by Dreams End » Mon Aug 29, 2005 6:47 pm
Only because I was JUST THINKING about gatekeepers and assassinations did this snippet of an Alexander Cockburn article catch my eye:<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08272005.html">www.counterpunch.org/cock...72005.html</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Assassination: as American as Apple Pie (and Torture)<br>By Alexander Cockburn<br><br>More than one CounterPuncher has urged me to thank Pat Robertson, along the lines of Diane Christian's excellent piece on our site today, from the bottom of our hearts. Why? As David Nebenzahl of Oakland wrote us,<br><br> Because Robertson's original loose-cannon remark gives us such clear insight into how things really work in this world. First of all, his proposal confirms that this precise thing has been done in the past: Allende, Mossadegh, ... [insert list of assassination targets here] despite Don Rumsfeld's pious denials. Secondly, he confirms our (the United States') implicit right to petroleum resources wherever they may be found, as shown by his comment about how offing Chavez probably wouldn't disrupt oil deliveries.<br><br>What about that list of targets of assassination bids by the CIA, acting on presidential orders that David wants us to insert? We could start with the bid on Chou en Lai's life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; move on to the disposal in 1960 of Iraq's Kassim by the Ba'athists helped into power by the CIA, then to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961 to kill the Congo's Patrice Lumumba Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved; to the Kennedy years saw similar implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well attested efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro; almost certainly to Omar Torrijos of Panama, downed in an air crash; to the Reagan White House's the carefully planned effort to bomb Muammar Q'addafi to death in his encampment in 1986.<br><br>In his Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, President of Indonesia, Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Claro M. Recto (the Philippines opposition leadr), Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres, Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanese Shiite leader (80 people killed in the attempt), Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam Hussein.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>Being curious why Cockburn thinks that CIA assassinations stop at our border, I could not resist sending him this. He won't answer, but it got it out of my system.<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>I just read "Assassination: as American as Apple Pie (and Torture)". It was an interesting list. However, if you give me enough time and space I can prove that each person on this list was killed by a lone, crazed gunman and not the CIA. Interestingly, the gunmen in question, in every case, had links both to pro-Soviet and pro-Cuban groups as well as anti-communist organizations. Every time! And often, the offices of the anti-communist groups were in the same building as the pro-Soviet organizations. Weird, huh?<br><br>To think that the CIA engages in assassination is "conspiracy theory" at its worst. If we are to consider the possibility that the CIA DOES engage in assassination, then we'd have to start giving at least a passing nod to the ideas that the CIA does the same thing domestically. Clearly, this is not possible. Maybe it's something about the fluoride in the water. Or perhap it's the laws preventing the CIA from domestic activities. The CIA always follows the law, as you know. <br><br>In the interest of historical scholarship, please refrain from printing such conspiracy drivel in the future. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>
