35 countries where the U.S. has supported fascists, drug lords and terrorists

[Luminous Animal]

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/08/35_countries_the_u_s_has_backed_international_crime_partner/

As the situation in Ukraine continues to fester, a handy history guide -- from A (Argentina) to Z (Zaire)

[Comrade Grumpy]

1. ...but we did it for freedom and democracy.

That's the only thing that ever motivates our foreign policy. At least, that's what they tell me.

[cali]

2. thanks for posting this. lots of good info and facts

[dipsydoodle]

3. I knew of some but not all.

Thanks for posting.

[woo me with science]

4. Excellent article, Thank you for posting it.

We live in a society that by its very design makes pursuing money the driving force of our lives.

Our government's actions are rooted in the pursuit of money, and it's probably fair to say that most of our foreign policy has been driven by money.

Yet this aspect of history....the role of money in our government's behavior...is outrageously absent from our schools and minimized in everything we are taught about our history.

[ProSense]

5. Interesting

5. Cambodia

When President Nixon ordered the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia 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, theU.S. Kampuchea Emergency Group, 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.

...list. Nixon, the last liberal President? Since this is directly related to a point about the Ukraine, wonder what Soviet history looks like? Stalin supported Hitler.

Interestingly, Kerry was responsible for creating the tribunal that prosecuted the Khmer Rouge.

Whereas John Kerry worked with Cambodian government officials and the United Nations to facilitate the creation of the genocide tribunal in Cambodia to prosecute key members of the Khmer Rouge;

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022279458

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x905152


As for this BS point from the OP piece:

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.

...In the view of the pro-Putin so-called progressives, the Obama administration is supporting neo-Nazis (pure lunacy), which is why Putin's invasion is justified. Invading a country is cool. Also, never mind Putin's horrible record and actual support for laws that deny human rights, promote hate and trample on free speech and freedom of the press. .

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024618822

[Luminous Animal]

9. "Nixon, the last liberal President?" What?

[ProSense]

11. I should have put it in quotes. n/t

[ProSense]

12. Happy 100th Birthday to the Last Liberal President!

Happy 100th Birthday to the Last Liberal President!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022163810

RICHARD NIXON was the best liberal president in years...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/101737419

[Luminous Animal]

14. I was lucky to have a wonderful public education which has given me the

skills to read entire articles and grasp context and nuance.

Witnessing the Chomsky/Buckley debates in real time and noticing the dumbing down of Presidential speeches over the decades leads me to believe that we are, indeed, devolving into idiocracy.

[ProSense]

16. How

Last edited Sun Mar 9, 2014, 12:25 PM - Edit history (1)

"I was lucky to have a wonderful public education which has given me the skills to read entire articles and grasp context and nuance."

...does that explain failing to grasp that this from the OP piece:

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.

...is pure BS.

In the view of the pro-Putin so-called progressives, the Obama administration is supporting neo-Nazis (pure lunacy), which is why Putin's invasion is justified. Invading a country is cool. Also, never mind Putin's horrible record and actual support for laws that deny human rights, promote hate and trample on free speech and freedom of the press.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024618822

Stand with Big Vladdy
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024633791

[Luminous Animal]

23. A person can glean much information from a piece

without endorsing the entire thing.

[Zorra]

6. Thank you. Very informative.

"Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it."
~ Carlos Santana George Santayana

[Wounded Bear]

7. That we know of...

Sorry, couldn't resist.

[Scootaloo]

26. They did leave a few out

Tajikistan and Saudi Arabia, for example.

[malaise]

8. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Truth isn't welcome

[malthaussen]

10. They forgot one: The United States of America. n/t

[WatermelonRat]

13. A severely deceptive article.

The intent is obviously to push the "everything happening in Ukraine was engineered by the US" narrative popular among those trying to minimize Russia's imminent annexation of a neighboring state's territory. Predictably, a large portion of the list comprises distortion of the nature of various factions and events, a loose definition of "fascist" and inflation or outright fabrication of American involvement. We don't need to argue about that though, because the list doesn't prove the author's point anyways.

First, among the listed examples, only a handful were unambiguously engineered coups of the sort being alleged now. The rest mostly consisted of backing one side or another in an existing conflict, often openly. There is certainly good reason to question the morality and strategic wisdom of many of those interventions, but since the point here is to back up the claim that the US covertly engineered the uprising in Ukraine, they are irrelevant.

Of the cases where the US was instrumental in the planning and execution of coups and uprisings, almost all were in the 50's and 60's, with the 1980 Turkish coup being the most recent.

Finally, none of this constitutes evidence of the allegations being made, which is more damning than any debunking of individual entries to the list.

[Enthusiast]

15. A force for good.

[Octafish]

17. More details from William Blum...

"It was in the early days of the fighting in Vietnam that a Vietcong officer said to his American prisoner: "You were our heroes after the War. We read American books and saw American films, and a common phrase in those days was 'to be as rich and as wise as an American'. What happened?"

An American might have been asked something similar by a Guatemalan, an Indonesian or a Cuban during the ten years previous, or by a Uruguayan, a Chilean or a Greek in the decade subsequent. The remarkable international goodwill and credibility enjoyed by the United States at the close of the Second World War was dissipated country by country, intervention by intervention."

-- William Blum

...scroll down a bit:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Blum/William_Blum.html

[malaise]

18. You know what frightens me?

As often as this has happened more than a few people still want to believe it's about freedom and democracy rather than the looting of resources across the planet.

National interest is the interest of the 1% from wherever. They don't give a flying fuck about us - the dispensable of the earth so all this bullshit about the Ukrainian people is meaningless.
This is about stealing oil yet again while weakening Russia.

[Octafish]

19. Longterm kicking Pooty Toot's pimply pants out of our Kremlin.

You got it, malaise. Resource Extraction is, barring wars without end, the most profitable game in Empire.

Why do so few know? BFEE OWNS Corporate McPravda.

Look at what Barrick Gold, one of Poppy Bush's favorite charities, did to The Guardian and Greg Palast.



Their crime? Telling the truth.

Poppy Strikes Gold

Sunday, April 27, 2008
Originally Posted July 9, 2003
By Greg Palast

EXCERPT...

And while the Bush family steadfastly believes that ex-felons should not have the right to vote for president, they have no objection to ex-cons putting presidents on their payroll. In 1996, despite pleas by U.S. church leaders, Poppy Bush gave several speeches (he charges $100,000 per talk) sponsored by organizations run by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader, tax cheat—and formerly the guest of the U.S. federal prison system. Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997–2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation.

The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.

They could well afford it. [font color="green"]In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush–era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore—for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka![/font color]

Barrick, of course, had to put up cash for the initial property rights and the cost of digging out the booty (and the cost of donations, in smaller amounts, to support Nevada's Democratic senator, Harry Reid). Still, the shift in rules paid off big time: According to experts at the Mineral Policy Center of Washington, DC, Barrick saved—and the U.S. taxpayer lost—a cool billion or so. Upon taking office, Bill Clinton's new interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, called Barrick's claim the "biggest gold heist since the days of Butch Cassidy." Nevertheless, because the company followed the fast-track process laid out for them under Bush, this corporate Goldfinger had Babbitt by the legal nuggets. Clinton had no choice but to give them the gold mine while the public got the shaft.

Barrick says it had no contact whatsoever with the president at the time of the rules change.(1) There was always a place in Barrick's heart for the older Bush—and a place on its payroll. In 1995, Barrick hired the former president as Honorary Senior Advisor to the Toronto company's International Advisory Board. Bush joined at the suggestion of former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, who, like Bush, had been ignominiously booted from office. I was a bit surprised that the president had signed on. When Bush was voted out of the White House, he vowed never to lobby or join a corporate board. The chairman of Barrick openly boasts that granting the title "Senior Advisor" was a sly maneuver to help Bush tiptoe around this promise.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gregpalast.com/poppy-strikes-gold/

Wow. So his flock of supporters in the media and elsewhere wanted it known: George Herbert Walker Bush did do something nice when he was President. It just happened to be that it was for a rich, powerful corporation.

The story continues, in which Mr. Palast details how said gold mining company employed fascist tactics to take over the mine, part of which involved bulldozing the miners homes and mines, some with the miners still inside. Let that, uh, sink in. For his trouble in reporting the story, Barrick threatened to sue.

The Truth Buried Alive

—By Greg Palast, From The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Penguin/Plume, 2003)

Source: UTNE Reader
April 2003 Issue

EXCERPT...

Bad news. In July 2001, in the middle of trying to get out the word of the theft of the election in Florida, [font color="red"]I was about to become the guinea pig, the test case, for an attempt by a multinational corporation to suppress free speech in the USA using British libel law. I have a U.S.-based Web site for Americans who can’t otherwise read my columns or view my BBC television reports. The gold-mining company held my English newspaper liable for aggravated damages for my publishing the story in the USA. If I did not pull the Bush-Barrick story off my U.S. Web site, my paper would face a ruinously costly fight.(1)[/font color]

Panicked, the Guardian legal department begged me to delete not just the English versions of the story but also my Spanish translation, printed in Bolivia. (Caramba!)

The Goldfingers didn’t stop there. [font color="green"]Barrick’s lawyers told our papers that I personally would be sued in the United Kingdom over Web publications of my story in America, because the Web could be accessed in Britain. The success of this legal strategy would effectively annul the U.S. Bill of Rights.[/font color] Speak freely in the USA, but if your words are carried on a U.S. Web site, you may be sued in Britain. The Declaration of Independence would be null and void, at least for libel law. Suddenly, instead of the Internet becoming a means of spreading press freedom, the means to break through censorship, it would become the electronic highway for delivering repression.

And repression was winning. InterPress Services (IPS) of Washington, DC, sent a reporter to Tanzania with Lissu. They received a note from Barrick that said if the wire service ran a story that repeated the allegations, the company would sue. IPS did not run the story.

I was worried about Lissu. On July 19, 2001, a group of Tanzanian police interest lawyers wrote the nation’s president asking for an investigation–instead, Lissu’s law partner in Dar es Salaam was arrested. The police were hunting for Lissu. They broke into his home and office and turned them upside down looking for the names of Lissu’s sources, his whereabouts and the evidence he gathered on the mine site clearance. This was more than a legal skirmish. Over the next months, demonstrations by vicims’ families were broken up by police thugs. A member of Parliament joining protesters was beaten and hospitalized. I had to raise cash quick to get Lissu out, and with him, his copies of police files with more evidence of the killings. I called Maude Barlow, the “Ralph Nader of Canada”, head of the Council of Canadians. Without hesitation, she teamed up with Friends of the Earth in Holland, raised funds and prepared a press conference–and in August tipped the story to the Globe & Mail, Canada’s national paper.

CONTINUED...

http://www.mapcruzin.com/palast-2.htm

Greg Palast did something very bad from the BFEE perspective: He told the truth, including the bits about the buried alive gold miners, as it happens. So, the Big Corporation sued and sued and sued. With their deep pockets, they can buy justice, judges, prime ministers, presidents and whoever and whatever else they need to turn a buck.

Gee. It's getting harder and harder for a man without a corporation to be heard these days. One day soon, no one will wonder why so few people remember democracy.

Old news for you, malaise. Need to reprint for those who are just coming of age.

[malaise]

22. That's why you're loved here

Truth all the time.

[Luminous Animal]

24. Thanks! I really appreciate your comments.

[Catherina]

20. Nailed it n/t

[Zorra]

21. +1 nt

[AverageJoe90]

25. And now it seems that Putin is now following our old lead.

He's already got the support of semi-fascists("United Russia", even worse than our own Republicans) in his own country, and I'd suspect his gov't also probably had something to do with the rise of Svoboda & Pravy Sektor within the Maidan movement as well; in fact, it's all too convenient for him, really, for a variety of reasons; it makes all the protesters look bad, gives Putin some much needed distraction from his own country's problems, etc. Let's ask, "cui bono". Who benefits? Not the U.S., that's for damn sure.

[truebluegreen]

27. Bookmarking, thanks.

So much hypocrisy, so little time.