One might think that by
now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms
that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting its
hidden agendas.
© Flickr/ Justin
Brown
18:50 28/09/2014
Paul Craig Roberts
September 28, 2014
One might think
that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false
alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the people into supporting
its hidden agendas.
The public fell for the
lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with
al-Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney’s firm,
Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington
failure.
The public fell for the
lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that were a
threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a
“mushroom cloud going up over an American city.” With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), this long war apparently is far
from over. Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers
of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are
redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French
after WW I when the British and French seized territories of the former Ottoman
Empire.
The American public fell
for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous
country is now in chaos.
The American public fell
for the lie that Iran has, or is building, nuclear weapons. Sanctioned and
reviled by the West, Iran has shifted toward an Eastern orientation, thereby
removing a principal oil producer from Western influence.
The public fell for the
lie that Assad of Syria used “chemical weapons against his own people.” The jihadists that
Washington sent to overthrow Assad have turned out to be, according to
Washington’s propaganda, a threat to America.
The greatest threat to
the world is Washington’s insistence on its hegemony. The ideology of a handful
of neoconservatives is the basis for this insistence. We face the situation in
which a handful of American neoconservative psychopaths claim to determine the
fate of countries.
Many still believe
Washington’s lies, but increasingly the world sees Washington as the greatest
threat to peace and life on earth. The claim that America is “exceptional and
indispensable” is used to justify Washington’s right to dictate to other countries.
The casualties of
Washington’s bombings are invariably civilians, and the deaths will produce
more recruits for IS. Already there are calls for Washington to reintroduce
“boots on the ground” in Iraq. Otherwise, Western civilization is doomed,
and our heads will be cut off. The newly created propaganda of a “Russian
threat” requires more NATO spending and more military bases on Russia’s
borders. A “quick reaction force” is being created to respond to a
nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, and Europe.
Usually it takes the
American public a year, or two, three, or four to realize that it has been
deceived by lies and propaganda, but by that time the public has swallowed a
new set of lies and propaganda and is all concerned about the latest
“threat.” The American public seems incapable of understanding that just
as the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, threat was a hoax, so is the
sixth threat, and so will be the seventh, eighth, and ninth.
Moreover, none of these
American military attacks on other countries have resulted in a better
situation, as Vladimir Putin honestly states. Yet, the public and its
representatives in Congress support each new military adventure despite the
record of deception and failure.
Perhaps if Americans were
taught their true history in place of idealistic fairy tales, they would be
less gullible and less susceptible to government propaganda. I have
recommended Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the US, Howard
Zinn’s A People’s History of the US, and now I recommend Stephen
Kinzer’s The Brothers, the story of the long rule of John Foster and
Allen Dulles over the State Department and CIA and their demonization of
reformist governments that they often succeeded in overthrowing. Kinzer’s
history of the Dulles brothers’ plots to overthrow six governments provides
insight into how Washington operates today.
In 1953 the Dulles
brothers overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mossadegh and imposed the Shah, thus
poisoning American-Iranian relations through the present day. Americans
might yet be led into a costly and pointless war with Iran, because of the
Dulles brothers poisoning of relations in 1953.
The Dulles brothers
overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform
threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law
firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing
disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a
threat to Western civilization. The brothers enlisted dictators such as
Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air
strikes and an invasion force. But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s
strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered. The
brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop
Rossell y Arellano. “A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all
Guatemalan churches.”
A masterpiece of
propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist
who was the enemy of all Guatemalans. False radio broadcasts produced a
fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections. Arbenz
asked
the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from
happening. American journalists, with the exception of James Reston,
supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior
military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign. The CIA’s chosen and
well paid “liberator,” Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s
successor.
We recently witnessed a
similar operation in Ukraine.
President Eisenhower
thanked the CIA for averting “a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,” and
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which
he declared that the events in Guatemala “expose the evil purpose of the
Kremlin.” This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power
operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.
What had really happened
is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it
compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s
fallow land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s
leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker,
Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government
to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior
partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy.
The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit
Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US
media to the protection of their private interests. The extraordinary
gullibility of the American people, the corrupt American media, and the
indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in
overthrowing a democracy.
Keep in mind that this
use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago
long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no
doubt in earlier times as well.
The Dulles brothers next
intended victim was Ho Chi Minh. Ho, a nationalist leader, asked for America’s
help in freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule. But John Foster Dulles, a
self-righteous anti-communist, miscast Ho as a Communist Threat who was
springing the domino theory on the Western innocents. Nationalism and
anti-colonialism, Foster declared, were merely a cloak for communist
subversion.
Paul Kattenburg, the
State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US
should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from
war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and
Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several
times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any
sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the “communist threat”
by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco
known as the Vietnam War. Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for
the US “to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to
shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.” Unfortunately
for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s
strongest suit.
The Dulles brothers’ next
targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of
Congo, and Fidel Castro. The plot against Castro was such a disastrous
failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job. President Kennedy lost
confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection
he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. When President
Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.
Warren Nutter, my Ph.D.
dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International
Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain
the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be
affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people.
Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and
Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the
distrust of the people. If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many
foreign nationals are not.
The US government’s
secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously.
Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas
and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long,
costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Secret CIA
and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President
John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all
his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald
Reagan seized the opportunity.
Secret agendas have prevailed
for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted. As the
saying goes, “a fish rots from the head.” The rot in Washington now
permeates the country.
http://jhaines6.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/ria-novosti-washingtons-secret-agendas-by-paul-craig-roberts/
