U.S. covert operations routinely resemble acts of terrorism.
"It's official: The U.S. is the world's leading terrorist state, and proud of it."
That
should have been the headline for the lead story in The New York Times
on Oct. 15, which was more politely titled "CIA Study of Covert Aid
Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels."
The article
reports on a CIA review of recent U.S. covert operations to determine
their effectiveness. The White House concluded that unfortunately
successes were so rare that some rethinking of the policy was in order.
The article quoted President Barack Obama as saying that he had asked
the CIA to conduct the review to find cases of "financing and supplying
arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And
they couldn't come up with much." So Obama has some reluctance about
continuing such efforts.
The first paragraph of the Times article
cites three major examples of "covert aid": Angola, Nicaragua and Cuba.
In fact, each case was a major terrorist operation conducted by the U.S.
Angola
was invaded by South Africa, which, according to Washington, was
defending itself from one of the world's "more notorious terrorist
groups" - Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. That was 1988.
By
then the Reagan administration was virtually alone in its support for
the apartheid regime, even violating congressional sanctions to increase
trade with its South African ally.
Meanwhile Washington joined
South Africa in providing crucial support for Jonas Savimbi's terrorist
Unita army in Angola. Washington continued to do so even after Savimbi
had been roundly defeated in a carefully monitored free election, and
South Africa had withdrawn its support. Savimbi was a "monster whose
lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people," in the words
of Marrack Goulding, British ambassador to Angola.
The
consequences were horrendous. A 1989 U.N. inquiry estimated that South
African depredations led to 1.5 million deaths in neighboring countries,
let alone what was happening within South Africa itself. Cuban forces
finally beat back the South African aggressors and compelled them to
withdraw from illegally occupied Namibia. The U.S. alone continued to
support the monster Savimbi.
In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion in 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched a murderous and
destructive campaign to bring "the terrors of the earth" to Cuba - the
words of Kennedy's close associate, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, in
his semiofficial biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned
responsibility for the terrorist war.
The atrocities against Cuba
were severe. The plans were for the terrorism to culminate in an
uprising in October 1962, which would lead to a U.S. invasion. By now,
scholarship recognizes that this was one reason why Russian Premier
Nikita Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba, initiating a crisis that came
perilously close to nuclear war. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
later conceded that if he had been a Cuban leader, he "might have
expected a U.S. invasion."
American terrorist attacks against Cuba
continued for more than 30 years. The cost to Cubans was of course
harsh. The accounts of the victims, hardly ever heard in the U.S., were
reported in detail for the first time in a study by Canadian scholar
Keith Bolender, "Voices From the Other Side: an Oral History of
Terrorism Against Cuba," in 2010.
The toll of the long terrorist
war was amplified by a crushing embargo, which continues even today in
defiance of the world. On Oct. 28, the U.N., for the 23rd time, endorsed
"the necessity of ending the economic, commercial, financial blockade
imposed by the United States against Cuba." The vote was 188 to 2 (U.S.,
Israel), with three U.S. Pacific Island dependencies abstaining.
There is by now some opposition to the embargo in high places in the
U.S., reports ABC News, because "it is no longer useful" (citing Hillary
Clinton's new book "Hard Choices"). French scholar Salim Lamrani
reviews the bitter costs to Cubans in his 2013 book "The Economic War
Against Cuba."
Nicaragua need hardly be mentioned. President
Ronald Reagan's terrorist war was condemned by the World Court, which
ordered the U.S. to terminate its "unlawful use of force" and to pay
substantial reparations.
Washington responded by escalating the
war and vetoing a 1986 U.N. Security Council resolution calling on all
states - meaning the U.S. - to observe international law.
Another
example of terrorism will be commemorated on Nov. 16, the 25th
anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador
by a terrorist unit of the Salvadoran army, armed and trained by the
U.S. On the orders of the military high command, the soldiers broke into
the Jesuit university to murder the priests and any witnesses -
including their housekeeper and her daughter.
This event
culminated the U.S. terrorist wars in Central America in the 1980s,
though the effects are still on the front pages today in the reports of
"illegal immigrants," fleeing in no small measure from the consequences
of that carnage, and being deported from the U.S. to survive, if they
can, in the ruins of their home countries.
Washington has also
emerged as the world champion in generating terror. Former CIA analyst
Paul Pillar warns of the "resentment-generating impact of the U.S.
strikes" in Syria, which may further induce the jihadi organizations
Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward "repairing their breach
from last year and campaigning in tandem against the U.S. intervention
by portraying it as a war against Islam."
That is by now a
familiar consequence of U.S. operations that have helped to spread
jihadism from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world.
Jihadism's
most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS,
which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and
Syria. "I think the United States is one of the key creators of
this organization," reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a
prominent commentator on the region. "The United States did not plan the
formation of ISIS," he adds, "but its destructive interventions in the
Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS."
To this we may add the world's
greatest terrorist campaign: Obama's global project of assassination of
"terrorists." The "resentment-generating impact" of those drone and
special-forces strikes should be too well known to require further
comment.
This is a record to be contemplated with some awe.
Source: AlterNet
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