection [31]instead brought a new wave of heroin addiction, organized crime and drug-related violence to New York and other American cities.
12. Ghana
There seem to be no inspiring national leaders in Africa these days. But that may be America's fault. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was a rising star in Ghana:Kwame Nkrumah. [32] He was Prime Minister under British rule from 1952 to 1960, when Ghana became independent and he became president. He was a socialist, a pan-African and an anti-imperialist, and, in 1965, he wrote a book called Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah was overthrown in a CIA coup in 1966. The CIA denied involvement at the time, but the British press later reported that 40 CIA officers operated out of the U.S. Embassy "distributing largesse among President Nkrumah's secret adversaries," and that their work "was fully rewarded." Former CIA officer John Stockwell revealed more about the CIA's decisive role in the coup in his book In Search of Enemies [33].
13. Greece
When British forces landed in Greece [34] in October 1944, they found the country under the effective control of ELAS-EAM, the leftist partisan group formed by the Greek Communist Party in 1941 after the Italian and German invasion. ELAS-EAM welcomed the British forces, but the British refused any accommodation with them and installed a government that included royalists and Nazi collaborators. When ELAS-EAM held a huge demonstration in Athens, police opened fire and killed 28 people [35]. The British recruited members of the Nazi-trained Security Battalions to hunt down and arrest ELAS members, who once again took up arms as a resistance movement. In 1947, with a civil war raging, the bankrupt British asked the U.S. to take over their role in occupied Greece. The U.S. role in supporting an incompetent fascist government in Greece was enshrined in the "Truman Doctrine," [36] seen by many historians as the beginning of the Cold War. ELAS-EAM fighters laid down their arms in 1949 after Yugoslavia withdrew its support, and 100,000 were either executed, exiled or jailed [37]. The liberal Prime Minister Georgios Papandreou was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup in 1967, leading to seven more years of military rule. His son Andreas was elected as Greece's first "socialist" president in 1981, but many ELAS-EAM members jailed in the 1940s were never freed and died in prison.
14. Guatemala
After its first operation to overthrow a foreign government in Iran in 1953, the CIA launched a more elaborate operation [38] to remove the elected liberal government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA recruited and trained a small army of mercenaries under Guatemalan exile Castillo Armas to invade Guatemala, with 30 unmarked U.S. planes providing air support. U.S. Ambassador Peurifoy prepared a list of Guatemalans to be executed, and Armas was installed as president. The reign of terror that followed led to 40 years of civil war [39], in which at least 200,000 were killed, most of them indigenous people. The climax of the war was the campaign of genocide in Ixil by President Rios Montt, for which he was sentenced to life in prison in 2013, until Guatemala's Supreme Court rescued him on a technicality [40]. A new trial is scheduled for 2015. Declassified CIA documents reveal that the Reagan administration was well aware of the indiscriminate and genocidal nature of Guatemalan military operations [41] when it approved new military aid in 1981, including military vehicles, spare parts for helicopters and U.S. military advisers. The CIA documents detail the massacre and destruction of entire villages, and conclude, "The well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."
15. Haiti
Almost 200 years after the slave rebellion that created the nation of Haiti and defeated Napoleon's armies, the long-suffering people of Haiti finally elected a truly democratic government led by Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. But President Aristide was overthrown in a U.S.-backed military coup after eight months in office, and the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recruited a paramilitary force called FRAPH [42] to target and destroy Aristide's Lavalas movement in Haiti. The CIA put FRAPH's leader Emmanuel "Toto" Constant on its payroll and shipped in weapons from Florida. When President Clinton sent a U.S. occupation force to restore Aristide to office in 1994, FRAPH members detained by U.S. forces were freed on orders from Washington, and the CIA maintained FRAPH as a criminal gang to undermine Aristide and Lavalas [43]. After Aristide was elected president a second time in 2000, a force of 200 U.S. special forces trained 600 former FRAPH members and others [44] in the Dominican Republic to prepare for a second coup. In 2004, they launched a campaign of violence to destabilize Haiti, which provided the pretext for U.S. forces to land in Haiti and remove Aristide from office.
16. Honduras
The 2009 coup in Honduras has led to severe repression and death squad murders of political opponents, union organizers and journalists [45]. At the time of the coup, U.S. officials denied any role in the coup and used semantics to avoid cutting off U.S. military aid as required under U.S. law. But two Wikileaks cables revealed that the U.S. Embassy was the main power broker [46] in managing the aftermath of the coup and forming a government that is now repressing and murdering its people.
17. Indonesia
In 1965, General Suharto seized effective power from President Sukarno on the pretext of combatting a failed coup and unleashed an orgy of mass murder [47]that killed at least half a million people. U.S. diplomats later admitted providing lists of 5,000 Communist Party members to be killed. Political officer Robert Martens said [48], "It really was a big help to the army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment."
18. Iran
Iran may be the most instructive case of a CIA coup that caused endless long-term problems for the United States. In 1953, the CIA and the U.K.'s MI6 overthrew the popular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh [49]. Iran had nationalized its oil industry by a unanimous vote of parliament, ending a BP monopoly that only paid Iran a 16% royalty on its oil. For two years, Iran resisted a British naval blockade and international economic sanctions. After President Eisenhower took office in 1953, the CIA agreed to a British request to intervene. After the initial coup failed and the Shah and his family fled to Italy, the CIA payed millions of dollars to bribe military officers and pay gangsters to unleash violence in the streets of Tehran. Mossadegh was finally removed and the Shah returned to rule as a brutal Western puppet until the Iranian Revolution in 1979.
19. Israel
Just as the U.S. uses its economic and military power, its sophisticated propaganda system and its position as a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council to violate international law with impunity, it also uses the same tools to shield its ally Israel from accountability for international crimes. Since 1966, the U.S. has used its Security Council veto 83 times [50], more than the other four Permanent Members combined, and 42 of those vetoes have been on resolutions related to Israel and/or Palestine. Just last week, Amnesty International published a report [51] that, "Israeli forces have displayed a callous disregard for human life by killing dozens of Palestinian civilians, including children, in the occupied West Bank over the past three years with near total impunity." Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Territories condemned the 2008 assault on Gaza [52] as a "massive violation of international law," adding that nations like the U.S. "that have supplied weapons and supported the siege are complicit in the crimes." The Leahy Law [53]requires the U.S. to cut off military aid to forces that violate human rights, but it has never been enforced against Israel. Israel continues to build settlements in occupied territory in violation of the 4th Geneva Convention [54], making it harder to comply with Security Council resolutions [55] that require it to withdraw from occupied territory. But Israel remains beyond the rule of law, shielded from accountability by its powerful patron, the United States.
20. Iraq
In 1958, after the British-backed monarchy was overthrown by General Abdul Qasim, the CIA hired a 22-year-old Iraqi named Saddam Hussein [56] to assassinate the new president. Hussein and his gang botched the job and he fled to Lebanon, wounded in the leg by one of his companions. The CIA rented him an apartment in Beirut and then moved him to Cairo, where he was paid as an agent of Egyptian intelligence and was a frequent visitor at the U.S. Embassy. Qasim was killed in a CIA-backed Baathist coup in 1963, and as in Guatemala and Indonesia, the CIA gave the new government a list of at least 4,000 communists to be killed. But, once in power, the Baathist revolutionary government was no Western puppet, and it nationalized Iraq's oil industry, adopted an Arab nationalist foreign policy and built the best education and health systems in the Arab world. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president, conducted purges of political opponents and launched a disastrous war against Iran. The U.S. DIA provided satellite intelligence to target chemical weapons that the West helped him to produce, and Donald Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials welcomed him as an ally against Iran. Only after Iraq invaded Kuwait and Hussein became more useful as an enemy did U.S. propaganda brand him as "a new Hitler." [57] After the U.S. invaded Iraq on false pretenses in 2003, the CIA recruited 27 brigades of "Special Police," [58] merging the most brutal of Saddam Hussein's security forces with the Iranian-trained Badr militia to form death squads that murdered tens of thousands of mostly Sunni Arab men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere in a reign of terror that continues to this day [59].
21. Korea
When U.S. forces arrived in Korea in 1945 [60], they were greeted by officials of the Korean People's Republic (KPR), formed by resistance groups which had disarmed surrendering Japanese forces and begun to establish law and order throughout Korea. General Hodge had them thrown out of his office and placed the southern half of Korea under U.S. military occupation. By contrast, Russian forces in the North recognized the KPR, leading to the long-term division of Korea. The U.S. flew in Syngman Rhee, [61]a conservative Korean exile, and installed him as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions [62], killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. He was at least partly responsible for the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.
22. Laos
The CIA began providing air support to French forces in Laos [63] in 1950, and remained involved there for 25 years. The CIA engineered at least three coups between 1958 and 1960 to keep the growing leftist Pathet Lao out of government. It worked with right-wing Laotian drug lords [64] like General Phoumi Nosavan, transporting opium between Burma, Laos and Vietnam and protecting his monopoly on the opium trade in Laos. In 1962, the CIA recruited a clandestine mercenary army of 30,000 veterans of previous guerrilla wars from Thailand, Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines to fight the Pathet Lao. As large numbers of American GIs in Vietnam got hooked on heroin, the CIA's Air America transported opium from Hmong territory in the Plain of Jars to General Vang Pao's heroin labs in Long Tieng and Vientiane for shipment to Vietnam. When the CIA failed to defeat the Pathet Lao, the U.S. bombed Laos almost as heavily as Cambodia, with 2 million tons of bombs.
23. Libya
NATO's war on Libya epitomized President Obama's "disguised, quiet, media-free" [65] approach to war. NATO's bombing campaign was fraudulently justified to the UN Security Council as an effort to protect civilians, and the instrumental role of Western and other foreign special forces on the ground was well-disguised, even when Qatari special forces [66] (including ex-ISI Pakistani mercenaries [67]) led the final assault on the Bab Al-Aziziya HQ in Tripoli. NATO conducted 7,700 air strikes [68], 30,000 -100,000 people were killed [69], loyalist towns were bombed to rubble and ethnically cleansed, and the country is in chaos [70] as Western-trained and -armed Islamist militias seize territory and oil facilities and vie for power. The Misrata militia, trained and armed by Western special forces, is one of the most violent and powerful. As I write this, protesters have just stormed the Congress building in Tripoli for the fourth or fifth time in recent months, and two elected Representatives have been shot and wounded as they fled.
24. Mexico
The death toll in Mexico's drug wars [71] recently passed 100,000. The most violent of the drug cartels is Los Zetas [72]. U.S. officials call the Zetas [73] "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous drug cartel operating in Mexico." The Zetas cartel was formed by Mexican security forces trained by U.S. special forces [74] at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, and at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
25. Myanmar
After the Chinese Revolution, Kuomintang generals moved into northern Burma and became powerful drug lords, with Thai military protection, financing from Taiwan and air transport and logistical support from the CIA. Burma's opium production grew from 18 tons in 1958 to 600 tons in 1970. The CIA maintained these forces as a bulwark against communist China but they transformed the "golden triangle" [75] into the world's largest opium producer. Most of the opium was shipped by mule trains into Thailand where other CIA allies shipped it to heroin labs in Hong Kong and Malaysia. The trade shifted around 1970 as CIA partner General Vang Pao set up new labs in Laos to provide heroin to GIs in Vietnam.
26. Nicaragua
Anastasio Somosa ruled Nicaragua as his personal fiefdom for 43 years with unconditional U.S. support, as his National Guard committed every crime imaginable from massacres and torture to extortion and rape with complete impunity. After he was finally overthrown by the Sandinista Revolution [76] in 1979, the CIA recruited, trained and supported "contra" mercenaries [77] to invade Nicaragua and conduct terrorism to destabilize the country. In 1986, the International Court of Justice found the United States guilty of aggression against Nicaragua [78] for deploying the contras and mining Nicaraguan ports. The court ordered the U.S. to cease its aggression and pay war reparations to Nicaragua, but they have never been paid. The U.S. response was to declare that it would no longer recognize the binding jurisdiction of the ICJ, effectively setting itself beyond the rule of international law.
27.Pakistan; 28.Saudi Arabia; 29. Turkey
After reading my last AlterNet piece [79] on the failed war on terror, former CIA and State Department terrorism expert Larry Johnson told me, "The main problem with respect to assessing the terrorist threat is to accurately define the state sponsorship. The biggest culprits today, in contrast to 20 years ago, are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Iran, despite the right-wing/neocon ravings, is not that active in encouraging and/or facilitating terrorism." In the past 12 years, U.S. military aid to Pakistan [80] has totaled $18.6 billion. The U.S. has just negotiated the largest arms deal in history [81] with Saudi Arabia. And Turkey is a long-standing member of NATO. All three major state sponsors of terrorism in the world today are U.S. allies.
30. Panama
U.S. drug enforcement officials wanted to arrest Manuel Noriega [82] in 1971, when he was the chief of military intelligence in Panama. They had enough evidence to convict him of drug trafficking, but he was also a long-time agent and informer for the CIA, so like other drug-dealing CIA agents from Marseille to Macao, he was untouchable. He was temporarily cut loose during the Carter administration but otherwise kept collecting at least $100,000 per year from the U.S. Treasury. As he rose to be the de facto ruler of Panama, he became even more valuable to the CIA, reporting on meetings with Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and supporting U.S. covert wars in Central America. Noriega probably quit drug trafficking in about 1985, well before the U.S. indicted him for it in 1988. The indictment was a pretext for the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, whose main purpose was to give the U.S. greater control over Panama, at the expense of at least 2,000 lives [83].
31. The Philippines
Since the U.S. launched its so-called war on terror in 2001, a task force of 500 US JSOC forces has conducted covert operations in the southern Philippines. Now, under Obama's "pivot to Asia," U.S. military aid to the Philippines is increasing, from $12 million in 2011 to $50 million this year. But Filippino human rights activists report that the increased aid coincides with increased military death squad operations against civilians [84]. The past three years have seen at least 158 people killed by death squads [85].
32. Syria
When President Obama approved flying weapons and militiamen from Libya [86] to the "Free Syrian Army" base in Turkey in unmarked NATO planes in late 2011, he was calculating that the U.S. and its allies could replicate the "successful" overthrow of the Libyan government. Everyone involved understood that Syria would be a longer and bloodier conflict, but they gambled that the end result would be the same, even though 55% of Syrians [87] told pollsters they still supported Assad. A few months later, Western leaders undermined Kofi Annan's peace plan with their "Plan B," "Friends of Syria." [88] This was not an alternative peace plan, but a commitment to escalation, offering guaranteed support, money and weapons to the jihadis in Syria to make sure they ignored the Annan peace plan and kept fighting. That move sealed the fate of millions of Syrians. Over the past two years Qatar has spent $3 billion and flown in planeloads of weapons [89], Saudi Arabia has shipped weapons from Croatia [90], and Western and Arab royalist special forces have trained thousands of increasingly radicalized fundamentalist jihadis, now allied with al-Qaeda. The Geneva II talks were a half-hearted effort to revive the 2012 Annan peace plan, but Western insistence that a "political transition" means the immediate resignation of Assad reveals that Western leaders still value regime change more than peace. To paraphrase Phyllis Bennis [91], the U.S. and its allies are still willing to fight to the last Syrian.
33. Uruguay
The foreign officials the U.S. has worked with include many who have benefited from their cooperation in American crimes around the world. But in Uruguay in 1970, when Police Chief Alejandro Otero objected to Americans training his officers in the art of torture, he was demoted. The U.S. official he complained to was Dan Mitrione [92], who worked for the U.S. Office of Public Safety, a division of the US Agency for International Development. Mitrione's training sessions reportedly included torturing homeless people to death with electric shocks to teach his students how far they could go.
34. Yugoslavia
The NATO aerial bombardment of Yugoslavia in 1999 was a flagrant crime of aggression in violation of Article 2.4 of the UN Charter [93]. When British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told Secretary of State Albright that the U.K. was having "difficulties with its lawyers" over the planned attack, she told him the U.K. should "get new lawyers, [94]" according to her deputy James Rubin. NATO's proxy ground force in its aggression against Yugoslavia was the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), led by Hashim Thaci [95]. A 2010 report by the Council of Europe [96] and a book by Carla Del Ponte [97], the former prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia, support long-standing allegations that at the time of the NATO invasion, Thaci ran a criminal organization called the Drenica group which sent more than 400 captured Serbs to Albania to be killed so that their organs could be extracted and sold for transplant. Hashim Thaci is now the Prime Minister of the NATO protectorate of Kosovo.
35. Zaire
Patrice Lumumba [98], the president of the pan-Africanist Mouvement National Congolais, took part in the Congo's struggle for independence and became the Congo's first elected Prime Minister in 1960. He was deposed in a CIA-backed coup led by Joseph-Desire Mobutu [99], his Army Chief of Staff. Mobutu handed Lumumba over to the Belgian-backed separatists and Belgian mercenaries he had been fighting in Katanga province, and he was shot by a firing squad led by a Belgian mercenary. Mobutu abolished elections and appointed himself president in 1965, and ruled as a dictator for 30 years. He killed political opponents in public hangings, had others tortured to death, and eventually embezzled at least $5 billion while Zaire, as he renamed it, remained one of the poorest countries in the world. But U.S. support for Mobutu continued. Even as President Carter publicly distanced himself, Zaire continued to receive 50% of all U.S. military aid to sub-Saharan Africa. When Congress voted to cut off military aid, Carter and U.S. business interests worked to restore it. Only in the 1990s did U.S. support start to waver, until Mobutu was deposed by Laurent Kabila in 1997 and died soon afterward.
***
Major Joe Blair was the director of instruction at the U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) [100] from 1986 to 1989. He described the training he oversaw at SOA as the following: "The doctrine that was taught was that if you want information you use physical abuse, false imprisonment, threats to family members, and killing. If you can't get the information you want, if you can't get that person to shut up or stop what they're doing, you assassinate them—and you assassinate them with one of your death squads."
The stock response of U.S. officials to the exposure of the systematic crimes I've described is that such things may have occurred at certain times in the past but that they in no way reflect long-term or ongoing U.S. policy. The School of the Americas was moved from the Panama Canal Zone to Fort Benning, Georgia, and replaced by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) in 2001. But Joe Blair has something to say about that too. Testifying at a trial of SOA Watch protesters in 2002 [101], he said, "There are no substantive changes besides the name. They teach the identical courses that I taught, and changed the course names and use the same manuals."
A huge amount of human suffering could be alleviated and global problems solved if the United States would make a genuine commitment to human rights and the rule of law, as opposed to one it only applies cynically and opportunistically to its enemies, but never to itself or its allies.
See more stories tagged with:
us [102],
Israel [103],
China [104],
chile [105],
fascists [106],
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Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/world/35-countries-where-us-has-supported-fascists-druglords-and-terrorists
Links:
[1] http://alternet.org
[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/nicolas-js-davies
[3] http://www.google.com/search?q=Afghanistan+opium+production+tons+statistics&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&imgil=xFDUlexeU_aubM%253A%253Bhttp%253A%252F%252Ft0.gstatic.com%252Fimages%253Fq%253Dtbn%253AANd9GcQTlP1HhIOneUz5vPLMn8qCHfOaLRzfG3U10wB3UPhecTUDYjS7VQ%253B900%253B695%253BN2Vc-pxnjLV6TM%253Bhttp%25253A%25252F%25252Fwww.zanran.com%25252Fq%25252Fafghanistan_opium_production_in_metric_tons&source=iu&usg=_vRhX8QHZEJqJSf-XWQYW6lynEoQ%3D&sa=X&ei=ywMRU__sIsbc2AXYxYGwDw&ved=0CE0Q9QEwBQ&biw=1024&bih=606#facrc=&imgrc=xFDUlexeU_aubM%253A%3BN2Vc-pxnjLV6TM%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fs3.amazonaws.com%252Fzanran_storage%252Fwww.seiservices.com%252FPdfImages%252F2467035973.016.png%3Bhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.zanran.com%252Fq%252Fafghanistan_opium_production_in_metric_tons%3B900%3B695
[4] http://www.transparency.org/country#AFG
[5] https://data.undp.org/dataset/Table-1-Human-Development-Index-and-its-components/wxub-qc5k
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
[7] http://harpers.org/archive/2009/12/the-master-of-spin-boldak/
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhafer_Deva
[10] http://www.amazon.com/U-S-Intelligence-Nazis-Richard-Breitman/dp/0521617944
[11] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/dec/06/argentina.usa
[12] http://nicolasdavies.blogspot.com/2005/10/daniel-rest-in-peace.html
[13] http://en.mercopress.com/2012/04/15/the-1964-made-in-brazil-coup-and-us-contingency-support-plan-if-the-plot-stalled
[14] http://rabble.ca/toolkit/on-this-day/us-secret-bombing-cambodia
[15] http://www.newstatesman.com/node/137397
[16] http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys
[18] http://www.questia.com/library/7751705/the-cold-war-and-its-origins-1917-1960
[19] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Taiwan_Strait_Crisis
[20] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Pepes
[21] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Self-Defense_Forces_of_Colombia
[22] http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25660
[23] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulgencio_Batista
[24] http://www.chomsky.info/books/hegemony02.htm
[25] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_de_Aviaci%C3%B3n_Flight_455
[26] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War
[27] http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/nairnelsalvadorbtds.html
[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlacatl_Battalion
[29] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mozote_massacre
[30] http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/heroin/McCoy2.htm
[31] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_French_Connection_(film)
[32] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Nkrumah
[33] http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Enemies-CIA-Story/dp/0393009262
[34] http://www.anagnosis.gr/index.php?pageID=228&la=eng
[35] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekemvriana
[36] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truman_Doctrine
[37] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Civil_War
[38] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
[39] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War
[40] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/21/rios-montt-genocide-case-collapses
[41] http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/23/reagans-hand-in-guatemalas-genocide/
[42] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_for_the_Advancement_and_Progress_of_Ha%C3%AFti
[43] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/HaitiJan96_Nairn.html
[44] http://www.democracynow.org/2004/4/7/witnesses_u_s_special_forces_trained
[45] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Honduras
[46] http://resistenciahonduras.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3014:two-rencet-wikileaks-reveal-us-central-role-during-the-honduras-coup-&catid=98:opinions&Itemid=347
[47] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
[48] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/Indonesia65_KH.html
[49] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
[50] http://www.globalpolicy.org/images/pdfs/Changing_Patterns_in_the_Use_of_the_Veto_as_of_August_2012.pdf
[51] http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/trigger-happy-israeli-army-and-police-use-reckless-force-west-bank-2014-02-27
[52] http://www.thenation.com/article/israels-war-crimes#
[53] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy_Law
[54] http://www.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/380-600056
[55] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Security_Council_Resolution_242
[56] http://www.amazon.com/Blood-On-Our-Hands-Destruction/dp/193484098X
[57] http://rense.com/general32/asd.htm
[58] http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/05/31/war-crimes-as-policy-2/
[59] http://truth-out.org/news/item/22138-iraqi-government-killing-civilians-in-fallujah
[60] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Division_of_Korea
[61] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngman_Rhee
[62] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeju_Uprising
[63] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Laos
[64] http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIAdrug_fallout.html
[65] http://www.army.mil/professionalWriting/volumes/volume2/april_2004/4_04_4.html
[66] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/26/qatar-troops-libya-rebels-support
[67] http://www.phantomreport.com/upping-the-ante-the-cia-and-special-operation-forces-from-qatar-and-pakistan-orchestrating-the-war-in-syria
[68] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/world/africa/scores-of-unintended-casualties-in-nato-war-in-libya.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
[69] http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/libya-conflicting-death-toll-raises-questions-about-what-truly-happened-237895
[70] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-civil_war_violence_in_Libya
[71] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War
[72] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Zetas
[73] http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/08/06/mexico.drug.cartels/index.html
[74] http://www.examiner.com/article/is-the-u-s-military-training-the-next-generation-of-drug-cartel-enforcers
[75] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(Southeast_Asia)
[76] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandinista_National_Liberation_Front
[77] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras
[78] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
[79] http://www.alternet.org/world/disastrous-and-failed-war-terror
[80] http://www.cgdev.org/page/aid-pakistan-numbers
[81] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704621204575488361149625050
[82] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega
[83] http://www.skepticfiles.org/socialis/pan_hr.htm
[84] http://www.karapatan.org/Karapatan+enraged+by+weekly+killing+spree+under+BS+Aquino
[85] http://fpif.org/u-s-aid-human-rights-violations-philippines/
[86] http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/nato-vs-syria/
[87] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jan/17/syrians-support-assad-western-propaganda
[88] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friends_of_Syria_Group
[89] http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/86e3f28e-be3a-11e2-bb35-00144feab7de.html
[90] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/world/middleeast/in-shift-saudis-are-said-to-arm-rebels-in-syria.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
[91] http://peaceblog.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/excellent-talking-points-on-syria-from-our-colleague-phyllis-bennis/
[92] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione
[93] https://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter1.shtml
[94] http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/hart/legeth/2003/00000006/00000001/art00013
[95] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashim_Tha%C3%A7i
[96] http://www.beoforum.rs/en/comments-belgrade-forum-for-the-world-of-equals/153-criminal-kosovo-americas-gift-to-europe-by-diana-johnstone.html
[97] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carla_Del_Ponte
[98] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrice_Lumumba
[99] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobutu_Sese_Seko
[100] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation
[101] http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Bay-Area-protesters-sentenced-in-Georgia-Jail-2796779.php
[102] http://www.alternet.org/tags/us-0
[103] http://www.alternet.org/tags/israel-gaza-conflict-casualties-timeline
[104] http://www.alternet.org/tags/china-turkey-relations
[105] http://www.alternet.org/tags/chile-0
[106] http://www.alternet.org/tags/fascists
[107] http://www.alternet.org/tags/terrorists
[108] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
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http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Public_Relations/ToxicSludge.html
Toxic Sludge is Good for You -- The Torturers' Lobby
The Torturers' Lobby, Propaganda, & Public Relations
The Torturers' Lobby & Grenada
The Torturers' Lobby & Nicaragua
The Torturers' Lobby & Central America
==
ken silverstein harper's magazine npr on the media
cassidy approached
Although there are distinct limits to what they can achieve, lobbyists are the crucial conduit through which pariah regimes advance their interests in Washington. “It’s like the secret handshake that gets you into the lodge,” as one former lobbyist told me. Occasionally, firms will achieve spectacular successes for a client: one particularly remarkable piece of lobbyist image management, for example, occurred in the mid-1980s, when the firm of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kellyhelped refashion Jonas Savimbi,a murderous, demented Angolan rebel leader backed by the apartheid regime in South Africa, as a valiant anti-communist “freedom fighter.” Savimbi visited Washington on numerous occasions, where the lobby shop had him ferried about by limousine to meetings with top political leaders, conservative groups, and TV networks. Black, Manafort checked repeated threats by members of Congress to cut off aid to Savimbi’s rebel group, which was burning and raping its way through Angola with the help of American taxpayers.
Generally, though, lobbyists’ victories are more discreet. In 2004 six former members of Congress served as “election observers” in Cameroon and offered an upbeat assessment of President Paul Biya’s overwhelming reelection victory, which a local Roman Catholic cardinal described as “surrounded by fraud.” It turned out that the firm of Patton Boggs, which worked for the Cameroonian government, had arranged the trip of allegedly independent observers, whose expenses were paid by the Biya regime. Between 1999 and 2000, the Carmen Group received more than $1 million from the government of Kazakhstan to help “establish President [Nursultan] Nazarbayev as one of the foremost emerging leaders of the New World.” The lobby shop sent four writers—syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, Providence Journal associate editor Philip Terzian, R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of The American Spectator, and Scott Hogenson of the Conservative News Service—on all-expenses-paid trips to Kazakhstan, and upon their return all wrote stories, ranging from critical but sympathetic to slavishly fawning, which the Carmen Group circulated on Capitol Hill.11.The most notable entry in the latter category came from Tyrrell. Despite traveling to Kazakhstan soon after a presidential balloting that was widely condemned as rigged, he wrote that the country “has at least four highly competitive political parties . . . the freedoms of our Bill of Rights, and commendable tolerance.”...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efrain_Rios_Montt">Efrain Rios Montt[35]
PanamaManuel Noriega, Omar Torrijos
PeruVladimiro Montesinos, Juan Velasco Alvarado
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The United States and Third World Dictatorships:
A Case for Benign Detachment
by Ted Galen Carpenter
Ted Galen Carpenter is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa058.html
...
It is reprehensible for a government that preaches the virtues of noninterference in the internal affairs of other nations to have amassed such a record of interference. The level of shame mounts when American meddling undermines a sister democracy and helps install a repressive autocracy. Yet in Iran, Guatemala, Zaire, and Chile that was precisely what happened. Post-Mossadegh Iran endured the shah's corrupt authoritarianism for 25 years before desperately embracing the fanaticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Guatemala after Arbenz has witnessed a dreary succession of military dictatorships, each one rivaling its predecessor in brutality.[26] The ouster of Patrice Lumumba facilitated the rise to power of Mobutu Sese Seko (nee Joseph Mobutu) in Zaire. Mobutu's regime is regarded as one of the most corrupt and repressive on any continent.
Perhaps Chile is the saddest case of all. Although deified by Western liberals, Salvador Allende had his unsavory qualities. His enthusiasm for Marxist economic bromides pushed his nation to the brink of disaster. He also exhibited a nasty authoritarian streak of his own, including an intolerance of political critics. Nevertheless, his actions remained (although sometimes just barely) within constitutional bounds. Moreover, he was the last in an unbroken series of democratically elected rulers stretching back more than four decades--an impressive record in Latin America. The Pinochet dictatorship that replaced Allende nearly 12 years ago is conspicuous for its brutal and systematic violation of individual liberties. Yet Henry Kissinger can assert that the "change in government in Chile was on balance favorable--even from the point of view of human rights."[27] Such a view reflects either willful blindness or an astounding cynicism....
An Alternative: Benign Detachment
This central defect in the Carter administration's foreign policy should serve as a cautionary reminder regarding efforts to structure a more equitable and coherent approach to Third World affairs. A new policy must eschew inconsistent moral posturing as well as amoral geopolitics. The most constructive alternative would stress "benign detachment" toward all Third World dictatorships, whatever their ideological orientation.
The concept of benign detachment is grounded in the indisputable reality that, for the foreseeable future, the United States will confront a Third World environment in which a majority of nations are undemocratic. It would unquestionably prove easier to function in a community of capitalist democracies, but we do not have that luxury. Democracy and capitalism may emerge as powerful doctrines throughout the Third World, but such a transformation would be long-term, reflecting indigenous historical experiences. We certainly cannot hasten that process by abandoning our own ideals and embracing reactionary autocrats. In the interim, the United States must learn to coexist with a variety of dictatorships. Benign detachment represents the most productive and least intrusive method of achieving that objective.
This approach would reject the simplistic categorization of right-wing regimes as friends and Marxist governments as enemies. It would require redefining America s national interests in a more circumspect manner. No longer should Washington conclude that the survival of a reactionary dictatorship, no matter how repressive, corrupt, and unstable it might be, somehow enhances the security of the United States. A policy of benign detachment would likewise repudiate the notion that there is an underlying kinship between rightist autocracies and Western democracies. Right-wing dictatorships are just as alien to our values as their left-wing counterparts.
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endit1
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