“A Damned Murder, Inc.: ” A History of the CIA (Wikipedia Compilation)

I. Murder Inc.: The History of the CIA (a Wikipedia Compilation)

Murder, Inc. A History of the CIA

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Murder Inc.

A History of the CIA
1) Mafia, or National Security?
2) “Coups” that overthrew governments
3) Assassinations and disinformation of peace activists
4) Domestic operations
5) “Tests” that destroyed people’s lives, including the “Unabomber”

1) Mafia, or National Security?

Considering the history and nature of the CIA, we must question the reason that this organization is still in existence. To know what the CIA does, is to know what you do not want them to do.

Throughout the entire history of the Central Intelligence Agency, even when it was named as the “OSS” or the Office of Strategic Services, the “national security “agency” seems to be focused not in national interest – but rather in the destabilization of international interest.

From this, we must question the purpose of the entire history of war, since the CIA is also our “international spy police,” so to speak.

From funding terrorism to murdering domestic citizens, the CIA has been caught doing it all. Most of the accusations range from importing cocaine and heroin within soldiers’ bodies who return from war, to destabilization of multiple nations in order to implement a dictatorship regime; and overthrow democracy.

We honor those who have fought for freedom, we detest those who take it away.

Our 1st gift from God was freewill. No matter what the purpose of this organization, we are obligated to protect that gift. No matter who the enemy, we are required to protect those who protect the gift.

Without freedom or the freewill of choice, we are not human. We are slaves. Those who enslave us are our enemy, those who fight for international interests are merely seeking more power in an attempt to satisfy internal desires for control.

This is sociopathy at it’s finest. We are the CIA.

2) “Coups” that overthrew governments

Covert United States foreign regime change actions

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Covert United States foreign regime change actions

1949 Syrian coup d’état
1953 Iranian coup d’état
1954 Guatemalan coup d’état
1959 Tibetan uprising
1961 Cuba, Bay of Pigs Invasion 1963 South Vietnamese coup
1964 Brazilian coup d’état
1967 Greek coup d’état
1973 Chilean coup d’état
1976 Argentine coup d’état
1979-89 Afghanistan, Operation Cyclone 1980 Turkish coup d’état
1981-87 Nicaragua, Contras
2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt 2011 Libyan uprising
2011-present Syrian uprising

History of U.S. expansion and influence Foreign policy

Military history
Timeline of military operations List of wars
List of bases
Manifest destiny
Non-interventionism Overseas interventions Pax Americana
America’s Backyard Territorial acquisitions

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The United States has been involved in and assisted in the overthrow of foreign governments (more recently termed “regime change“) without the overt use of U.S. military force. Often, such operations are tasked to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Regime change has been attempted through direct involvement of U.S. operatives, the funding and training of insurgency groups within these countries, anti-regime propaganda campaigns, coups d’état, and other activities usually conducted as operations by the CIA. The United States has also accomplished regime change by direct military action, such as following the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989 and the U.S.-led military invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Some argue that non-transparent United States government agencies working in secret sometimes mislead or do not fully implement the decisions of elected civilian leaders and that this has been an important component of many such operations,[1] see plausible deniability. Some contend that the U.S. has supported more coups against democracies that it perceived as communist, becoming communist, or pro-communist.[1]

The U.S. has also covertly supported opposition groups in various countries without necessarily attempting to overthrow the government. For example, the CIA funded anti-communist political parties in countries such as Italy and Chile; it also armed Kurdish rebels fighting the Ba’athistgovernment of Iraq in the Second Kurdish-Iraqi War prior to the Algiers Agreement.

Contents [hide]
• 1 Prior to Cold War

• 1.1 Russia
• 2 During the Cold War
• 2.1 Communist states 1944–89
• 2.2 Syria 1949
• 2.3 Iran 1953
• 2.4 Guatemala 1954
• 2.5 Tibet 1955–70s
• 2.6 Indonesia 1958

• 2.7 Cuba 1959
• 2.8 Democratic Republic of the Congo 1960–65
• 2.9 Iraq 1960–63
• 2.10 Dominican Republic 1961
• 2.11 South Vietnam 1963
• 2.12 Brazil 1964
• 2.13 Ghana 1966
• 2.14 Chile 1970–73
• 2.15 Argentina 1976
• 2.16 Afghanistan 1979–89
• 2.17 Turkey 1980
• 2.18 Poland 1980–81
• 2.19 Nicaragua 1981–90
• 2.19.1 Destablization through CIA assets
• 2.19.2 Arming the Contras
• 2.20 Cambodia 1980–95
• 2.21 Angola 1980s
• 2.22 Philippines 1986
• 3 Since the end of the Cold War
• 3.1 Iraq 1992–96
• 3.2 Afghanistan 2001
• 3.3 Venezuela 2002
• 3.4 Iraq 2002–03
• 3.5 Haiti 2004
• 3.6 Gaza Strip 2006–present
• 3.7 Somalia 2006–07
• 3.8 Iran 2005–present
• 3.9 Libya 2011
• 3.10 Syria 2012–present
• 4 See also
• 5 References
• 6 Further reading
• 6.1 Books
• 7 External links

Prior to Cold War[edit]

This section requires expansion.(May 2012)
Russia[edit]
Main article: Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

U.S. troops in Vladivostok, August 1918

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 was met with overt hostility from President Wilson‘s administration. After withdrawing funding for Russia and opposing a British and French plan to include the Bolsheviks as allies against Germany in 1918, the United States extended its maritimeblockade of Germany to include Soviet Russia and began covertly supporting Russian opposition factions. [2][3]

In 1918, the Allied powers, including the United States, began a military intervention in the Russian Civil War. At the request of the British and French, the U.S. sent troops to the Russian port cities ofVladivostok and Archangelsk. President Wilson appointed General William S. Graves to lead the thousands of American troops at Vladivostok.[4][5]

During the Cold War[edit]
Communist states 1944–89[edit]

This section requires expansion.(June 2012)
The United States supported resistance movements and dissidents in the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. One example is thecounterespionage operations following the discovery of the Farewell dossier which some argue contributed to the fall of the Soviet regime. [6][7] The National Endowment for Democracysupported pro-capitalist movements in thecommunist states and has been accused of secretly supporting regime change, which it denies.[8][9][10] Many of the Eastern European states later turned to capitalism and joined the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO). In addition, the perceived threat of worldwide (sometimes Soviet-sponsored) revolutionary guerrillamovements—often involved in wars of national liberation—defined much ofU.S. foreign policy in the Third World with regard to covert action and led to what could be considered asproxy wars between the United States and Soviet Union.

Syria 1949[edit]
Main article: March 1949 Syrian coup d’état

Syria became an independent republic in 1946, but the March 1949 Syrian coup d’état, led by Army Chief of Staf Husni al-Za’im, ended the initial period of civilian rule. Za’im met at least six times with CIA operatives in the months prior to the coup to discuss his plan to seize power. Za’im requested American funding or personnel, but it is not known whether this assistance was provided. Once in power, Za’im made several key decisions that benefited the United States. He approved the Trans-Arabian Pipeline (TAPLINE), an American project designed to transport Saudi Arabian oil to Mediterranean ports. Construction of TAPLINE had been delayed due to Syrian intransigence. Za’im also improved relations with two American allies in the region: Israel and Turkey. He signed anarmistice in 1949 with Israel, formally ending the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and he renounced Syrian claims to Hatay Province, a major source of dispute between Syria and Turkey. Za’im also cracked down on local communists. However, Za’im’s regime was short-lived. He was overthrown in August, just four and a half months after seizing power.[11][12][13][14]

Iran 1953[ edit]
Main article: 1953 Iranian coup d’état
See also: Tudeh Party and Iran hostage crisis

In 1953, the CIA worked with the United Kingdom to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran led by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh who had attempted tonationalize Iran’s petroleum industry, threatening the profits of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, now known as BP.[15] Declassified CIA documents show that Britain was fearful of Iran’s plans to nationalize its oil industry and pressed the U.S. to mount a joint operation to depose the prime minister and install a puppet regime.[16] In 1951 the Iranian parliament voted to nationalize the petroleum fields of the country.[16][17]

The coup was led by CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. (grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt). With help from British intelligence, the CIA planned, funded and implementedOperation Ajax.[18] In the months before the coup, the UK and U.S. imposed a boycott of the country, exerted other political pressures, and conducted a massive covert propaganda campaign to create the environment necessary for the coup. The CIA hired Iranian agents
provocateurs who posed as communists, harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric’s home to turn the Islamic religious community against the government. For the U.S. audience, the CIA hoped to plant articles in U.S. newspapers saying that ShahMohammed Reza Pahlevi‘s return to govern Iran resulted from a homegrown revolt against what was being represented to the U.S. public as a communist-leaning government. The CIA successfully used its contacts at the Associated Press to put on the newswire in the U.S. a statement from Tehran about royal decrees that the CIA itself had written.[16]

Tehran men celebrating the 1953 Iranian coup d’état

The coup initially failed and the Shah fled the country. After four days of rioting, Shi’ite-sparked street protests backed by pro-Shah army units defeated Mossadeq’s forces and the Shah returned to power.[19]
Supporters of the coup have argued that Mossadegh had become the de facto dictator of Iran, citing his dissolution of the Parliament and the Supreme Court, and his abolishment of free elections with a secret ballot, after he declared victory in a referendum where he claimed 99.9% of the vote.[20] Darioush Bayandor has argued that the CIA botched its coup attempt and that a popular uprising, instigated by top Shi’ite clerics such as Grand Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Borujerdi and Abol-Ghasem Kashani (who were certain that Mosaddegh was taking the nation toward religious indiference, and worried that he had banished the Shah), instigated street riots to return the Shah to power four days after the failed coup.[19] After the coup, the Shah introduced electoral reforms extending sufrage to all members of society, including women. This was part of a broader series of reforms dubbed the White Revolution.[21] However, the Shah also carried out at least 300 political executions, according toAmnesty International. [22]

The CIA subsequently used the apparent success of their Iranian coup project to bolster their image in American government circles. They expanded their reach into other countries, taking a greater portion of American intelligence assets based on their record in Iran.[19]

In August 2013 the CIA admitted that it was involved in both the planning and the execution of the coup, including the bribing of Iranian politicians, security and army high-ranking officials, as well as pro-coup propaganda.[23][24] The CIA is quoted acknowledging the coup was carried out “under CIA direction” and “as an act of U.S. foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government.”[25] The National Security Archive said it that while it “applauds the CIA’s decision to make these materials available, today’s posting shows clearly that these materials could have been safely declassified many years ago without risk of damage to national security.”[23]

Guatemala 1954[edit]
Main article: 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état

The CIA supported the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Guatemala led by Jacobo Arbenz.[26][27][28][29] Arbenz was elected without a secret ballot. His land reformwas ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, which he then purged. He also received arms from the Soviet bloc.[30] The CIA claimed it intervened because it feared that a communist government would become “a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere;”[31] however, it was also protecting, among others, four hundred thousand acres of land theUnited Fruit Company had acquired. Guatemala’s official 1999 truth commission accused Arbenz of being involved in the deaths of several hundred political opponents. [32] Although the CIA’s operations were a failure, the Arbenz regime suddenly collapsed without any significant violence when the Guatemalan military turned against it.[33] In the eleven days after the resignation of President Arbenz, five successive military junta governments occupied the Guatemalan presidential palace; each junta was successively more amenable to the political demands of the U.S., after which, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas assumed the Presidency of Guatemala.

Tibet 1955–70s[edit]

According to the 14th Dalai Lama, the CIA supported the Tibetan independence movement “not because they (the CIA) cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide eforts to destabilize all communist governments”. [34]

Main article: CIA Tibetan program

The CIA armed an anti-Communist insurgency for decades in order to oppose the invasion of Tibet by Chinese forces and the subsequentcontrol of Tibet by China. The program had a record of almost unmitigated failure.[35]

According to the 14th Dalai Lama, the CIA supported the Tibetan independence movement “not because they (the CIA) cared about Tibetan independence, but as part of their worldwide eforts to destabilize all communist governments”.[34]

The budget figures for the CIA’s Tibetan program were as follows:

• Subsidy to the Dalai Lama: US$180,000[36]
• Support of Tibetan guerrillas based in Nepal: US$500,000[36]
• Other costs: US$1.06m[36]
• Total: US$1.73m[36]

Indonesia 1958[ edit]
See also: Guided Democracy in Indonesia, Transition to the New
Order, Non-Aligned Movement, and 30 September Movement

The autocratic Indonesian government of Sukarno was faced with a major threat to its legitimacy beginning in 1956, when several regional commanders began to demand autonomy fromJakarta. After mediation failed, Sukarno took action to remove the dissident commanders. In February 1958, dissident military commanders in Central Sumatera (Colonel Ahmad Hussein) and North Sulawesi (Colonel Ventje Sumual) declared the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia–Permesta Movement aimed at overthrowing the Sukarno regime. They were joined by many civilian politicians from the Masyumi Party, such as Sjafruddin Prawiranegara, who were opposed to the growing influence of the communist Partai Komunis Indonesia party. Due to their anti-communist rhetoric, the rebels received arms, funding, and other covert aid from the CIA until Allen Lawrence Pope, an American pilot, was shot down after a bombing raid on government-held Ambon in April 1958. The central government responded by launching airborne and seaborne military invasions of rebel
strongholdsPadang and Manado. By the end of 1958, the rebels were militarily defeated, and the last remaining rebel guerilla bands surrendered by August 1961.[37] To make amends for CIA involvement in the rebellion,
President Kennedy invited Sukarno to Washington, and provided Indonesia with billions of dollars in civilian and military aid.[38]

Cuba 1959[edit]
Bay of Pigs Memorial inLittle Havana– Miami, Florida.
Main articles: Bay of Pigs Invasion, The Cuban Project, Operation Northwoods, and Cuba–United States relations

The Eisenhower and Kennedy Administrations approved initiatives for CIA-trained Cuban anti-communist exiles and refugees to land in Cuba and attempt to overthrow the government of Cuban leaderFidel Castro. Critics have characterized Castro’s rule as dictatorship. Plans originally formed under Eisenhower were scaled back under Kennedy. The largest and most complicated coup efort, approved at White House level, was the Bay of Pigs operation.

The CIA made a number of attempts to assassinate Castro, often with White House approval, as in Operation Mongoose.
Democratic Republic of the Congo 1960–65[edit]
Main article: Congo Crisis

In 1960, Belgium granted independence to its most prized territory, the Belgian Congo. A leader of the successful anti-colonial struggle, Patrice Lumumbawas elected to be the first prime minister of the country that following its independence from colonial rule had become known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[39]

On 11 July 1960, with the support of Belgian business interests and over 6000 Belgian troops, the province of Katanga in the southeast declared independence as the State of Katanga under the leadership of Moise Tshombe, leader of the local CONAKAT party. At the core of the Katangese forces were several hundred Europeanmercenaries, many of which were recruited in Belgium. Almost from the beginning, the new state faced a rebellion in the north in Luba areas. This was led by a political party called the Association of the Luba People of Katanga (BALUBAKAT). In January 1961, Katanga faced a secession crisis of its own when BALUBAKAT leaders declared independence from Katanga. The South Kasai region sought independence in similar circumstances to neighboring Katanga during the crisis. Ethnic conflicts and political tensions between leaders of the central government and local leaders plagued the diamond-rich region. On 8 August 1960, the autonomous Mining State of South Kasai was proclaimed with its capital at Bakwanga.Albert Kalonji, a Luba chief, was named president of South Kasai and Joseph Ngalula was appointed head of government.[40]

Lumumba was determined to quickly subdue the renegade provinces of Kasai and Katanga. Dissatisfied with the United Nations response, on August 17, 1960 Lumumba followed through on his threat to request military assistance from the Soviet Union. The USSR quickly responded with an airlift of ANC troops into Kasai and a supply of military trucks. A bloody campaign ensued causing the deaths of hundreds of Baluba tribesmen and the flight of a quarter of a million refugees. Lumumba’s decision to accept Soviet help angered the administration of President Eisenhower in the United States. Referring to the Communist takeover in Cuba in 1959, the CIA station chief in Leopoldville cabled the director, saying “Congo [is] experiencing [a] classic communist efort [to] takeover government… there may be little time to take action to avoid another Cuba”. Eisenhower authorized the CIA to initiate a plan to assassinate Lumumba using poison to be placed in his food or toothpaste, although this plan was aborted.[41][42]

In early 1964, a new crisis broke out as Congolese rebels calling
themselves “Simbas” (Swahili for “Lions”) rebelled against the government. They were led by Pierre Mulele, Gaston Soumialot and Christophe Gbenye who were former members of Gizenga’s Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA). Mulele was an avowed Maoist, and for this reason his insurgency was supported by communist China. The rebellion afected Kivu and Eastern (Orientale) provinces. By August they had captured Stanleyville and set up a rebel government there. As the rebel movement spread, discipline became more difficult to maintain, and acts of violence and terror increased. Thousands of Congolese were executed, including government officials, political leaders of opposition parties, provincial and local police, school teachers, and others believed to have been Westernized. Many of the executions were carried out with extreme cruelty, in front of a monument to Lumumba in Stanleyville.[43]

A hostage is hysterical as she is transported to a departing airplane.

In early 1965 Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara traveled to Congo to ofer his knowledge and experience as a guerrilla to the insurgents. Guevara led the Cuban operation in support of the Marxist Simba movement. Guevara, his second-in-command Victor Dreke, and 12 other Cuban expeditionaries arrived in the Congo on 24 April 1965 and a contingent of approximately 100 Afro-Cubans joined them soon afterward.[44][45] They collaborated for a time with guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila, who had previously helped supporters of Lumumba lead an unsuccessful revolt months earlier. White South African mercenaries, led by Mike Hoare in concert with Cuban exiles and the CIA, worked with the Congo National Army to thwart Guevara in the mountains near the village of Fizi onLake Tanganyika. They were able to monitor his communications and so pre-empted his attacks and interdicted his supply lines. Despite the fact that Guevara sought to conceal his presence in the Congo, the U.S. government was aware of his location and activities. The CIA assisted the operation, carried out by U.S. and Belgian forces, to rescue hundreds of European hostages held by the Simba cannibals.[46]

On 25 November 1965, just five days after Guevara’s departure, Joseph Mobutu seized power with the help of the political and military support of Western countries, including the U.S.[47]

Iraq 1960–63[edit]
See also: CIA transnational human rights actions#Qasim

In February 1960, the United States planned a coup against the government of Iraq headed by Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim, who two years earlier had deposed the Western-allied Iraqi monarchy. Qasim’s rule has been described as authoritarian and dictatorial. The U.S. was concerned about the growing influence of Iraqi Communist Party government officials under his administration, as well as his threats to invade Kuwait, which almost caused a war between Iraq and Britain.

According to the Church Committee, the CIA planned a “special operation” to “incapacitate” an Iraqi Colonel believed to be “promoting Soviet bloc political interests in Iraq.” The aim was to send Qasim a poisoned handkerchief, “which, while not likely to result in total disablement, would be certain to prevent the target from pursuing his usual activities for a minimum of three months.” During the course of the Committee’s investigation, the CIA stated that the handkerchief was “in fact never received (if, indeed, sent).” It added that the colonel: “Sufered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad (an event we had nothing to do with) after our handkerchief proposal was considered.”

Qasim was killed on 8 February 1963 by a firing squad of the Ba’ath party in collaboration with Iraqi nationalists and members of the Arab Socialist Union, in what came to be known as the Ramadan Revolution. Of the 16 members of Qasim’s cabinet, 12 of them were Ba’ath Party members; however, the party turned against Qasim due to his refusal to join Gamel Abdel Nasser‘s United Arab Republic.[48] Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. “Almost certainly a gain for our side,” Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to President Kennedy on the day of the takeover.[49] The Ba’ath Party was subsequently purged from the government in the November 1963 Iraqi coup d’état after the Ba’athist Prime Minister, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, attempted to seize power from the U.S.-backed President, Abdul Salam Arif.

Writing in his memoirs of the 1963 coup, long time OSS and CIA intelligence analyst Harry Rositzke presented it as an example of one on which they had good intelligence in contrast to others that caught the agency by surprise. The overthrow “was forecast in exact detail by CIA agents.” “Agents in the Ba’th Party headquarters in Baghdad had for years kept Washington au courant on the party’s personnel and organization, its secret communications and sources of funds, and its penetrations of military and civilian hierarchies in several countries…. CIA sources were in a perfect position to follow each step of Ba’th preparations for the Iraqi coup, which focused on making contacts with military and civilian leaders in Baghdad. The CIA’s major source, in an ideal catbird seat, reported the exact time of the coup and provided a list of the new cabinet members…. To call an upcoming coup requires the CIA to have sources within the group of plotters. Yet, from a diplomatic point of view, having secret contacts with plotters implies at least unofficial complicity in the plot.”[50]

Qasim was aware of U.S. complicity in the plot and continually denounced the U.S. in public. The U.S. Department of State was worried that Qasim would harass American diplomats in Iraq because of this. The CIA was aware of many plots in Iraq in 1962, not just the one that succeeded.[51]

The best direct evidence that the U.S. was complicit is the memo from Komer to President Kennedy on February 8, 1963. The last paragraph reads:
Trujillo was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 50,000 people

“We will make informal friendly noises as soon as we can find out whom to talk with, and ought to recognize as soon as we’re sure these guys are firmly in the saddle. CIA had excellent reports on the plotting, but I doubt either they or UK should claim much credit for it.”[52]

Dominican Republic 1961[edit]
See also: CIA transnational human rights actions#Trujillo

The CIA supported the overthrow of Rafael Trujillo, Prime Minister of the Dominican Republic, on 30 May 1961.[53] Trujillo has been described as one of the worst dictators in the Americas. In a report to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, CIA officials described the agency as having “no active part” in the assassination and only a “faint connection” with the groups that planned the killing,[54] but the internal CIA investigation, by its Inspector General, “disclosed quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters.”[55]

South Vietnam 1963[ edit]
Main articles: Cable 243, 1963 South Vietnamese coup, and Arrest and assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm

The body of Diệm in the back of the APC, having been killed on the way to military headquarters

The CIA backed a coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the American ambassador to South Vietnam, refused to meet with Diệm. Upon hearing that a coup d’état was being designed by Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) generals led by General Dương Văn Minh, Lodge gave secret assurances to the generals that the U.S. would not interfere.Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, provided a group of South Vietnamese generals with $40,000 to carry out the coup with the promise that US forces would make no attempt to protect Diệm. Dương Văn Minh and his co-conspirators overthrew the government on 1 November 1963 in a swift coup. On 1 November, with only the palace guard remaining to defend Diệm and his younger brother, Nhu, the generals called the palace ofering Diệm exile if he surrendered. However, that evening, Diệm and his entourage escaped via an underground passage to Cholon, where they were captured the following morning, 2 November. The brothers were assassinated together in the back of an armoured personnel carrier with a bayonet and revolver by Captain Nguyễn Văn Nhung while en route to the Vietnamese Joint General Staf headquarters.[56] Diệm was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery next to the house of the U.S. ambassador.[57] Upon learning of Diệm’s ouster and death, Hồ Chí Minh reportedly said, “I can scarcely believe the Americans would be so stupid.”[58]

Brazil 1964[edit]
Main article: 1964 Brazilian coup d’état

The democratically-elected government of Brazil, headed by President João Goulart, was successfully overthrown in a coup in March 1964. On March 30, the American military attaché in Brazil, Colonel Vernon A. Walters, telegraphed the State Department. In that telegraph, he confirmed that Brazilian army generals, independently of the US, had committed themselves to acting against Goulart within a week of the meeting, but no date was set.[59]

LBJ receives briefing on Brazil.
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson receiving briefing on events in0:00 MENU Brazil on March 31, 1964 on his Texas ranch with Undersecretary

of State George Ball and Assistant Secretary for Latin America, Thomas C. Mann. Ball briefs Johnson on that status of military moves in Brazil to overthrow the government of João Goulart.

Problems playing this file? See media help.
Declassified transcripts of communications between U.S. ambassador to Brazil Lincoln Gordon and the U.S. government show that, predicting an all-out civil war, President Johnson authorized logistical materials to be in place to support the coup-side of the rebellion as part of U.S. Operation Brother Sam.[60]

In the telegraphs, Gordon also acknowledges U.S. involvement in “covert support for pro-democracy street rallies… and encouragement [of] democratic and anti-communist sentiment in Congress, armed forces, friendly labor and student groups, church, and business” and that he “may be requesting modest supplementary funds for other covert action programs in the near future.”[61]

In Gordon’s 2001 book, Brazil’s Second Chance: En Route Toward the First World, on Brazilian history since the military coup, he denied a role in the coup. However, James N. Green, an American historian of Brazil, argued: “[Gordon] changed Brazil’s history, for he… made it clear that, if the coup was advanced, the United States was going to recognize it immediately, which was fundamental [to the plotters].”[62]

The Soviet Union’s postage stamp marking the 80th anniversary of the birth of Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972)

Ghana 1966[ edit]
Kwame Nkrumah helped Ghana gain its independence from British colonial rule and advocated a non-aligned Marxist economic perspective. Nkrumah enacted aPreventive Detention Act that made it possible for his administration to arrest and detain anyone charged with treason without due process of law in the judicial system. In 1964, he proposed a constitutional amendment which would make theConvention People’s Party the only legal party and himself president for life of both nation and party. The amendment passed with 99.91 percent of the vote, an implausibly high total that led observers to condemn the vote as “obviously rigged.”[63] In February 1966, while he was on a state visit, his government was overthrown in a military coup led by Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka. Several commentators, including former CIA officer John Stockwell, have alleged the CIA’s involvement in the coup.[64][65][66] However, no documentary evidence implicating the United States in the coup exists,[67] while claims of involvement may have been based on KGB disinformation.[68]

Chile 1970–73[edit]
Main articles: 1973 Chilean coup d’état and United States intervention in Chile
Two Chilean air force jets fire 18 rockets into the presidential palace La Moneda, setting it on fire, in the 1973 Chilean coup d’état on September 11, 1973

The election of Marxist candidate Salvador Allende as President of Chile in September 1970 led President Richard Nixon to order that Allende not be allowed to take office.[69]:25 Nixon pursued a vigorous campaign of covert resistance to Allende, first designed to convince the Chilean congress to confirm Jorge Alessandri as the winner of the election. When this failed, false flag operatives approached senior Chilean military officers, in “some two dozen contacts”, with the message that “the U.S. desired… a coup.”[69] Once Allende took office, extensive covert eforts continued with U.S.-funded black propaganda placed in El Mercurio, strikes organized against Allende, and funding for Allende opponents. When El Mercurio requested significant funds for covert support in September 1971, “…in a rare example of presidential micromanagement of a covert operation, Nixon personally authorized the $700,000—and more if necessary—in covert funds to El Mercurio[69]:93. Following an extended period of social, political, and economic unrest, General Augusto Pinochet assumed power in a violent coup d’état on September 11, 1973; among the dead was Allende.

The Chilean Chamber of Deputies accused Allende of support of armed groups, torture, illegal arrests, muzzling the press, confiscating private property, and not allowing people to leave the country.[70]Mark Falcof credits the CIA with preserving democratic opposition to Allende and preventing the “consolidation” of his supposed “totalitarian project”.[71] However, Peter Kornbluh asserts that the CIA destabilized Chile and helped create the conditions for the 1973 Chilean coup d’état, which led to years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet.[69] Others also point to the involvement of the Defense Intelligence Agency, agents of which allegedly secured the missiles used to bombard the La Moneda Palace.[72]

Argentina 1976[edit]
See 1976 Argentine coup d’état

Afghanistan 1979–89[ edit]
Main articles: Operation Cyclone, Reagan Doctrine, Soviet war in Afghanistan, and War in Afghanistan (1978–present)
See also: Charlie Wilson’s War and Badaber Uprising

“To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle
modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an
inspiration to those who love freedom.”

—U.S. President Ronald Reagan, March 21, 1983 [73]

In April 1978, the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) seized power in Afghanistan in the Saur Revolution. Within months, opponents of the communist government launched an uprising in eastern Afghanistan that quickly expanded into a civil war waged by guerrilla mujahideen against government forces countrywide. The Pakistani government provided these rebels with covert training centers, while the Soviet Union sent thousands of military advisers to support the PDPA government.[74] Meanwhile, increasing friction between the competing factions of the PDPA – the dominant Khalq and the more moderate Parcham – resulted in the dismissal of Parchami cabinet members and the arrest of Parchami military officers under the pretext of a Parchami coup. By mid-1979, the United States had started a covert program to finance the mujahideen,[75] whose aim was later allegedly described by Carter’s National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, as to “induce a Soviet military intervention.”[76] However, Brzezinski has denied the accuracy of the quote,[77] while Cyrus Vance‘s close aide Marshall Shulman “insists that the State Department worked hard to dissuade the Soviets from invading and would never have undertaken a program to encourage it”.[78]

In September 1979, Khalqist President Nur Muhammad Taraki was assassinated in a coup within the PDPA orchestrated by fellow Khalq member Hafizullah Amin, who assumed the presidency. Distrusted by the Soviets, Amin was assassinated by Soviet special forces in December 1979. A Soviet-organized government, led by Parcham’s Babrak Karmal but inclusive of both factions, filled the vacuum. Soviet troops were deployed to stabilize Afghanistan under Karmal in more substantial numbers, although the Soviet government did not expect to do most of the fighting in Afghanistan. As a result, however, the Soviets were now directly involved in what had been a domestic war in Afghanistan.[79]

At the time some believed the Soviets were attempting to expand their borders southward in order to gain a foothold in the Middle East. The Soviet Union had long lacked a warm water port, and their movement south seemed to position them for further expansion toward Pakistan in the East, and Iran to the West. American politicians, Republicans and Democrats alike, feared the Soviets were positioning themselves for a takeover of Middle Eastern oil. Others believed that the Soviet Union was afraid Iran’s Islamic Revolution and Afghanistan’s Islamization would spread to the millions of Muslims in the USSR.

After the invasion, President Jimmy Carter announced what became known as the Carter Doctrine: that the U.S. would not allow any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf. He also began arming Afghan insurgents, a policy which President Ronald Reagan would greatly expand. Years later, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that “The day the Soviets officially crossed the border [24 December 1979], I wrote to President Carter, saying ‘We now have the opportunity of giving the USSR its Vietnam War’.”[76] In a 1997CNN/National Security Archive interview he detailed the strategy taken by the Carter administration against the Soviets in 1979:

We immediately launched a twofold process when we heard that the Soviets had entered Afghanistan. The first involved direct reactions and sanctions focused on the Soviet Union, and both the State Department and the National Security Council prepared long lists of sanctions to be adopted, of steps to be taken to increase the
international costs to the Soviet Union of their actions. And the second course of action led to my going to Pakistan a month or so after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, for the purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis a joint response, the purpose of which would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible; and we engaged in that efort in a collaborative sense with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the British, the Chinese, and we started providing weapons to the Mujaheddin, from various sources again – for example, some Soviet arms from the Egyptians and the Chinese. We even got Soviet arms from the Czechoslovak communist government, since it was obviously susceptible to material incentives; and at some point we started buying arms for the Mujaheddin from the Soviet army in Afghanistan, because that army was increasingly corrupt.[80]

The supplying of billions of dollars in arms to the Afghan mujahideen militants was one of the CIA’s longest and most expensive covert operations.[81] The CIA provided assistance to the fundamentalist insurgents through the Pakistani secret services, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), in a program called Operation Cyclone. At least US$3 billion were funneled into the country to train and equip troops with weapons, and there were similar programs run by Saudi Arabia,
Britain’s MI6 and SAS, Egypt, Iran, and the People’s Republic of China.[82]

No Americans trained or had direct contact with the mujahideen. [83] The skittish CIA had fewer than 10 operatives in the region.[84] Pakistan’s secret service, Inter-Services Intelligence(ISI), was used as an intermediary for most of these activities to disguise the sources of support for the resistance.

The early foundations of al-Qaida were allegedly built in part on relationships and weaponry that came from the billions of dollars in U.S. support for the Afghan mujahadin during the war to expel Soviet forces from that country.[85] However, scholars such as Jason Burke, Steve Coll, Peter Bergen, Christopher Andrew, and Vasily Mitrokhin have argued that Bin Laden was “outside of CIA eyesight” and that there is “no support” in any “reliable source” for “the claim that the CIA funded bin Laden or any of the other Arab volunteers who came to support the mujahideen.”[86][87][88][89]

Michael Johns , the former Heritage Foundation foreign policy analyst and White House speechwriter to President George H. W. Bush, argued that “the Reagan-led efort to supportfreedom fightersresisting Soviet oppression led successfully to the first major military defeat of the Soviet Union…. Sending the Red Army packing from Afghanistan proved one of the single most important contributing factors in one of history’s most profoundly positive and important developments.”[90]

Turkey 1980[edit]
See also: 1980 Turkish coup d’état

One day before the military coup of 12 September 1980 some 3,000 American troops of the RDF started a maneuver Anvil Express on Turkish soil.[91] At the end of 1981 a Turkish-American Defense Council (Turkish: Türk-Amerikan Savunma Konseyi) was founded. Defense Minister Ümit Haluk and Richard Perle, then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense international security policy of the newReagan administration, and the deputy Chief of Staf Necdet Öztorun participated in its first meeting on 27 April 1982.

U.S. support of the coup was acknowledged by the CIA’s Ankara station chief, Paul Henze. After the government was overthrown, Henze cabled Washington, saying, “our boys [in Ankara] did it.”[92][93] This has created the impression that the U.S. stood behind the coup. Henze denied this during a June 2003 interview on CNN Türk‘s Manşet, but two days later Birand presented an interview with Henze recorded in 1997 in which he basically confirmed Mehmet Ali Birand’s story.[94] [95] The U.S. State Department announced the coup during the night between 11 and 12 September: the military had phoned the U.S. embassy in Ankara to alert them of the coup an hour in advance.[96]

Poland 1980–81[ edit]
The U.S. supported the Solidarity movement in Poland, and—based on CIA intelligence—waged a public relations campaign to deter what the Carter administration felt was “an imminent move by large Soviet military forces into Poland.” When the Polish government launched a crackdown of its own in 1981, however, Solidarity was not alerted. Potential explanations for this vary; some believe that the CIA was caught of guard, while others suggest that American policy-makers viewed an internal crackdown as preferable to an “inevitable Soviet intervention.”[97]

Nicaragua 1981–90[ edit]
See also: Reagan Doctrine, Nicaraguan general election, 1990, and Nicaragua v. United States

From 1981-90, the CIA attempted to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Destablization through CIA assets[ edit]
In 1983, the CIA created a group of “Unilaterally Controlled Latino Assets” (UCLAs), whose task was to “sabotage ports, refineries, boats and bridges, and try to make it look like the contras had done it.”[98] In January 1984, these UCLA’s carried out the operation for which they would be best known, the last straw that led to the ratifying of the Boland Amendment, the mining of several Nicaraguan harbors, which sank several Nicaraguan boats, damaged at least five foreign vessels, and brought an avalanche of international condemnation down on the United States.[99]

Arming the Contras[edit]
Oliver North‘s mugshot taken after his arrest

The Contras, based in neighboring Honduras, waged a guerrilla war insurgency in an efort to topple the government of Nicaragua. The U.S. played a decisive role in financing, training, arming, and advising the contras.[100]

The Boland Amendment made it illegal under U.S. law to provide arms to the Contra militants. Nevertheless, the Reagan administration continued to arm and fund the Contras through the Iran-Contrascandal, pursuant to which the U.S. secretly sold arms to Iran in violation of U.S. law in exchange for cash used by the U.S. to supply arms to the Contras.

The U.S. argued that:[101]

“The United States initially provided substantial economic assistance to the Sandinista-dominated regime. We were largely instrumental in the OAS action delegitimizing the Somoza regime and laying the groundwork for installation for the new junta. Later, when the Sandinista role in the Salvadoran conflict became clear, we sought through a combination of private diplomatic contacts and suspension of assistance to convince Nicaragua to halt its subversion. Later still, economic measures and further diplomatic eforts were employed to try to efect changes in Sandinista behavior.”

“Nicaragua’s neighbors have asked for assistance against Nicaraguan aggression, and the United States has responded. Those countries have repeatedly and publicly made clear that they consider themselves to be the victims of aggression from Nicaragua, and that they desire United States assistance in meeting both subversive attacks and the conventional threat posed by the relatively immense Nicaraguan Armed Forces.”

In 1986 the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in favor of Nicaragua and against the United States and awarded reparations to Nicaragua. The ICJ held that the U.S. had violatedinternational lawby supporting the Contras in their rebellion against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua’s harbors. The Court found in its verdict that the United States was “in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State”, “not to intervene in its afairs”, “not to violate its sovereignty”, “not to interrupt peaceful maritime commerce”, and “in breach of its obligations under Article XIX of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the Parties signed at Managua on 21 January 1956.” [100]

The U.S.-supported Nicaraguan Contras

The Sandinista government headed by Daniel Ortega won decisively in the 1984 Nicaraguan elections.[102] The national elections of 1984 were conducted during a state of emergency officially justified by the war fought against the Contras insurgents and the CIA-orchestrated bombings. Many political prisoners were still held as it took place, and none of the main opposition parties participated due to what they claimed were threats and persecution from the government. The 1984 election was for posts subordinate to the Sandinista Directorate, a body “no more subject to approval by vote than the Central Committee of the Communist Party is in countries of the East Bloc,” and there was no secret ballot.[103]

It has been argued that “probably a key factor in preventing the 1984 elections from establishing liberal democratic rule was the United States’ policy toward Nicaragua.” [104] The Reagan administration was divided over whether the rightwing coalition Coordinadora Democrática Nicaragüense participate in the elections or not, which “only complicated the eforts of the Coordinadora to develop a coherent electoral strategy.” [104] Ultimately, the U.S. administration’s public and private support for non-participation allowed those members of the Coordinadora who favoured a boycott to gain the upper hand.[104] Others have disputed this view, claiming that “the Sandinistas’ decision to hold elections in 1984 was largely of foreign inspiration”.[105]

The U.S. continued to pressure the government by illegally arming the Contra insurgency. On October 5, 1985 the Sandinistas broadened the state of emergency begun in 1982 and suspended many more civil rights. A new regulation also forced any organization outside of the government to first submit any statement it wanted to make public to the censorsip bureau for prior censorship.[106]

As the Contras’ insurgency continued with U.S. support, the Sandinistas struggled to maintain power. They lost power in 1990, when they ended the state of emergency and held an election that all the main opposition parties competed in. The Sandinistas have been accused of killing thousands by Nicaragua’s Permanent Commission on Human Rights.[107] The Contras have also been accused of committing war crimes, such as rape, arson, and the killing of civilians.[108]

The New York Times surveyed voters on the 1990 election:

“The longer they [Sandinistas] were in power, the worse things became. It was all lies, what they promised us” (unemployed person); “I thought it was going to be just like 1984, when the vote was not secret and there was not all these observers around” (market vendor); “Don’t you believe those lies [about fraud], I voted my conscience and my principles, and so did everyone else I know” (young mother); “the Sandinistas have mocked and abused the people, and now we have given our vote to [the opposition] UNO” (ex-Sandinista officer).[109]

Cambodia 1980–95[edit]
See also: Sino-Vietnamese War and People’s Republic of Kampuchea

The Reagan Administration sought to apply the Reagan Doctrine of aiding anti-Soviet resistance movements abroad to Cambodia, which was under Vietnamese occupation following theCambodian genocide carried out by the communist Khmer Rouge. The Vietnamese had installed a communist government led by Khmer Rouge dissident Heng Samrin. According to R. J. Rummel, the Vietnamese were responsible for 460,000 democidal killings during the war[110] in addition to the roughly 2 million who had been killed by the Khmer Rouge.[111] The largest resistance movement fighting Cambodia’s communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore, Reagan authorized the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People’s National Liberation Front, [112] known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an efort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation. Eventually, the Vietnamese withdrew.[113] Then, under United Nations supervision, free elections were held.[114]

Angola 1980s[ edit]
See also: Democratic International, Halloween Massacre (Angola), and Angolan Civil War

War between the Cuban-backed People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) government in Angola and South African-backed National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) forces led to decades of civil war that may have cost as many as 1 million lives.[115] The Reagan administration ofered covert aid to the anti-communist UNITA rebels, led by Jonas Savimbi. Dr. Peter Hammond, a Christian missionary who lived in Angola at the time, recalled:

“There were over 50,000 Cuban troops in the country. The communists had attacked and destroyed many churches. MiG-23s and Mi-24 Hind helicopter gun ships were terrorising villagers in Angola. I documented numerous atrocities, including the strafing of villages, schools and churches. In 1986, I remember hearing Ronald Reagan’s speech – carried on the BBC Africa service – by short wave radio: “We are going to send stinger missiles to the UNITA Freedom Fighters in Angola!” Those who were listening to the SW radio with me looked at one another in stunned amazement. After a long silence as we wondered if our ears had actually heard what we thought we heard, one of us said: “That would be nice!” We scarcely dared believe that it would happen. But it did. Not long afterwards the stinger missiles began to arrive in UNITA controlled Free Angola. Soviet aircraft were shot down. The bombing and strafing of villagers, schools and churches came to an end. Without any doubt, Ronald Reagan’s policies saved many tens of thousands of lives in Angola.”[116]

Savimbi meeting the European Parliament deputies in 1989

Human rights observers have accused the MPLA of “genocidal atrocities,” “systematic extermination,” “war crimes” and “crimes against
humanity.”[117] The MPLA held blatantly rigged elections in 1992, which were rejected by eight opposition parties. An official observer wrote that there was little UN supervision, that 500,000 UNITA voters were disenfranchised and that there were 100 clandestine polling stations. UNITA sent peace negotiators to the capital, where the MPLA murdered them, along with 20,000 UNITA members. Savimbi was still ready to continue the elections. The MPLA then massacred tens of thousands of UNITA and National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) voters nationwide.[118] [119]

Savimbi was strongly supported by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Heritage foreign policy analyst Michael Johns and other conservatives visited regularly with Savimbi in his clandestine camps in Jamba and provided the rebel leader with ongoing political and military guidance in his war against the Angolan government. During a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1986, Reagan invited Savimbi to meet with him at the White House. Following the meeting, Reagan spoke of UNITA winning “a victory that electrifies the world.” Savimbi also met with Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush, who promised Savimbi “all appropriate and efective assistance.”[120]

The killing of Savimbi in February 2002 by the Angolan military led to the decline of UNITA’s influence. Savimbi was succeeded by Paulo Lukamba. Six weeks after Savimbi’s death, UNITA agreed to a ceasefire with the MPLA, but even today Angola remains deeply divided politically between MPLA and UNITA supporters. Parliamentary elections in September 2008 resulted in an overwhelming majority for the MPLA, but their legitimacy was questioned by international observers.

Corazon Aquino, president from 1986-1992
Philippines 1986[edit]
See also: Partido Lakas ng Tao and EDSA Shrine

The United States played a significant role in pressuring President Ferdinand Marcos to step down and in the peaceful transition to democracy in the Philippines, notwithstanding decades of past American support for his regime. [121] With the People Power Revolution, Corazon Aquino‘s assumption into power marked the restoration of democracy in the country.

Since the end of the Cold War[ edit]
Iraq 1992–96[edit]
See also: Iraq Liberation Act

According to former U.S. intelligence officials interviewed by The New York Times, the CIA indirectly supported a bomb and sabotage campaign between 1992 and 1995 in Iraq conducted by the Iraqi National Accord insurgents, led by Iyad Allawi. The campaign had no apparent efect in toppling Saddam Hussein’s rule.[122]

According to former CIA officer Robert Baer, various rebel groups were attempting to oust Hussein at the time. No public records of the CIA campaign are known to exist, and former U.S. officials said their recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory. “But whether the bombings actually killed any civilians could not be confirmed because, as a former CIA official said, the United States had no significant intelligence sources in Iraq then.” In 1996, Amneh al-Khadami, who described himself as the chief bomb maker for the Iraqi National Accord, recorded a videotape in which he talked of the bombing campaign and complained that he was being shortchanged money and supplies. Two former intelligence officers confirmed the existence of the videotape. Mr. Khadami said that “we blew up a car, and we were supposed to get $2,000” but got only $1,000, as reported in 1997 by the British newspaper The Independent, which had obtained a copy of the videotape.[122][123]

U.S. and Iraqi sources provided an account of the unsuccessful strategy of deposing Saddam by a coup d’état during the 1990s, an efort reportedly known within CIA by the cryptonym “DBACHILLES”.[124] According to the Washington Post,[125] the CIA appointed a new head of its Near East Division, Stephen Richter, who assumed that large parts of the Iraqi army might support a coup. A team met with Gen. Mohammed Abdullah Shawani,[125] a former commander of Iraqi Special Forces, and a Turkmen from Mosul. As the CIA was drafting its plans, the British encouraged the agency to contact an experienced Iraqi exile named Ayad Alawi, who headed a network of current and former Iraqi military officers and Ba’ath Party operatives known as wifaq, the Arabic word for “trust”.

According to the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, DBACHILLES succeeded in reaching a number of senior Iraqi military officers, but was compromised and collapsed in June 1996. The Iraqis began arresting the coup plotters on June 26. At least 200 officers were seized and more than 80 were executed, including Shawani’s sons.[124]

Afghanistan 2001[edit]
Main article: War in Afghanistan (2001-present)
Hamid Karzai with Special Forces and CIA Paramilitary in late 2001

In 2001, the CIA’s Special Activities Division units were the first U.S. forces to enter Afghanistan. Their eforts organized the Afghan Northern Alliance for the subsequent arrival of USSOCOM forces. The plan for the invasion of Afghanistan was developed by the CIA, the first time in United States history that such a large-scale military operation was planned by the CIA.[126] SAD, U.S. Army Special Forces and the Northern Alliance combined to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan with minimal loss of U.S. lives. They did this without the need for U.S. military conventional ground forces.[127][128][129]

The Washington Post stated in an editorial by John Lehman in 2006:

“What made the Afghan campaign a landmark in the U.S. Military’s history is that it was prosecuted by Special Operations forces from all the services, along with Navy and Air Force tactical power, operations by the Afghan Northern Alliance and the CIA were equally important and fully integrated. No large Army or Marine force was employed”.[130]

In a 2008 New York Times book review of Horse Soldiers, a book by Doug Stanton about the invasion of Afghanistan, Bruce Barcott wrote:

“The valor exhibited by Afghan and American soldiers, fighting to free Afghanistan from a horribly cruel regime, will inspire even the most jaded reader. The stunning victory of the horse soldiers – 350 Special Forces soldiers, 100 C.I.A. officers and 15,000 Northern Alliance fighters routing a Taliban army 50,000 strong – deserves a hallowed place in American military history”.[131]

Venezuela 2002[edit]
Main article: 2002 Venezuelan coup d’état attempt

In 2002, Washington is claimed to have approved and supported a coup against the Venezuelan government. Senior officials, including Special Envoy to Latin America Otto Reich and convicted Iran-contra figure and George W. Bush “democracy ‘czar’” Elliott Abrams, were allegedly part of the plot.[132] Top coup plotters, including Pedro Carmona, the man installed during the coup as the new president, began visits to the White House months before the coup and continued until weeks before the putsch. The plotters were received at the White House by the man President George W. Bushtasked to be his key policy-maker for Latin America, Special Envoy Otto Reich.[132] It has been claimed by Venezuelan news sources that Reich was the U.S. mastermind of the coup.[133]

Former U.S. Navy intelligence officer Wayne Madsen told the British newspaper The Guardian that American military attachés had been in touch with members of the Venezuelan military to explore the possibility of a coup. “I first heard of Lieutenant Colonel James Rogers [the assistant military attaché now based at the U.S. embassy in Caracas] going down there last June [2001] to set the ground”, Mr. Madsen reported, adding: “Some of our counter-narcotics agents were also involved.” He claims the U.S. Navy assisted with signals intelligence as the coup played out and helped by jammingcommunications for the Venezuelan military, focusing on jamming communications to and from the diplomatic missions inCaracas. The U.S. embassy dismissed the allegations as “ridiculous”. [134]

Bush Administration officials and anonymous sources acknowledged meeting with some of the planners of the coup in the several weeks prior to April 11, but have strongly denied encouraging the coup itself, saying that they insisted on constitutional means.[135] Because of allegations, Sen. Christopher Dodd requested a review of U.S. activities leading up to and during the coup attempt. A U.S. State Department Office of Inspector General report found no “wrongdoing” by U.S. officials either in the State Department or in the U.S. Embassy.[136]

Iraq 2002–03[edit]
Main article: Iraq War

The CIA’s Special Activities Division teams were the first U.S. forces to enter Iraq, in July 2002, before the main invasion. Once on the ground, they prepared for the subsequent arrival of U.S. Army Special Forces to organize the Kurdish Peshmerga. This joint team (called the Northern Iraq Liaison Element (NILE)[137] combined to defeat Ansar al-Islam, a group with ties to al-Qaeda, in Iraqi Kurdistan. This battle was for control of the territory that was occupied by Ansar al-Islam and took place before the invasion. It was carried out by Paramilitary Operations Officers from SAD and the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group. This battle resulted in the defeat of Ansar and the capture of a chemical weapons facility at Sargat.[137] Sargat was the only facility of its type discovered in the Iraq war.[138][139]

SAD teams also conducted missions behind enemy lines to identify leadership targets. These missions led to the initial air strikes against Hussein and his generals. Although the strike against Hussein was unsuccessful in killing him, it efectively ended his ability to command and control his forces. Strikes against Iraq’s generals were more successful and significantly degraded the Iraqi command’s ability to react to, and maneuver against the U.S.-led invasion force. [137][140] SAD operations officers were also successful in convincing key Iraqi Army officers into surrendering their units once the fighting started.[138]

NATO member Turkey refused to allow the U.S. forces across its territory into northern Iraq. Therefore, joint SAD and Army Special forces teams and the Peshmerga were the entire Northern force against the Iraqi army. They managed to keep the northern divisions in place rather than allowing them to aid their colleagues against the U.S.-led coalition force coming from the south.[141] Four of these CIA officers were awarded the Intelligence Star for their actions.[138][139]

Haiti 2004[edit]
Main article: 2004 Haitian coup d’état

Haiti ‘s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was ousted in a coup d’état, preventing him from finishing his second term. Aristide was flown out of the country on a United States plane accompanied by U.S. military/security personnel. Aristide maintains that his departure was a kidnapping, accusing the U.S. of orchestrating a coup d’état against him.[142][143]

Gaza Strip 2006–present[edit]
Main article: Battle of Gaza (2007)

After winning Palestinian legislative elections in 2006, Hamas and Fatah formed the Palestinian authority national unity government in 2007, headed by Ismail Haniya. In June 2007 Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip[144] and removed Fatah officials. The ICRC estimated that at least 118 people were killed and more than 550 wounded during the fighting in the week up to June 15.[145]

In May 2007, U.S. officials promised to continue funding a $84 million aid package aimed at improving the fighting ability of the Abbas Presidential Guard loyal to Fatah. The U.S. insisted that all of its aid to the Presidential Guard is “nonlethal”, consisting of training, uniforms, and supplies, as well as paying for better infrastructure at Gaza’s borders. “The situation has gotten to be quite dire in Gaza, we have a situation of lawlessness and outright chaos”, he said. “This chaotic situation is why the [U.S.] is focused on [helping] the legal, legitimate security forces in our efort to reestablish law and order.”, said Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, who was overseeing the U.S. program.[146][147][148][149]

In the April 2008 the journalist David Rose suggested that the United States collaborated with the Palestinian Authority and Israel to attempt a coup on Hamas, and Hamas pre-empted the coup.[150]Hamas Foreign Minister Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar has echoed this view, and called the arming of Fatah by the United States an “American coup d’état”.[151] Hamas is listed as a terrorist organization by many Western nations.

Somalia 2006–07[edit]
See also: War in Somalia (2006-present)

Although the United States has had an ongoing interest in Somalia for decades, in early 2006 the CIA began a program of funding a coalition of anti-Islamic warlords. [152] This involved CIA case workers funneling payments of hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Alliance for the Restoration of Peace and Counter-Terrorism against the Islamic Court Union. Although the ICU was locally supported for having restored a relative level of peace, some concern had been expressed about their treatment of women and strict interpretation of Islamic law. [153]

Iran 2005–present[edit]
See also: 2009-2010 Iranian election protests

President George W. Bush authorized the CIA to undertake black
operations against Iran in an efort to destabilize the Iranian government.[154] A 2005 article in the New York Timesstated that the Bush administration was expanding eforts to influence Iran’s internal politics with aid to opposition and pro-democracy groups abroad and longer broadcasts criticizing the Iranian government. Under Secretary of State for Political Afairs R. Nicholas Burns said the administration was “taking a page from the playbook”
on Ukraine and Georgia. Unnamed administration officials were reported as saying the State Department was also studying dozens of proposals for spending $3 million in the coming year “for the benefit of Iranians living inside Iran” including broadcast activities, Internet programs and “working with people inside Iran” on advancing political activities there.[155]

In 2006, the United States congress passed the Iran Freedom and Support Act, which directed $10 million towards groups opposed to the Iranian government. In 2007, ABC newsreported that President Bush had authorized a $400 million covert operation to create unrest in Iran.[156] According to the The Daily Telegraph, the CIA has also provided support to a militant Sunni organization calledJundullah, which has launched raids into Iran from its base in Pakistan.[154] Alexis Debat separately claimed that the US encouraged Pakistan to support Jundullah, but his reporting was challenged after he was discovered to have allegedly fabricated numerous interviews.[157] Seymour Hersh, writing in The New Yorker, alleged that the US has provided funding and training to the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran and Party for a Free Life in Kurdistan, militant groups opposed to the current Iranian government.[158][159] Prior to 2012, the U.S. State Department had listed the PMOI as a terrorist organizaion, despite the absence of any confirmed terrorist acts committed by the group in more than a decade.[160]

Court square in Benghazi, April 2011; at the central place for gatherings and demonstrations the walls are draped with pictures of casualties, mourners passing by
Libya 2011[edit]
Main article: Libyan civil war

After the Arab Spring movement overthrew the rulers of Tunisia and Egypt, their neighbour to the east and west respectively, Libya had a major revolt beginning in February 2011.[161][162] In response, the Obama administration sent in CIA Special Activities Division paramilitary operatives to assess the situation and gather information on the opposition forces.[163][164][165]

During the early phases of the Libyan air strike ofensive, paramilitary operatives assisted in the recovery of a U.S. Air Force pilot who had crashed due to mechanical problems.[166] There was also speculation in The Washington Post that President Obama issued a covert action finding in March 2011 that authorized the CIA to carry out a clandestine efort to provide arms and support to the Libyan opposition.[167]

Muammar Gaddafi was ultimately overthrown in the Libyan civil war. Syria 2012–present[edit]
Main article: Syrian civil war

In 2012, President Barack Obama authorized U.S. government agencies to support forced regime change in Syria. [168] In July 2012, the Office of Foreign Assets Control authorised channeling financial support for the Free Syrian Army through the Syrian Support Group, a non-governmental organization based in Washington, D.C..[169] In April 2013, the Obama administration promised to double non-lethal aid to the rebels, from US$123 million to US$250 million, thus attaining the goal of US$1 billion in total international aid.[170]

In June 2013, the White House confirmed that the U.S. has “stepped up” its assistance to Syrian rebels.[171] While the State Department was in charge of providing non-lethal aid to the rebels, theCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA) was tasked with the supply and delivery of weaponry and other lethal equipment. [172] By early September 2013, the Obama administration considered putting The Pentagon in charge of arming and training Syrian rebel forces because the CIA’s previous training program was too limited and too slow.[173]

In October 2013, the CIA ramped up its clandestine efort to train opposition fighters in Syria amid concern that moderate, U.S.-backed militias are rapidly losing ground in the country’s civil war. The program is aimed at increasing the fighting power of units aligned with the Supreme Council of the Syrian Revolution, an umbrella organization led by a former Syrian general that is the main recipient of U.S. support.[174]

See also[ edit]
• 40 Committee
• American Empire
• United States and state terrorism
• Foreign Military Sales
• Foreign policy of the United States
• Timeline of United States military operations
• Kirkpatrick Doctrine
• NSC 5412/2 Special Group
• Overseas expansion of the United States
• Overseas interventions of the United States
• Overthrow of the Hawaiian Monarchy
• Truman Doctrine
• United States military aid
• United States Foreign Military Financing
• United States Agency for International Development
• Special Activities Division
• Torture and the United States
• United States war crimes
• United States involvement in regime change

References[ edit]

Constructs such as ibid., loc. cit. and idem are discouraged by Wikipedia’s style guide for footnotes, as they are easily broken. Please improve this article by replacing them with named references(quick guide), or an abbreviated title.(December 2010)

1. ^ Jump up to:a b Weart, Spencer R. (1998). Never at War. Yale University Press. pp. 221–224, 314. ISBN 978-0-300-07017-0.
2. Jump up^ Humanities and Social Sciences On-Line, Review of book by David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920
3. Jump up^ David S. Foglesong, America’s Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War 1917-1920, Chapter 5, “American Intelligence Gathering, Propaganda and Covert Action in Revolutionary Russia”
4. Jump up^ The National Archives, Prologue Magazine, Winter 2002, Vol. 34, No. 4, “Guarding the Railroad, Taming the Cossacks The U.S. Army in Russia, 1918-1920”
5. Jump up^ Robert L. Willett, Russian Sideshow: America’s Undeclared War, 1918-1920, p. 9
6. Jump up^ “CIA slipped bugs to Soviets”. Washington Post.NBC. Retrieved 2008-11-21.
7. Jump up^ “The Farewell Dossier”. Central Intelligence Agency. Retrieved 2008-11-21.
8. Jump up^ The backlash against democratic assistance[dead link]
9. Jump up^ Koestler, Brendan. “What’s the National Endowment for Democracy?”. Slate Magazine. Retrieved 2008-11-21.
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11.Jump up^ Douglas Little (1990). “Cold War and Covert Action: The United States and Syria, 1945-1958”. Middle East Journal44 (1). JSTOR 4328056.
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History, Clark University” (PDF). Retrieved 2012-10-09.
13.Jump up^ Gendzier, Irene L. (1997). Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon and the

Middle East, 1945-1958 . Columbia University Press. p. 98. Retrieved February 13, 2012. “Recent investigation… indicates that CIA agents Miles Copeland and Stephen Meade..were directly involved in the coup in which Syrian colonel Husni Za’im seized power. According to then former CIA agent Wilbur Eveland, the coup was carried out in order to obtain Syrian ratification of TAPLINE.”

14. Jump up^ Gerolymatos, André (2010). Castles Made of Sand: A Century of Anglo-American Espionage and Intervention in the Middle East.. Thomas Dunne books (MacMillan). Retrieved February 13, 2012. “Miles Copeland, formerly a CIA agent, has outlined how he and Stephen Meade backed Zaim, and American archival sources confirm that it was during this period that Meade established links with extremist right-wing elements of the Syrian army, who ultimately carried out the coup.”

15. Jump up^ The New York Review of Books, “A Crass and Consequential Error,” reviewing the book Patriot of Persia: Muhammad Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup by Christopher de Bellaigue, 16 August 2012.

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19.^ Jump up to:a b c Bayandor, Darioush (April 2010). Iran and the CIA: The Fall of Mosaddeq Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan.ISBN 978-0-230-57927-9.
20.Jump up^ “Trying to Persuade a Reluctant Shah”. The New York Times.
21.Jump up^ I Knew the Shah-Part 2 Al Jazeera English. January 17, 2009.
22.Jump up^ Washington Post, March 23, 1980.
23.^ Jump up to:a b CIA finally admits it masterminded Iran’s 1953 coup
24.Jump up^ CIA admits role in 1953 Iranian coup
25.Jump up^ In declassified document, CIA acknowledges role in ’53 Iran coup
26.Jump up^ Nick Cullather, with an afterword by Piero Gleijeses“Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954”. Stanford University Press, 2006.
27.Jump up^ Piero Gleijeses. “Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954”.Princeton University Press, 1992.
28.Jump up^ Stephen M. Streeter. “Managing the Counterrevolution: The United States and Guatemala, 1954-1961”. Ohio University Press, 2000.
29.Jump up^ Gordon L. Bowen. “U.S. Foreign Policy toward Radical Change: Covert Operations in Guatemala, 1950-1954”.Latin American Perspectives, 1983, Vol. 10, No. 1, p. 88-102.
30.Jump up^ Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954 (Princeton University Press, 1991), pp84, 147, 145, 155, 181-2.
31.Jump up^ Nicholas Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operation in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford University Press, 1999) pp24-7, based on the CIA archives.
32.Jump up^ Antecedentes Inmediatos (1944-1961): El derrocamiento de Arbenz y la intervención militar de

1954,” in Comisión para el Esclaracimiento Histórico (CEH), Guatemala: Memoria Del Silencio (Guatemala, 1999), Capítulo primero.

33. Jump up^ Nicholas Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of its Operation in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Stanford University Press, 1999).
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35.Jump up^ Conboy, Kenneth and Morrison, James, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet (2002).
36.^ Jump up to:a b c d “CIA Gave Aid to Tibetan Exiles in ’60s, Files Show”. The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 8 September 2013. “The budget figures for the CIA’s Tibetan program are contained in a memo dated Jan. 9, 1964. It was evidently written to help justify continued funding for the clandestine intelligence operation. “Support of 2,100 Tibetan guerrillas based in Nepal: $500,000,” the document says. “Subsidy to the Dalai Lama: $180,000.” After listing several other costs, it concludes: “Total: $1,735,000.” The files show that this budget request was approved soon afterward.”
37.Jump up^ Roadnight, Andrew (2002). United States Policy towards Indonesia in the Truman and Eisenhower

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42.Jump up^ “Senate Church Committee on Lumumba” (PDF). Retrieved 2012-10-09.
43.Jump up^ M. Crawford Young. Post-Independence Politics in the Congo. JSTOR 2934325. 44.Jump up^ Gálvez 1999, p. 62.
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51.Jump up^ Kennedy Library, “Telegram from Department of State to Embassy Baghdad of February 5, 1963,”
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53.Jump up^ Frank, Mitch. “The CIA’s Secret Army.” Time Magazine. February 3, 2003.
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56. Jump up^ The Pentagon Papers, Vol. 2 Ch. 4 “The Overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem, May–November, 1963”, pgs. 201–276,
57.Jump up^ G. Herring, America’s Longest War, 1996, p. 116.
58.Jump up^ Moyar, pg. 286. Books.google.com. 2006-08-28. Retrieved 2012-10-09.
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60.Jump up^ 198. Telegram From the Department of State to the Embassy in Brazil. Washington, March 31, 1964, 2:29 p.m. Retrieved on August 20, 2007.
61.Jump up^ 187. Telegram From the Ambassador to Brazil (Gordon) to the Department of State Rio de Janeiro, March 28, 1964. Retrieved on August 20, 2007
62.Jump up^ Lincoln Gordon mudou a história do Brasil, diz historiador americano
63.Jump up^ Anthony, S. (1969) “The State of Ghana” African AffairsVol. 68, No. 273, pp. 337-339.
64.Jump up^ Botwe-Asamoah, Kwame (2005). Kwame Nkrumah’s politico-cultural thought and policies : an African-centered paradigm for the second phase of the African revolution. New York [u.a.]: Routledge. pp. 16, 46, 62, 143, 146, 148, 219. ISBN 0415948339.
65.Jump up^ Oglesby, Charles (1970). Containment and Change. Macmillan Company. p. 105.
66.Jump up^ Interview with John Stockwell in Pandora’s Box: Black Power (Adam Curtis, BBC Two, 22 June 1992)
67.Jump up^ John Prados, Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), p. 329.
68.Jump up^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), pg. 435.
69.^ Jump up to:a b c d Kornbluh, Peter (2003). The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New York: The New Press. ISBN 1-56584-936-1.
70.Jump up^ “Declaration on the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy,”Resolution of the Chamber of Deputies, Chile, August 22, 1973.
71.Jump up^ Falcof, Mark, “Kissinger and Chile”, Commentary,2003. See also his Modern Chile.
72.Jump up^ Axelsson, Sun Chili, le Dossier Noir. (Chile: The Black File) Paris, France: Gallimard, 1974, p. 87
73.Jump up^ Message on the Observance of Afghanistan Day by U.S. President Ronald Reagan, March 21, 1983
74.Jump up^ Hussain, Rizwan (2005). Pakistan And The Emergence Of Islamic Militancy In Afghanistan. Ashgate Publishing. pp. 108–109. ISBN 0-7546-4434-0.
75.Jump up^ Meher, Jagmohan (2004). America’s Afghanistan War: The Success that Failed. Gyan Books. pp. 68–69, 94.ISBN 81-7835-262-1.
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77.Jump up^ Jay, Paul, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Afghan war and the ‘Grand Chessboard’ Pt 2, The Real News, January 15, 2010 at 1:50 to 6:10.
78.Jump up^ Alterman, Eric, “‘Blowback,’ the Prequel,” The Nation, November 12, 2001.
79.Jump up^ Kalinovsky, Artemy M. (2011). A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan. Harvard University Press. pp. 25–28. ISBN 978-0-674-05866-8.
80.Jump up^ Full Text of Interview
81.Jump up^ Time Magazine, May 13, 2003, “The Oily
Americans,”http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,450997-2,00.html
82.Jump up^ Interview with Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski – (13/6/97). Part 2.] Episode 17. Good Guys, Bad Guys. June 13, 1997.
83.Jump up^ Bergen, Peter. Holy War, Inc. New York: Free Press, 2001. Pg.66
84.Jump up^ The New Republic, “TRB FROM WASHINGTON, Back to Front” by Peter Beinart, October 8, 2001.
85.Jump up^ Hartung, William D. (October 27, 2006). “We Arm The World”. TomPaine.com. Retrieved January 27, 2012.
86.Jump up^ Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda (Penguin, 2003), p59.
87.Jump up^ Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World (Penguin, 2006), p579n48.
88.Jump up^ Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden (Penguin, 2004), p87.
89.Jump up^ Peter Bergen, The Osama bin Laden I Know (Free Press, 2006), pp60-1.
90.Jump up^ “Charlie Wilson’s War Was Really America’s War,” by Michael Johns, January 19, 2008.
91.Jump up^ Alternative Türkeihilfe, Militärs an der Macht (An alternative aid for Turkey, Military in Power) Herford (Germany), August 1983, pg.6.
92.Jump up^ Birand, Mehmet Ali. 12 Eylül, Saat: 04.00, 1984, pg. 1
93.Jump up^ Hear Paul Henze say it: Fethullahçı Gladyo onYouTube 8m20s in.
94.Jump up^ Balta, Ibrahim. “Birand’dan Paul Henze’ye ‘sesli–görüntülü’ yalanlama,” Zaman, 14 June 2003. (Turkish)
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96.Jump up^ Gil, Ata. “La Turquie à marche forcée,” Le Monde diplomatique, February 1981.
97.Jump up^ MacEachin, Douglas J. “US Intelligence and the Polish Crisis 1980-1981.” CIA. June 28, 2008.
98.Jump up^ Leogrande, Leonard M, “Making the Economy Scream: US economic sanctions against Sandinista Nicaragua” (Third World Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 2), pp 340.
99.Jump up^ Gilbert, Dennis Sandinistas: the party and the revolution, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp 167
100.^ Jump up to:a b ICJ (NICARAGUA v. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA) 27 June 1986, Retrieved 26/09/12
101.Jump up^ “Nicaragua’s role in revolutionary internationalism”.U.S. Department of State Bulletin. 1986. Retrieved 2008-11-21.
102.Jump up^ BBC News, 2005 Nov. 5, “On This Day—1984: Sandinistas Claim Election
Victory,”http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/5/newsid_2538000/2538379.stm
103.Jump up^ Martin Kriele, “Power and Human Rights in Nicaragua,” German Comments, April 1986, pp56-7, 63-7, a chapter excerpted from his Nicaragua: Das blutende Herz Amerikas (Piper, 1986)
104.^ Jump up to:a b c Williams, Philip J. “Elections and democratization in Nicaragua: the 1990 elections in perspective.” Journal of Interamerican Studies 32, 4:13-34 (winter 1990). p16
105.Jump up^ Cornelius, Wayne A. “The Nicaraguan elections of 1984: a reassessment of their domestic and international significance.” Drake, Paul W. and Eduardo Silva. 1986. Elections and democratization in Latin America, 1980-85. La Jolla: Center for Iberian and Latin American Studies, Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, Institute of the Americas, University of California, San Diego. Pp. 62.
106.Jump up^ Chamorro Cardenal, Jaime (1988). La Prensa, A Republic of Paper. Freedom House. p. 23.
107.Jump up^ John Norton Moore, The Secret War in Central America (University Publications of America, 1987) p143n94 (2,000 killings); Roger Miranda and William Ratlif, The Civil War in Nicaragua (Transaction, 1993), p193 (3,000 disappearances); Insight on the News, July 26, 1999 (14,000 atrocities).
108.Jump up^ The Catholic Institute for International Relations (1987). “Right to Survive: Human Rights in Nicaragua” (print). The Catholic Institute for International Relations.
109.Jump up^ New York Times, March 5, 1990.
110.Jump up^ “Statistics Of Cambodian Genocide And Mass Murder”. Hawaii.edu. Retrieved 2012-08-08.
111.Jump up^ Heuveline, Patrick (2001). “The Demographic Analysis of Mortality in Cambodia,” in Forced Migration and Mortality, eds. Holly E. Reed and Charles B. Keely. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
112.Jump up^ Far Eastern Economic Review, December 22, 1988, details the extensive fighting between the U.S.-backed forces and the Khmer Rouge.
113.Jump up^ “Cambodia at a Crossroads”, by Michael Johns, The World and I magazine, February 1988.[dead link]
114.Jump up^ United Nations Security Council Resolution 745 S-RES-745(1992) on 28 February 1992 (retrieved 2008-04-09)
115.Jump up^ Médecins Sans Frontières, “Angola: An Alarming Nutritional Situation,” August 1999
116.Jump up^ Hammond, Peter,Reagan Saved Lives in Angola,FrontLine Fellowship, accessed August 9, 2012.
117.Jump up^ National Society for Human Rights, Press Releases, September 12, 2000, May 16, 2001.
118.Jump up^ National Society for Human Rights, Ending the Angolan Conflict, Windhoek, Namibia, July 3, 2000.
119.Jump up^ John Matthew, Letters, The Times, UK, November 6, 1992 (election observer).
120.Jump up^ “Bush pledges Angola rebel aid,” The New York Times, January 1989.
121.Jump up^ Karnow, Stanley (1989-03-19). “REAGAN AND THE PHILIPPINES: Setting Marcos Adrift”. The New York Times.
122.^ Jump up to:a b Brinkley, Joel (2004-06-09). “Ex-C.I.A. Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90’s Attacks”. New York Times.
123.Jump up^ Wurmser, David (1997-11-12). “Iraq Needs a Revolution”. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 2008-11-20.
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125.^ Jump up to:a b Ignatius, David (May 16, 2003), “The CIA And the Coup That Wasn’t”, Washington Post
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148.Jump up^ Diplomats fear US wants to arm Fatah for ‘war on Hamas’, The Times, November 18, 2006
149.Jump up^ Israeli defense official: Fatah arms transfer bolsters forces of peace, Haaretz, December 28, 2006
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Further reading[edit]
Books[edit]
• Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to

Iraq , Times Books, 2006, ISBN 978-0-8050-7861-9
• John Ranelagh, The Agency, 1986
• Christopher Andrew, For the President’s Eyes Only, 1995
• Richard Helms with William Hood, A Look over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central

Intelligence Agency . New York: Random House, 2003.
• Weiner, Tim (2008). Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (1st Anchor Books
ed.). New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0307389008.
• John Prados, Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, Ivan R. Dee, 2006.
External links[edit]
• “Part II…Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to
Iraq” May 8, 2006 Democracy Now!
• CIA Responds to a Critic
• Sins of Omission and Commission
• The CIA’s “Family Jewels”
• Kinzer on National Public Radio

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Geographic activities• Asia/Pacific
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• Directorate of Science & Technology

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• Official reports by the US Government on the CIA
Categories:

• Central Intelligence Agency operations
• Cold War conflicts
• American secret government programs
• Changes in political power

3) Assassinations and disinformation of peace activists

Assassination and targeted killing[edit]
Main article: Targeted killing

At least since World War II, a distinction has been drawn between assassination of civilian leaders, and targeted killings of leaders of fighting organizations. Some cases were blurry, such as the British-Czech Operation Anthropoid, the killing of uniformed SS officer Reinhard Heydrich, the German governor, at the time, of Czechoslovakia. A failed attempt, by British troops, to kill Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was clearly aimed at a military leader, as was the successful shooting down of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.

CIA has admitted being involved in assassination attempts against foreign leaders. Recently, there have been targeted killings of suspected terrorists, typically with missiles fired fromunmanned aerial vehicles, in a manner that a number of legal authorities believe was a legitimate act as opposed to a prohibited assassination.

Assassinations[edit]

Of the cases cited, it appears that no CIA personnel or even directly controlled foreign agents actually killed any leader, but there certainly were cases where the CIA knew of, or supported, plots to overthrow foreign leaders. In the cases of Lumumba, Qasim, and Castro, the CIA was involved in preparing to kill the individual, but a native group killed him first. In other cases, such as Diem, the Agency knew of a plot but did not warn him, and communications at White House level indicated that the Agency had, with approval, told the plotters the US didn’t object to their plan. The gun or poison, however, was not in the hands of a CIA officer.

CIA personnel were involved in attempted assassinations of foreign government leaders such as Fidel Castro. They provided support to those that killed Patrice Lumumba. In yet another category was noninterference in the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) coup in which President Ngo Dinh Diem was killed.

A distinction has been drawn between political assassinations and “targeted killing” of leaders of non-state belligerents.
Castro[edit]
Perhaps the best-documented account of CIA-sponsored assassination plans were against President Fidel Castro of Cuba.

According to columnist Jack Anderson, [48] the first attempt was part of the Bay of Pigs Invasion operation, but five more teams were sent, the last apprehended on a rooftop within rifle range of Castro, at the end of February or beginning of March 1963. Anderson speculated that President Fidel Castro may have become aware of it, and somehow recruited Lee Harvey Oswald to retaliate against President John F. Kennedy.

Maheu was identified as the team leader, who recruited John Roselli, a gambler with contacts in the American and Cuban underworlds. The CIA assigned two operations officers, William King Harvey and James O’Connell, to accompany Roselli to Miami to recruit the actual teams.

Anderson’s story appears to be confirmed by two CIA documents, the first referring to an Inspector General report of investigation of allegations that the Agency conspired to assassinate Fidel Castro.

The story first appeared in Drew Pearson’s column and has since appeared in Jack Anderson’s column. “While the columns contained many factual errors, the allegations are basically true. [49] Second, a declassified memo from Howard Osborne, director of the CIA Office of Security, dated 15 February 1972, in the “CIA Family Jewels” series, from to the Executive Director, speaks of John Roselli, then serving time in a Federal penitentiary in Seattle, Washington, with deportation scheduled at the end of his sentence.[50]While the CIA was aware “Roselli intended to expose his participation in the plot should we not intervene in his behalf. The DCI at the time, John McCone, decided to take a calculated risk and accept the consequences of possible disclosure. Two articles by Jack Anderson discuss the plot, as well the Washington Post Sunday magazine, Parade

Individuals who were aware of this project were: Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, Richard M. Bissell Jr. (Deputy Director for Plans (DDP)) Colonel J.C. King (Chief, Western Hemisphere Division, DDP), Colonel Sheffield Edwards, William Harvey, and James P. O’Connell. Also included were Robert A. Maheu (former FBI agent, public relations agent who did work for the CIA, and later an aide to Howard Hughes), and his attorneys Edward P. Morgan andEdward Bennett Williams.

On 26 February 1971, Osborne arranged with the Commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to flag any deportation. INS confirmed they did this again for 1972.

Diem[ edit]
In summary, CIA, Embassy, and other US personnel, up to White House level, were aware of yet another coup being planned against President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. While the US had no direct participation in the coup, the plotters were told, in a deniable way, that the US did not object to it. No documentary evidence has surfaced that the US knew that Diem and his brother were to be killed, and it is unclear that all the Vietnamese plotters knew or agreed to it. President John F. Kennedy was aware of the coup plans, but apparently had not considered the hazard to Diem.

According to the Pentagon Papers, the final US loss of confidence in Diem began when his government violently suppressed a protest on Buddha’s Birthday, May 8, 1963. Up to that point, the majority Buddhists had not been very politically active, even though Diem had given preference to the Catholic minority. Quickly, however, the Buddhists put a “cohesive and disciplined [political] organization” into action. By June, the situation moved from dissidence from a religious group to a “grave crisis of public confidence”.[51]

Then-Ambassador Frederick Nolting had tried to persuade Diem to moderate government action against Buddhists, but with no success. While Nolting was on leave, President John F. Kennedy appointed Henry Cabot Lodge as the new Ambassador. In June 1963, senior leaders began, for the first time, to discuss the efect of a coup to remove Diem. Nolting and the US military in Vietnam, however, argued that Diem was keeping chaos at bay. Nolting left permanently in mid-August, but the assurances from Diem died with multiple August 21 night raids on Buddhist temples in many parts of Vietnam. Two days later, a US representative was approached by generals considering a coup. On August 23, the first contact with a U.S. representative was made by generals who had begun to plan a coup against Diem. They were told that the U.S. had determined that Diem’s brother, who had led the raids on the Buddhists, could not stay in any kind of power, and that, “then, we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.”

A White House tape of President Kennedy and his advisers, published this week in a new book-and-CD collection and excerpted on the Web, confirms that top U.S. officials sought the November 1, 1963 coup against then-South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem without apparently considering the physical consequences for Diem personally (he was murdered the following day). The taped meeting and related documents show that U.S. officials, including JFK, vastly overestimated their ability to control the South Vietnamese generals who ran the coup 40 years ago this week [November 2003].

The Kennedy tape from October 29, 1963 captures the highest-level White House meeting immediately prior to the coup, including the President’s brother voicing doubts about the policy of support for a coup: “I mean, it’s diferent from a coup in the Iraq or South American country; we are so intimately involved in this…[52]

An 8 May 1973 memorandum [49] states that “An Inspector General report of investigation of allegations that the Agency was instrumental in bringing about the assassination ofPresident Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam. The allegations were determined to be without foundation.”

Nevertheless, the Pentagon Papers observed,

For the military coup d’etat against Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. must accept its full share of responsibility. Beginning in August 1963 we variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged the coup eforts of the Vietnamese generals and ofered full support for a successor government. In October we cut of aid to Diem in a direct rebuf, giving a green light to the generals. We maintained clandestine contact with them throughout the planning and execution of the coup and sought to review their operational plans and proposed new government. Thus, as the nine-year rule of Diem came to a bloody end, our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment in an essentially leaderless Vietnam.[51]
proceeded to the point that lethal substances and instruments specifically intended for use in an assassination were delivered by the CIA to the Congo Station. There is no evidence that these instruments of assassination were actually used against Lumumba.”

Lumumba[edit]
See also: Covert U.S. regime change actions#Democratic Republic of the Congo 1960

The Church Committee concluded it had “solid evidence of a plot to assassinate Patrice Lumumba [the first elected Prime Minister of the Republic of Congo]. Strong hostility to Lumumba, voiced at the very highest levels of government may have been intended to initiate an assassination operation; at the least it engendered such an operation. The evidence indicates that it is likely that President Eisenhower’s expression of strong concern about Lumumba at a meeting of the National Security Council on August 18, 1960, was taken by (Director of Central Intelligence) Allen Dulles as authority to assassinate Lumumba. There is, however, testimony by Eisenhower Administration officials, and ambiguity and lack of clarity in the records of high-level policy meetings, which tends to contradict the evidence that the President intended an assassination efort against Lumumba. In a footnote, the Committee cited an unnamed official as saying he had heard Eisenhower order the assassination.”

Approval discussions and meetings[ edit]
The week after the August 18 NSC meeting, a presidential advisor reminded the Special Group of the “necessity for very straightforward action” against Lumumba and prompted a decision not to rule out consideration of (“any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba.” The Special Group is one of the many names for the often-reorganized committee that approved CIA covert action proposals. It has been called the 303 committee, Special Group (counterinsurgency), Operations Advisory Group, 5412 committee, and Forty Committee. “The following day, Dulles cabled a CIA Station Officer in Leopoldville, Republic of the Congo,* that “in high quarters” the “removal” of Lumumba was “an urgent and prime objective.”

“Shorty thereafter the CIA’s clandestine service formulated a plot to assassinate Lumumba. The plot

Events overtaken by events[ edit]
In the meantime, Lumumba was dismissed from his post by Congolese President Joseph Kasa-Vubu, an act of dubious legality; in retaliation, Lumumba attempted to dismiss Kasa-Vubu from the presidency, an act of even more dubious legality. On September 14, a coup d’état endorsed by the CIA and organized by Colonel Joseph Mobutu removed Lumumba from office.

Lumumba was killed, in 1961, by forces under the control of the President, Moise
Tshombe of Katanga, a province that had declared its independence of the Republic of the Congo. Lumumba was taken by Katangan soldiers commanded by Belgians, and eventually shot by a Katangan firing squad under Belgian leadership.

Planning in the clandestine services[ edit]
The independent Republic of the Congo was declared on 30 June 1960, with Joseph Kasa-Vubu as President and Patrice Lumumba as Prime Minister. It shared a name with the neighboring Republic of the Congo to the west, a French colony that also gained independence in 1960, and the two were normally diferentiated by also stating the name of the relevant capital city, so Congo (Léopoldville) versus Congo (Brazzaville).

Larry Devlin became Chief of Station in Congo in July 1960, a mere 10 days after the country’s independence from Belgium and shortly before Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba‘s two month term in office, dismissal from power and ultimate execution. In his memoir, Devlin reveals that late in 1960, he received instructions from an agent (“Joe from Paris”) who was relaying instructions from CIA headquarters that he (Devlin) was to efect the assassination of Lumumba. Various poisons, including one secreted in a tube of toothpaste, were profered. The directive had come from the CIA Deputy Chief of Plans Dick Bissell, but Devlin wanted to know if it had originated at a higher level and if so, how high. “Joe” had been given to understand that it had come from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but Devlin to this day does not know for sure. Devlin writes (and has recently said in public speaking engagements) that he felt an assassination would have been “morally wrong” and likely to backfire and work against U.S. interests. In the event, he temporized, neglecting to act, and Lumumba was ultimately murdered by his enemies in Katanga, with Belgian government participation. U.S. intelligence was kept apprised.

The United Nations Security Council was called into session on December 7, 1960 to consider Soviet demands that the U.N. seek Lumumba’s immediate release, the immediate restoration of Lumumba as head of the Congo government, the disarming of the forces of Mobutu, and the immediate evacuation of Belgians from the Congo. Soviet RepresentativeValerian Zorin refused U.S. demands that he disqualify himself as Security Council President during the debate.Dag Hammarskjöld, answering Soviet attacks against his Congo operations, said that if the U.N. forces were withdrawn from the Congo “I fear everything will crumble.”

Following a U.N. report that Lumumba had been mistreated by his captors, his followers threatened (on December 9, 1960) to seize all Belgians and “start cutting of the heads of some of them” unless Lumumba was released within 48 hours.

Qasim[ edit]
Declassified CIA documents show that a request was made for a mission to incapacitate dictator Abd al-Karim Qasim of Iraq, who was overthrown in 1963 by a coalition dominated by the Ba’ath party. Qasim had put down an earlier coup attempt in 1959.

While Qasim was actually killed by a firing squad of the Ba’ath party that overthrew him, there had been a separate CIA plan to incapacitate him. In their request, they said the target’s death would not be unacceptable to them, but was not the principal objective: “We do not consciously seek subject’s permanent removal from the scene; we also do not object should this complication develop.” (see detailed memo below)

Planning in the clandestine services[ edit]
The poisoned handkerchief is mentioned in the Church Committee report.[53] The report included, “In February 1960, the Near East Division [of the Directorate of Plans (i.e., Clandestine Service)] sought the endorsement of what the Division Chief called the “Health Alteration Committee” for its proposal for a “special operation: to “incapacitate” an Iraqi Colonel believed to be “promoting Soviet bloc political interests in Iraq.” The Division sought the Committee’s advice on a technique, “which while not likely to result in total disablement would be certain to prevent the target from pursuing his usual activities for a minimum of three months”, adding: “We do not consciously seek subject’s permanent removal from the scene; we also do not object should this complication develop.” Memo, Acting Chief N.E. Division to DC/CI [organization code not clear; it is the usual abbreviation for counter-intelligence.)

“In April, the [Health Alteration] Committee unanimously recommended to the DDP (Deputy Director for Plans, Richard M. Bissell Jr.)that a “disabling operation” be undertaken, noting that the Chief of Operations advised that it would be “highly desirable” Bissell’s deputy, Tracy Barnes, approved the action on behalf of Bissell. (Memo. Denuty Chief CI to DDP. 4/l/62)

“The approved operation was to mail a monogrammed handkerchief containing an incapacitating agent to the colonel from an Asian country [i.e., country not yet named]. [James] Scheider [Science Advisor to Bissell] testified that, while he did not now recall the name of the recipient, he did remember mailing from the Asian country. during the period in question, a handkerchief “treated with some kind of material for the purpose of harassing that person who received it.” (Scheider Affidavit. 10/20/75. pp. 52–56)

During the course of this Committee’s investigation, the CIA stated that the handkerchief was “in fact never received (if, indeed, sent).” It added that the colonel: “Sufered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad (an event we had nothing to do with) after our handkerchief proposal was considered.” (Memo from Chief of Operations, Near East Division to Assistant to the SA/DDO 10/26/75.)

Planning overtaken by events[ edit]
On Feb. 8, 1963, the conspirators staged a coup in Baghdad. For a time the government held out, but eventually Qasim gave up, and after a swift trial was shot; his body was later shown on Baghdad television.

Possible White House knowledge[ edit]
Washington immediately befriended the successor regime. “Almost certainly a gain for our side”, Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to President John F. Kennedy on the day of the takeover.

That Komer wrote that memo to Kennedy, without spending any time on additional research, may suggest, but does not confirm, the National Security Council, a covert operations approval committee, or Kennedy knew of planning against Qasim. Even if Komer or Kennedy knew of a plot to overthrow Qasim, approval of the plan, above CIA level, has not yet been documented.

Trujillo[ edit]
An Inspector General report of investigation of allegations that the Agency was instrumental in bringing about the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. Trujillo was efective head of government at the time of his assassination in 1961.

Conditions leading to a desire, by Dominicans, appeared to begin Johnny Abbes, took control the Intelligence Military Service (the secret police), and the country developed more internal violence and increasingly isolated from other nations. This isolation compounded Trujillo’s fears, prompting him to worsen his foreign interventionism.

To be sure, Trujillo did have cause to resent the leaders of some nations, such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro, who assisted a small, abortive invasion attempt by dissident Dominicans in 1959. Trujillo, however, expressed greater concern over Venezuela’s president Rómulo Betancourt (1959–64). An established and outspoken opponent of Trujillo, Betancourt had been associated with some individual Dominicans who had plotted against the dictator. Trujillo developed an obsessive personal hatred towards Betancourt and supported numerous plots of Venezuelan exiles to overthrow him. This pattern of intervention led the Venezuelan government to take its case against Trujillo to the Organization of American States (OAS).

This development infuriated Trujillo, who ordered his foreign agents to plant a bomb inside Betancourt’s car. The assassination attempt, carried out on June 24, 1960, injured but did not kill the Venezuelan president.[citation needed] The firestorm caused from the incident inflamed world opinion against Trujillo. The members of the OAS, expressing this outrage, voted unanimously to sever diplomatic relations and to impose strong economic sanctions on the Dominican Republic.

Finally on the night of the May 30, 1961, Rafael Trujillo was shot to death on San Cristobal Avenue, Santo Domingo. He was the victim of an ambush plotted by a number of Dominicans. According to American reporter Bernard Diederich, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had supplied some of the guns used to kill the president.[54]

In a report to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, CIA officials described the agency as having “no active part” in the assassination and only a “faint connection” with the groups that planned the killing.,[55] but the internal CIA investigation, by its Inspector General, “disclosed quite extensive Agency involvement with the plotters.”[49]

[56]
Nicaragua[edit]

In 1984, a CIA manual for training the Nicaraguan Contras in psychological operations and unconventional warfare, entitled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War“, became public.[57] The manual recommended “selective use of violence for propagandistic efects” and to “neutralize” (i.e., kill) government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:
“ …demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the

killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts. ” The manual also recommended:

“ …selective use of armed force for PSYOP [psychological operations] effect…. Carefully selected, planned targets — judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. — may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area], but extensive precautions must insure that the people “concur” in such an act by thorough explanatory canvassing among the affected populace before and after conduct of the mission.[58] ”

The CIA claimed that the purpose of the manual was to “moderate” activities already being done by the Contras.[59]
References[edit]

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20.Jump up^ “US: Secret CIA Prisoners Still Missing;Washington Should Reveal Fate of People ‘Disappeared’ by US”, Human Rights Watch (Human Rights Watch), 2007-02-27
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25.^ Jump up to:a b c U.S. General Accounting Office, National Security and International Afairs Division (5 March 1992), Foreign Aid: Police Training and Assistance; report to Congressional requesters
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27.Jump up^ Langguth, A.J. (1978), Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America, Pantheon
28.^ Jump up to:a b Operations – Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Department of Justice, Special Inquiries
29.Jump up^ Kelly, Michael J., “11: Legitimacy and the Public Security Function”, in Robert B. Oakley, Michael J. Dziedzic, Eliot M. Goldberg, Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, National Defense University[dead link]
30.Jump up^ Madsen, Wayne (August 1999), “Mercenaries IN KOSOVO: The U.S. connection to the KLA includes related article comparing United States foreign policy in Central America and Kosovo”, Progressive
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35.Jump up^ U.S. General Accounting Office, National Security and International Afairs Division (5 March 1992), “Appendix I. Legislative Exemptions to the Prohibition on U.S. Assistance to Foreign Police”, Foreign Aid: Police Training and Assistance; report to Congressional requesters
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37.Jump up^ The International Security and Development Cooperation Act of 1981 (U.S. Congress): P.L. 97-113, sec. 721(d), 95 stat. 1519
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Update – June 26, 2007, 1 p.m. The full “family jewels” report,released today by the Central Intelligence Agency and detailing 25 years of Agency misdeeds, is now available on the Archive’s Web site. The 702-page collection was delivered by CIA officers to the Archive at approximately 11:30 this morning
— 15 years after the Archive filed a Freedom of Information request for the documents.

The report is available for download in its entirety and is also split into five smaller files for easier download.
ALL FILES NOW FULL TEXT SEARCHABLE!
CIA’s “Family Jewels” – full report (24 MB)
CIA’s “Family Jewels” Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Top Ten Most Interesting “Family Jewels”
Released by the CIA to the National Security Archive, June 26, 2007

1) Journalist surveillance – operation CELOTEX I-II (pp. 26-30)
2) Covert mail opening, codenamed SRPOINTER / HTLINGUAL at JFK airport (pp. 28, 644-45)
3) Watergate burglar and former CIA operative E. Howard Hunt requests a lock picker (p. 107)

4) CIA Science and Technology Directorate Chief Carl Duckett “thinks the Director would be ill-advised to say he is acquainted with this program” (Sidney Gottlieb’s drug experiments) (p. 213)

5) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) reflecting Agency employee resentment against participation (p. 326)

6) Plan to poison Congo leader Patrice Lumumba (p. 464)
7) Report of detention of Soviet defector Yuriy Nosenko (p. 522)
8) Document describing John Lennon funding anti-war activists (p. 552)
9) MHCHAOS documents (investigating foreign support for domestic U.S. dissent) (pp. 591-93)
10) CIA counter-intelligence official James J. Angleton and issue of training foreign police in bomb-making, sabotage, etc. (pp. 599-603)
Plus a bonus “Jewel”:
Warrantless wiretapping by CIA’s Division D (pp. 533-539)

Today’s release also includes a substantially-excised version of a memo first released 30 years ago in 1977 with fewer excisions (see comparison below).

1977 release
2007 release

Update – June 26, 2007, 11:00 a.m. The Central Intelligence Agency has promised to deliver the long-secret “family jewels” report to the Archive within the hour. The complete report, as released by CIA, will be posted here as soon as we can scan it.

In the meantime, the Archive has posted the original memorandum, signed by then-CIA director James R. Schlesinger, ordering the “family jewels” study and calling on CIA employees to report to him any activities “which might be construed to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency.”

Washington D.C., June 21, 2007 – The Central Intelligence Agency violated its charter for 25 years until revelations of illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation led to official investigations and reforms in the 1970s, according to declassified documents posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden announced today that the Agency is declassifying the full 693-page file amassed on CIA’s illegal activities by order of then-CIA director James Schlesinger in 1973–the so-called “family jewels.” Only a few dozen heavily-censored pages of this file have previously been declassified, although multiple Freedom of Information Act requests have been filed over the years for the documents. Gen. Hayden called the file “a glimpse of a very different time and a very different Agency.” The papers are scheduled for public release on Monday, June 25.

“This is the first voluntary CIA declassification of controversial material since George Tenet in 1998 reneged on the 1990s promises of greater openness at the Agency,” commented Thomas Blanton, the Archive’s director.

Hayden also announced the declassification of some 11,000 pages of the so-called CAESAR, POLO and ESAU papers–hard-target analyses of Soviet and Chinese leadership internal politics and Sino-Soviet relations from 1953-1973, a collection of intelligence on Warsaw Pact military programs, and hundreds of pages on the A-12 spy plane.
The National Security Archive separately obtained (and posted today) a six-page summary of the illegal CIA activities, prepared by Justice Department lawyers after a CIA briefing in December 1974, and the memorandum of conversation when the CIA first briefed President Gerald Ford on the scandal on January 3, 1975.

Then-CIA director Schlesinger commissioned the “family jewels” compilation with a May 9, 1973 directive after finding out that Watergate burglars E. Howard Hunt and James McCord (both veteran CIA officers) had cooperation from the Agency as they carried out “dirty tricks” for President Nixon. The Schlesinger directive, drafted by deputy director for operations William Colby, commanded senior CIA officials to report immediately on any current or past Agency matters that might fall outside CIA authority. By the end of May, Colby had been named to succeed Schlesinger as DCI, and his loose-leaf notebook of memos totaled 693 pages [see John Prados, Lost Crusader: The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 259-260.]

Seymour Hersh broke the story of CIA’s illegal domestic operations with a front page story in the New York Times on December 22, 1974 (“Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years”), writing that “a check of the CIA’s domestic files ordered last year… produced evidence of dozens of other illegal activities… beginning in the nineteen fifties, including break-ins, wiretapping, and the surreptitious inspection of mail.”

On December 31, 1974, CIA director Colby and the CIA general counsel John Warner met with the deputy attorney general, Laurence Silberman, and his associate, James Wilderotter, to brief Justice “in connection with the recent New York Times articles” on CIA matters that “presented legal questions.” Colby’s list included 18 specifics:

1. Confinement of a Russian defector that “might be regarded as a violation of the kidnapping laws.”
2. Wiretapping of two syndicated columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott.
3. Physical surveillance of muckraker Jack Anderson and his associates, including current Fox News anchor Brit Hume.
4. Physical surveillance of then Washington Post reporter Michael Getler.
5. Break-in at the home of a former CIA employee.
6. Break-in at the office of a former defector.
7. Warrantless entry into the apartment of a former CIA employee.
8. Mail opening from 1953 to 1973 of letters to and from the Soviet Union.
9. Mail opening from 1969 to 1972 of letters to and from China.
10. Behavior modification experiments on “unwitting” U.S. citizens.
11. Assassination plots against Castro, Lumumba, and Trujillo (on the latter, “no active part” but a “faint connection” to the killers).
12. Surveillance of dissident groups between 1967 and 1971.
13. Surveillance of a particular Latin American female and U.S. citizens in Detroit.
14. Surveillance of a CIA critic and former officer, Victor Marchetti.
15. Amassing of files on 9,900-plus Americans related to the antiwar movement.
16. Polygraph experiments with the San Mateo, California, sheriff.
17. Fake CIA identification documents that might violate state laws.
18. Testing of electronic equipment on US telephone circuits.

Read the Documents
Note: The following documents are in PDF format.
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Document 1 : Summary of the Family Jewels
Memorandum for the File, “CIA Matters,” by James A. Wilderotter, Associate Deputy Attorney General, 3 January 1975

Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

On New Years’ eve, 1974, DCI Colby met with Justice Department officials, including Deputy Attorney General Laurence H. Silberman, to give them a full briefing of the “skeletons.”

Document 2: Colby Briefs President Ford on the Family Jewels Memorandum of Conversation, 3 January 1975
Source: Gerald R. Ford President Library

Ten days after the appearance of Hersh’s New York Times story, DCI William Colby tells President Ford how his predecessor James Schlesinger (then serving as Secretary of Defense) ordered CIA staffers to compile the “skeletons” in the Agency’s closet, such as surveillance of student radicals, illegal wiretaps, assassination plots, and the three year confinement of a Soviet defector, Yuri Nosenko.

Document 3: Kissinger’s Reaction
Memorandum of Conversation between President Ford and Secretary of State/National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, 4 January 1975
Source: Gerald R. Ford President Library

An apoplectic Kissinger argues that the unspilling of CIA secrets is “worse than the days of McCarthyism” when the Wisconsin Senator went after the State Department. Kissinger had met with former DCI Richard Helms who told him that “these stories are just the tip of the iceberg,” citing as one example Robert F. Kennedy’s role in assassination planning. Ford wondered whether to fire Colby, but Kissinger advised him to wait until after the investigations were complete when he could “put in someone of towering integrity.” The “Blue Ribbon” announcement refers to the creation of a commission chaired by then-vice president Nelson A. Rockefeller.

Document 4 : Investigations Continue
Memorandum of Conversation between Kissinger, Schlesinger, Colby et al., “Investigations of Allegations of CIA Domestic Activities,” 20 February 1975

Source: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library

Cabinet and sub-cabinet level officials led by Kissinger discuss ways and means to protect information sought by ongoing Senate (Church Committee) and House (Pike Committee) investigations of intelligence community abuses during the first decades of the Cold War. Worried about the foreign governments that have cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies, Kissinger wants to “demonstrate to foreign countries that we aren’t too dangerous to cooperate with because of leaks.”

5) “Tests” that destroyed people’s lives, including the “Unabomber”

Unethical human experimentation in the United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about U.S. medical experiments that are alleged to be unethical, non-consensual, or illegal. For the consensual, ethical, and legal use of human beings in medical research, see Human subject research.

Particularly in the 20th century, there have been numerous experiments performed on human test subjects in the United States that have been considered unethical, and were often performed illegally, without the knowledge, consent, or informed consent of the test subjects. Such experiments have also been found to have taken place among European nations.

The experiments include: the deliberate infection of people with deadly or debilitating diseases, exposure of people to biological and chemical weapons, human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation
and torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children,[1] the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of “medical treatment”. In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities or prisoners.

Funding for many of the experiments was provided by United States government, especially the United States military, Central Intelligence Agency, or private corporations involved with military activities. The human research programs were usually highly secretive, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.

The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant, and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975 and the 1994Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.

Contents [hide]
• 1 Surgical experiments

• 2 Pathogens, disease, and biological warfare agents
• 3 Human radiation experiments
• 3.1 Radioactive iodine experiments
• 3.2 Uranium experiments
• 3.3 Plutonium experiments
• 3.4 Experiments involving other radioactive materials
• 3.5 Fallout research
• 3.6 Irradiation experiments
• 4 Chemical experiments
• 5 Psychological and torture experiments
• 5.1 U.S. government research
• 5.2 Academic research
• 6 Pharmacological research
• 7 Other experiments
• 8 Legal, academic and professional policy

• 9 See also
• 10 References
• 10.1 Notes
• 10.2 Bibliography
• 11 Further resources
• 11.1 General
• 11.2 Biological warfare and disease/pathogen experiments
• 11.3 Human radiation experiments
• 11.3.1 Books
• 11.3.2 Government documents
• 11.3.3 Journals
• 11.4 Psychological/torture/interrogation experiments
• 11.5 Video

Surgical experiments[edit]
Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as “the father of gynecology“, performed surgical experiments on enslaved African women, without anaesthesia. The women—one of whom was operated on 30 times— regularly died from infections resulting from the experiments.[2] In order to test one of his theories about the causes of trismus in infants, Sims performed experiments where he used a shoemaker’s awl to move around the skull bones of the babies of enslaved women.[3][4]

In 1874, Mary Raferty, an Irish servant woman, came to Dr. Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati for treatment of her cancer. Seeing a research opportunity, he cut open her head, and inserted needle electrodes into her exposed brain matter.[5] He described the experiment as follows:

When the needle entered the brain substance, she complained of acute pain in the neck. In order to develop more decided reactions, the strength of the current was increased … her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the left hand was extended as if in the act of taking hold of some object in front of her; the arm presently was agitated with clonic spasm; her eyes became fixed, with pupils widely dilated; lips were blue, and she frothed at the mouth; her breathing became stertorous; she lost consciousness and was violently convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes, and was succeeded by a coma. She returned to consciousness in twenty minutes from the beginning of the attack, and complained of some weakness and vertigo.

—Dr. Bartholow’s research report[5]

In 1896, Dr. Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children, without the knowledge or consent of their parents, at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be harmful.[6]

From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners at San Quentin. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take the testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams,goats, and boars into living prisoners. Stanley also performed various eugenics experiments, and forced sterilizations on San Quentin prisoners. [7] Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the “unfit” from reproducing.[7][8]

Pathogens, disease, and biological warfare agents[edit]
A subject of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment has his blood drawn, c. 1953

In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a California physician working at a hospital for lepers injected six girls under the age of 12 with syphilis.[6] In 1895,New York City pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two “idiots” (mentally disabled boys)—one four-year-old and one sixteen-year old—with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found more than 40 reports of experimental infections with gonorrheal culture, including some where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.[6][9][10]

U.S Army doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result.[11][12] In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera, which had somehow become contaminated with plague. He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.[12][13]

In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at the St. Vincent’s House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent blindness in some of the children and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the others. In the study they refer to the children as “material used”.[14]

In 1909, F. C. Knowles released a study describing how he had deliberately infected two children in an orphanage with Molluscum contagiosum after an outbreak in the orphanage, in order to study the disease.[6]

In 1911, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research injected 146 hospital patients (some of whom were children) with syphilis. He was later sued by the parents of some of the child subjects, who allegedly contracted syphilis as a result of his experiments.[15]

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment[16] was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. In the experiment, 400 impoverished black males who had syphilis were ofered “treatment” by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis and did not give them treatment for the disease, but rather just studied them to chart the progress of the disease. By 1947, penicillin became available as treatment, but those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their true condition, so that they could observe the efects of syphilis on the human body. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. 28 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. The study was not shut down until 1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing the researchers to stop in the face of a public outcry.[17]

In 1941, at the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with theinfluenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages. [18] Francis Payton Rous, based at the Rockefeller Institute and editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments:

“It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper… elsewhere than in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The Journal is under constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists who would not hesitate to play up the fact that you used for your tests human beings of a state institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes without saying.”[19]

Rous closely monitored the articles he published since the 1930s, when revival of the anti-vivisectionist movement raised pressure against certain human experimentation.[20]

In 1941 Dr. William C. Black inoculated with herpes a twelve-month-old baby “ofered as a volunteer”. He submitted his research to The Journal of Experimental Medicine and it was rejected on ethical grounds. The editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, Francis Payton Rous, called the experiment “an abuse of power, an infringement of the rights of an individual, and not excusable because the illness which followed had implications for science.”[21][22][23] The study was later published in the Journal of Pediatrics.[24]

The Stateville Penitentiary was the site of a controlled study of the efects of malaria on the prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois beginning in the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department. At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the precedent of the malaria experiments as part of their defense.[25][26] The study continued at Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years. In related studies from 1944 to 1946, Dr. Alf Alving, a professor at the University of ChicagoMedical School, purposely infected psychiatric patients at the Illinois State Hospital with malaria, so that he could test experimental treatments on them.[27]
In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, in order to test the efectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs. They later tried infecting people with “direct inoculations made from syphilis bacteria poured into the men’s penises and on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few cases through spinal punctures”. Approximately 700 people were infected as part of the study
(including orphan children). The study was sponsored by the Public Health Service, the National Institutes of Health and the Pan American Health Sanitary Bureau (now the World Health Organization‘s Pan American Health Organization) and the Guatemalan government. The team was led by John Charles Cutler, who later participated in the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. Cutler chose to do the study in Guatemala because he would not have been permitted to do it in the United States. In 2010 when the research was revealed, the US officially apologized to Guatemala for the studies.[28][29][30][31]

In 1950, in order to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the U.S. Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens – considered harmless at this time – over the city of San Francisco. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died as a result.[32][33][34][35][36][37] The family of the man who died sued the government for gross negligence, but a federal judge ruled in favor of the government in 1981.[38] Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969.[39]

Also in 1950, Dr. Joseph Stokes of the University of Pennsylvania deliberately infected 200 female prisoners with viral hepatitis.[40]

From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, for research whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine.[41] From 1963 to 1966, Saul Krugman of New York University promised the parents of mentally disabled children that their children would be enrolled into Willowbrook in exchange for signing a consent form for procedures that he claimed were “vaccinations.” In reality, the procedures involved deliberately infecting children withviral hepatitis by feeding them an extract made from the feces of patients infected with the disease.[42][43]

In 1952, Chester M. Southam, a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher, injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison. Also at Sloan-Kettering, 300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause cancer.[44]

In 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare experiment where they released whooping cough bacteria from boats outside of Tampa Bay, Florida, causing a whooping cough epidemic in the city, and killing at least 12 people.[45] [46][47]

In 1956 and 1957, several U.S. Army biological warfare experiments were conducted on the cities of Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. In the experiments, Army bio-warfare researchers released millions of
infected mosquitoes on the two towns, in order to see if the insects could potentially spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Hundreds of residents contracted a wide array of illnesses, including fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. Army researchers pretended to be public health workers, so that they could photograph and perform medical tests on the victims. Several people died as a result of the experiments.[11][48]

In 1962, 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York were injected with live cancer cells by Chester M. Southam, who in 1952 had done the same to prisoners at the Ohio State Prison, in order to “discover the secret of how healthy bodies fight the invasion of malignant cells”. The administration of the hospital attempted to cover the study up, but the New York medical licensing board ultimately placed Southam on probation for one year. Two years later, the American Cancer Society elected him as their Vice President.[49]

From 1963 to 1969 as part of Project Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD), the U.S. Army performed tests which involved spraying several U.S. ships with various biological and chemical warfare agents, while thousands of U.S. military personnel were aboard the ships. The personnel were not notified of the tests, and were not given any protective clothing. Chemicals tested on the U.S. military personnel included the nerve gases VX and Sarin, toxic chemicals such as zinc cadmium sulfide and sulfur dioxide, and a variety of biological agents.[50]

In 1966, the U.S. Army released the harmless Bacillus globigii into the tunnels of the New York City Subway system, as part of a field study called A Study of the Vulnerability of Subway Passengers in New York City to Covert Attack with Biological Agents.[45][51][52][53][54] The Chicago subway system was also subject to a similar experiment by the Army.[45]

Human radiation experiments[ edit]
Researchers in the United States have performed thousands of human radiation experiments to determine the efects of atomic radiation and radioactive contamination on the human body, generally on people who were poor, sick, or powerless.[55] Most of these tests were performed, funded, or supervised by the United States military, Atomic Energy Commission, or various other US federal government agencies.

The experiments included a wide array of studies, involving things like feeding radioactive food to mentally disabled children or conscientious objectors, inserting radium rods into the noses of schoolchildren, deliberately releasing radioactive chemicals over U.S. and Canadian cities, measuring the health efects of radioactive fallout from nuclear bomb tests, injecting pregnant women and babies with radioactive chemicals, and irradiating the testicles of prison inmates, amongst other things.

Much information about these programs was classified and kept secret. In 1986 the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce released a report entitled American Nuclear Guinea Pigs : Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens.[56] In the 1990s Eileen Welsome‘s reports on radiation testing for The Albuquerque Tribune prompted the creation of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments by executive order of president Bill Clinton, to monitor government tests. It published results in 1995. Welsome later wrote a book called The Plutonium Files.

Radioactive iodine experiments[ edit]
In a 1949 operation called the “Green Run,” the AEC released iodine-131 and xenon-133 to the atmosphere near the Hanford site in Washington, which contaminated a 500,000-acre (2,000 km2) area containing three small towns.[57]

In 1953, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) ran several studies at the University of Iowa on the health efects of radioactive iodine in newborns and pregnant women. In one study, researchers gave pregnant women from 100 to 200 microcuries (3.7 to 7.4 MBq) of iodine-131, in order to study the women’s aborted embryos in an attempt to discover at what stage, and to what extent, radioactive iodine crosses the placental barrier. In another study, they gave 25 newborn babies (who were under 36 hours old and weighed from 5.5 to 8.5 pounds (2.5 to 3.9 kg)) iodine-131, either by oral administration or through an injection, so that they could measure the amount of iodine in their thyroid glands, as iodine would go to that gland.[58]

In another AEC study, researchers at the University of Nebraska College of Medicine fed iodine-131 to 28 healthy infants through a gastric tube to test the concentration of iodine in the infants’ thyroid glands.[58]

In 1953, the AEC sponsored a study to discover if radioactive iodine afected premature babies diferently from full-term babies. In the experiment, researchers from Harper Hospital inDetroit orally administered iodine-131 to 65 premature and full-term infants who weighed from 2.1 to 5.5 pounds (0.95 to 2.49 kg).[58]

From 1955 to 1960, Sonoma State Hospital in northern California served as a permanent drop-of location for mentally handicapped children diagnosed with cerebral palsy or lesser disorders. The children subsequently underwent painful experimentation without adult consent. Many were given irradiated milk, some spinal taps “for which they received no direct benefit.” Reporters of 60 Minuteslearned that in these five years, the brain of every cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied without parental consent. According to the CBS story, over 1,400 patients died at the clinic.[59]

In an experiment in the 1960s, over 100 Alaskan citizens were continually exposed to radioactive iodine.[60]

In 1962, the Hanford site again released I-131, stationing test subjects along its path to record its efect on them. The AEC also recruited Hanford volunteers to ingest milk contaminated with I-131 during this time.[58]

Uranium experiments[edit]

Between 1946 and 1947, researchers at the University of
Rochester injected uranium-234 and uranium-23 5 in dosages ranging from 6.4 to
70.7 micrograms per kilogram of body
weight into six people to study how much uranium their kidneys could tolerate before becoming damaged.[62]

“ It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such work should
be classified`secret’.”

April 17, 1947 Atomic Energy Commission memo from Colonel O.G. Haywood, Jr. to Dr. Fidler at the Oak Ridge Laboratory in Tennessee[61]

Between 1953 and 1957, at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr. William Sweet injected eleven terminally ill, comatose and semi-comatose patients with uranium in an experiment to determine, among other things, its viability as a chemotherapy treatment againstbrain tumors, which all but one of the patients had (one being a mis-diagnosis). Dr. Sweet, who died in 2001, maintained that consent had been obtained from the patients and next of kin.[63][64]

Plutonium experiments[ edit]
From April 10, 1945 to July 18, 1947, eighteen people were injected with plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project.[65] Doses administered ranged from 95 to 5,900 nanocuries.[65]

Albert Stevens , a man misdiagnosed with stomach cancer, received “treatment” for his “cancer” at the U.C. San Francisco Medical Center in 1945. Dr. Joseph Gilbert Hamilton, a Manhattan Project doctor in charge of the human experiments in California[66] had Stevens injected with Pu-238 and Pu-239 without informed consent. Stevens never had cancer; a surgery to remove cancerous cells was highly successful in removing the benign tumor, and he lived for another 20 years with the injected plutonium.[67] Since Stevens received the highly radioactive Pu-238, his accumulated dose over his remaining life was higher than anyone has ever received: 64 Sv (6400 rem). Neither Albert Stevens nor any of his relatives were told that he never had cancer; they were led to believe that the experimental “treatment” has worked. His cremated remains were surreptitiously acquired by Argonne National Laboratory Center for Human Radiobiology in 1975 without the consent of surviving relatives. Some of the ashes were transferred to the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository at Washington State University,[67] which keeps the remains of people who died having radioisotopes in their body.

Three patients at Billings Hospital at the University of Chicago were injected with plutonium.[68] In 1946, six employees of a Chicago metallurgical lab were given water that was contaminated withplutonium-239, so that researchers could study how plutonium is absorbed into the digestive tract.[62]

An eighteen-year-old woman at an upstate New York hospital, expecting to be treated for a pituitary gland disorder, was injected with plutonium.[69]

Experiments involving other radioactive materials[ edit] Immediately after World War II, researchers at Vanderbilt University gave 829 pregnant mothers in Tennessee what they were told were “vitamin drinks” that would improve the health of their babies. The mixtures contained radioactive iron and the researchers were determining how fast the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. At least three children are known to have died from the experiments, from cancers and leukemia.[70][71] Four of the women’s babies died from cancers as a result of the experiments, and the women experienced rashes, bruises, anemia, hair/tooth loss, and cancer.[55]

From 1946 to 1953, at the Walter E. Fernald State School in Massachusetts, in an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the Quaker Oats corporation, 73 mentally disabled children were fed oatmeal containing radioactive calcium and other radioisotopes, in order to track “how nutrients were digested”. The children were not told that they were being fed radioactive chemicals; they were told by hospital staf and researchers that they were joining a “science club”.[70][72][73][74]

The University of California Hospital in San Francisco exposed 29 patients, some with rheumatoid arthritis, to total body irradiation (100-300 rad dose) to obtain data for the military.[75]

In the 1950s, researchers at the Medical College of Virginia performed experiments on severe burn victims, most of them poor and black, without their knowledge or consent, with funding from the Army and in collaboration with the AEC. In the experiments, the subjects were exposed to additional burning, experimental antibiotic treatment, and injections of radioactive isotopes. The amount of radioactivephosphorus-32 injected into some of the patients, 500 microcuries (19 MBq), was 50 times the “acceptable” dose for
a healthy individual; for people with severe burns, this likely led to significantly increased death rates.[76][77]

Between 1948 and 1954, funded by the federal government, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Hospital inserted radium rods into the noses of 582 Baltimore, Maryland schoolchildren as an alternative toadenoidectomy.[78][79][80] Similar experiments were performed on over 7,000 U.S. Army and Navy personnel during World War II.[78] Nasal radium irradiation became a standard medical treatment and was used in over two and a half million Americans.[78]

In 1951 at Johns Hopkins, Henrietta Lacks had been treated with a radium rod in her cervix, and 2 radium plaques placed on her skin, for a cervical tumor.[81]

In another study at the Walter E. Fernald State School, in 1956, researchers gave mentally disabled children radioactive calcium orally and intravenously. They also injected radioactive chemicals into malnourished babies and then pushed needles through their skulls, into their brains, through their necks, and into their spines to collect cerebrospinal fluid for analysis.[74][82]

In 1961 and 1962, ten Utah State Prison inmates had blood samples taken which were mixed with radioactive chemicals and reinjected back into their bodies.[83]

The Atomic Energy Commission funded the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to administer radium-224 and thorium-234 to 20 people between 1961 and 1965. Many were chosen from the Age Center of New England and had volunteered for “research projects on aging”. Doses were 0.2–2.4 microcuries (7.4–88.8 kBq) for radium and 1.2–120 microcuries (44–4,440 kBq) for thorium. [56]

In a 1967 study that was published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, pregnant women were injected with radioactive cortisol to see if it would cross the placental barrier and afect the fetuses.[84]

Fallout research[edit]
Cover of the final report of Project 4.1, which examined the efects of radioactive fallout on the natives of the Marshall Islands

In 1957, atmospheric nuclear explosions in Nevada, which were part of Operation Plumbbob were later determined to have released enough radiation to have caused from 11,000 to 212,000 excess cases of thyroid cancer among U.S. citizens who were exposed to fallout from the explosions, leading to between 1,100 and 21,000 deaths.[85]

Early in the Cold War, in studies known as Project GABRIEL and Project SUNSHINE, researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia tried to determine how much nuclear fallout would be required to make the Earth uninhabitable.[86][87] They realized that atmospheric nuclear testing had provided them an opportunity to investigate this. Such tests had
dispersed radioactive contaminationworldwide, and examination of human bodies could reveal how readily it was taken up and hence how much damage it caused. Of particular interest was strontium-90 in the bones. Infants were the primary focus, as they would have had a full opportunity to absorb the new contaminants. [88] [89] As a result of this conclusion, researchers began a program to collect human bodies and bones from all over the world, with a particular focus on infants. The bones were cremated and the ashes analyzed for radioisotopes. This project was kept secret primarily because it would be a public relations disaster; as a result parents and family were not told what was being done with the body parts of their relatives.[90]

Irradiation experiments[ edit]
Between 1960 and 1971, the Department of Defense funded
non-consensual whole body radiation experiments on poor, black cancer patients, who were not told what was being done to them. Patients were told that they were receiving a “treatment” that might cure their cancer, but the Pentagon was trying to determine the efects of high levels of radiation on the human body. One of the doctors involved in the experiments, Robert Stone, was worried aboutlitigation by the patients. He referred to them only by their initials on the medical reports. He did this so that, in his words, “there will be no means by which the patients can ever connect themselves up with the report”, in order to prevent “either adverse publicity or litigation”.[91]

From 1960 to 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, funded by the Defense Atomic Support Agency, performed whole body radiation experiments on more than 90 poor, black, terminally ill cancer patients with inoperable tumors at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center. He forged consent forms, and did not inform the patients of the risks of irradiation. The patients were given 100 or more rads (1 Gy) of whole-body radiation, which in many caused intense pain and vomiting. Critics have questioned the medical rationale for this study, and contend that the main purpose of the research was to study the acute efects of radiation exposure. [92][93]

From 1963 to 1973, a leading endocrinologist, Dr. Carl Heller, irradiated the testicles of Oregon and Washington prisoners. In return for their participation, he gave them $5 a month, and $100 when they had to receive a vasectomy upon conclusion of the trial. The surgeon who sterilized the men said that it was necessary to “keep from contaminating the general population with radiation-inducedmutants“. Dr. Joseph Hamilton, one of the researchers who had worked with Heller on the experiments, said that the experiments “had a little of theBuchenwald touch”.[94]

In 1963, University of Washington researchers irradiated the testes of 232 prisoners to determine the efects of radiation on testicular function. When these inmates later left prison and had children, at least four of them had ofspring born with birth defects. The exact number is unknown because researchers never followed up on the status of the subjects.[95]

Chemical experiments[ edit]
From 1942 to 1944, the U.S. Chemical Warfare Service conducted experiments which exposed thousands of U.S. military personnel to mustard gas, in order to test the efectiveness of gas masks and protective clothing.[96][97][98][99]

From 1950 through 1953, the U.S. Army sprayed[ citation needed] chemicals over six cities in the United States and Canada, in order to test dispersal patterns of chemical weapons. Army records stated that the chemicals which were sprayed on the city of Winnipeg, Canada, included zinc cadmium sulfide, which was not thought to be harmful.[100] A 1997 study by the US National Research Council found that it was sprayed at levels so low as not be harmful; it said that people were normally exposed to higher levels in urban environments.

To test whether or not sulfuric acid, which is used in making molasses, was harmful as a food additive, the Louisiana State Board of Health commissioned a study to feed “Negro prisoners” nothing but molasses for five weeks. One report stated that prisoners didn’t “object to submitting themselves to the test, because it would not do any good if they did”.[13]

A 1953 article in the medical/scientific journal Clinical Science[101] described a medical experiment in which researchers intentionally blistered the skin on the abdomens of 41 children, who ranged in age from 8 to 14, using cantharide. The study was performed to determine how severely the substance injures/irritates the skin of children. After the studies, the children’s blistered skin was removed with scissors and swabbed with peroxide.[84]

Chloracne resulting from exposure todioxins, such as those that Albert Kligman injected into prisoners at the Holmesburg Prison

From approximately 1951 to 1974, the Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania was the site of extensive dermatological research operations, using prisoners as subjects. Led by Dr. Albert M. Kligman of theUniversity of Pennsylvania, the studies were performed on behalf of Dow Chemical Company, the U.S. Army, and Johnson & Johnson.[102][103][104] In one of the studies, for which Dow Chemical paid Kligman $10,000, Kligman injected dioxin — a highly
toxic, carcinogenic compound found in Agent Orange, which Dow was manufacturing for use in Vietnam at the time — into 70 prisoners (most of them black). The prisoners developed severe lesions which went untreated for seven months.[11] Dow Chemical wanted to study the health efects of dioxin and other herbicides, and how they afect human skin, because workers at their chemical plants were developing chloracne. In the study, Kligman applied roughly the same amount of dioxin as that to which Dow employees were being exposed. In 1980 and 1981, some of the people who were used in this study sued Professor Kligman for a variety of health problems, including lupus and psychological damage.[105]

Kligman later continued his dioxin studies, increasing the dosage of dioxin he applied to the skin of 10 prisoners to 7,500 micrograms of dioxin, which is 468 times the dosage that the Dow Chemical official Gerald K. Rowe had authorized him to administer. As a result, the prisoners developed
inflammatory pustules and papules.[105]

The Holmesburg program paid hundreds of inmates a nominal stipend to test a wide range of cosmetic products and chemical compounds, whose health efects were unknown at the time.[106][107] Upon his arrival at Holmesberg, Kligman is claimed to have said, “All I saw before me were acres of skin … It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time”.[108] A 1964 issue of Medical Newsreported that 9 out of 10 prisoners at Holmesburg Prison were medical test subjects.[109]

In 1967, the U.S. Army paid Kligman to apply skin-blistering chemicals to the faces and backs of inmates at Holmesburg to, in Kligman’s words, “learn how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process.”[105]

Psychological and torture experiments[ edit]
U.S. government research[edit]
The United States government funded and performed numerous psychological experiments, especially during the Cold War era. Many of these experiments were performed to help develop more efectivetorture and interrogation techniques for the U.S. military and intelligence agencies, and to develop techniques for Americans to resist torture at the hands of enemy nations and organizations.

In studies running from 1947 to 1953, which were known as Project Chatter, the U.S. Navy began identifying and testing truth serums, which they hoped could be used during interrogations of Soviet spies. Some of the chemicals tested on human subjects included mescaline and the anticholinergic drug scopolamine. [110]

Shortly thereafter, in 1950, the CIA initiated Project Bluebird, later renamed Project Artichoke, whose stated purpose was to develop “the means to control individuals through special interrogation techniques”, “way[s] to prevent the extraction of information from CIA agents”, and “ofensive uses of unconventional techniques, such as hypnosis and drugs”.[110][111][112] The purpose of the project was outlined in a memo dated January 1952 that stated, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preservation?” The project studied the use of hypnosis,
forced morphine addiction and subsequent forcedwithdrawal, and the use of other chemicals, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in subjects.[113][114][115][116][117]In order to “perfect techniques for the abstraction of information from individuals, whether willing or not”, Project Bluebird researchers experimented with a wide variety of psychoactive substances, including LSD, heroin,marijuana, cocaine, PCP, mescaline, and ether. [118] Project Bluebird researchers dosed over 7,000 U.S. military personnel with LSD, without their knowledge or consent, at theEdgewood
Arsenal in Maryland. Years after these experiments, more than 1,000 of these soldiers sufered from several psychiatric illnesses,
including depression and epilepsy. Many of them tried to commit suicide.[119]

In 1952, professional tennis player Harold Blauer died when injected by Dr. James Cattell with a fatal dose of a mescaline derivative at the New York State Psychiatric Institute ofColumbia University. The United States Department of Defense, which sponsored the injection, worked in collusion with the Department of Justice and the New York State Attorney General to conceal evidence of its involvement for 23 years. Cattell claimed that he did not know what the army had given him to inject into Blauer, saying: “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what we were giving him.”[120][121]

On November 19, 1953 Dr. Frank Olson was without his knowledge or consent given an LSD dosage before his death 9 days later. For 22 years this was covered up until the Project MKUltrarevelations.

In 1953, the CIA placed several of its interrogation and mind-control programs under the direction of a single program, known by the code name MKULTRA, after CIA director Allen Dulles complained about not having enough “human guinea pigs to try these extraordinary techniques”.[122] The MKULTRA project was under the direct command of Dr. Sidney Gottliebof the Technical Services Division. [122] The project received over $25 million, and involved hundreds of experiments on human subjects at eighty diferent institutions.

In a memo describing the purpose of one MKULTRA program subprogram, Richard Helms said:

We intend to investigate the development of a chemical material which causes a reversible, nontoxic aberrant mental state, the specific nature of which can be reasonably well predicted for each individual. This material could potentially aid in discrediting individuals, eliciting information, and implanting suggestions and other forms of mental control.

—Richard Helms, internal CIA memo[123]

In 1954, the CIA’s Project QKHILLTOP was created to study
Chinese brainwashing techniques, and to develop efective methods of interrogation. Most of the early studies are believed to have been performed by the Cornell University Medical School’s human ecology study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold Wolf.[110][124][125] Wolf requested that the CIA provide him any information they could find regarding “threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing’, ‘black psychiatry’, and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents”. According to Wolf, the research team would then:

…assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of ofensive/defensive intelligence use … Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental efect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood … Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.

—Dr. Harold Wolf, Cornell University Medical School[125]

Another of the MKULTRA subprojects, Operation Midnight Climax, consisted of a web of CIA-run safehouses in San Francisco, Marin, and New York which were established in order to study the efects of LSD on unconsenting individuals. Prostitutes on the CIA payroll were instructed to lure clients back to the safehouses, where they were surreptitiously plied with a wide range of substances, including LSD, and monitored behind one-way glass. Several significant operational techniques were developed in this theater, including extensive research into sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the possible use of mind-altering drugs in field operations.[126]

“… it was fun, fun, fun. Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and bidding of the All-highest?”

George Hunter White, who oversaw drug experiments for the CIA as part of Operation Midnight Climax[126]

In 1957, with funding from a CIA front organization, Dr. Ewan Cameron of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, Canada began MKULTRA Subproject 68.[127] His experiments were designed to first “depattern” individuals, erasing their minds and memories—reducing them to the mental level of an infant—and then to “rebuild” their personality in a manner of his choosing.[128] To achieve this, Cameron placed patients under his “care” into drug-induced comas for up to 88 days, and applied numerous high voltage electric shocks to them over the course of weeks or months, often administering up to 360 shocks per person. He would then perform what he called “psychic driving” experiments on the subjects, where he would repetitively play recorded statements, such as “You are a good wife and mother and people enjoy your company”, through speakers he had implanted into blacked-out football helmets that he bound to the heads of the test subjects (for sensory deprivation purposes). The patients could do nothing but listen to these messages, played for 16–20 hours a day, for weeks at a time. In one case, Cameron forced a person to listen to a message non-stop for 101 days.[128] Using CIA funding, Cameron converted the horse stables behind Allen Memorial into an elaborate isolation and sensory deprivation chamber which he kept patients locked in for weeks at a time.[128]Cameron also induced insulin comas in his subjects by giving them large injections of insulin, twice a day, for up to two months at a time.[110] Several of the children who Cameron experimented on were sexually abused, in at least one case by several men. One of the children was filmed numerous times performing sexual acts with high-ranking federal government officials, in a scheme set up by Cameron and other MKULTRA researchers, to blackmail the officials to ensure further funding for the experiments.[129]

The CIA leadership had serious concerns about these activities, as evidenced in a
1957 Inspector General Report, which stated:

Precautions must be taken not only to protect operations from exposure to enemy

“The frequent screams of the patients that echoed through the hospital did not deter Cameron or most of his associates in their attempts to depattern their subjects completely.”

John D. Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, Chapter 8[130]

forces but also to conceal these activities from the American public in general. The knowledge that the agency is engaging in unethical and illicit activities would have serious repercussions in political and diplomatic circles …

—1957 CIA Inspector General Report[131]

In 1957, Dr. Robert Heath of Tulane University performed experiments on schizophrenic patients, which were funded by the U.S. Army. In the studies, he dosed them with high levels of LSD, and then implanted “deep electrodes” in their brains to take EEG readings.[132][133]
MKULTRA activities continued until 1973 when CIA director Richard Helms, fearing that they would be exposed to the public, ordered the project terminated, and all of the files destroyed.[122] But, a clerical error had sent many of the documents to the wrong office, so when CIA workers were destroying the files, some of them remained. They were later released under a Freedom of Information Actrequest by investigative journalist John Marks. Many people in the American public were outraged when they learned of the experiments, and several congressional investigations took place, including the Church Committee and the Rockefeller Commission.

On April 26, 1976, the Church Committee of the United States Senate issued a report, Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operation with Respect to Intelligence Activities,[134]In Book I, Chapter XVII, p. 389, this report states:

LSD was one the materials tested in the MKULTRA program. The final phase of LSD testing involved surreptitious administration to unwitting non-volunteer subjects in normal life settings by undercover officers of the Bureau of Narcotics acting for the CIA.

A special procedure, designated MKDELTA, was established to govern the use of MKULTRA materials abroad. Such materials were used on a number of occasions. Because MKULTRA records were destroyed, it is impossible to reconstruct the operational use of MKULTRA materials by the CIA overseas; it has been determined that the use of these materials abroad began in 1953, and possibly as early as 1950.[113][135][136][137][138]

Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.[113] [135][136][137][138]

In 1963, CIA had synthesized many of the findings from its psychological research into what became known as the KUBARK Counterintelligence
Interrogation handbook,[139] which cited the MKULTRA studies and other secret research programs as the scientific basis for their interrogation methods. [128] Cameron regularly traveled around the U.S. teaching military personnel about his techniques (hooding of prisoners for sensory deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, etc.), and how they could be used in interrogations. Latin American paramilitary groups working for the CIA and U.S. military received training in these psychological techniques at places such as the School of the Americas. In the 21st century, many of the torture techniques developed in the MKULTRA studies and other programs are being used at U.S. military and CIA prisons such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.[128][140] In the aftermath of the Congressional hearings, major news media mainly focused on sensationalistic stories related to LSD, “mind-control”, and “brainwashing”, and rarely used the word “torture”. This suggested that CIA researchers were, as one author put it “a bunch of bumbling sci-fi bufoons”, rather than a rational group of men who had run torture laboratories and medical experiments in major U.S. universities; they had arranged for torture, rape and psychological abuse of adults and young children, driving many of them permanently insane.[128]

From 1964 to 1968, the U.S. Army paid $386,486 to professors Albert Kligman and Herbert W. Copelan to perform experiments with mind-altering drugs on 320 inmates of Holmesburg Prison. The goal of the study was to determine the minimum efective dose of each drug needed to disable 50 percent of any given population. Kligman and Copelan initially claimed that they were unaware of any long-term health efects the drugs could have on prisoners; however, documents later revealed that this was not the case.[105]

Medical professionals gathered and collected data on the CIA’s use of torture techniques on detainees during the 21st century war on terror, in order to refine those techniques, and to “to provide legal cover for torture, as well as to help justify and shape future procedures and policies”, according to a 2010 report by Physicians for Human Rights. The report stated that: “Research and medical experimentation on detainees was used to measure the efects of
large-volume waterboarding and adjust the procedure according to the results.” As a result of the waterboarding experiments, doctors recommended adding saline to the water “to prevent putting detainees in a coma or killing them through over-ingestion of large amounts of plain water.” Sleep deprivation tests were performed on over a dozen prisoners, in 48-, 96- and 180-hour increments. Doctors also collected data intended to help them judge the emotional and physical efects of the techniques so as to “calibrate the level of pain experienced by detainees during interrogation” and to determine if using certain types of techniques would increase a subject’s “susceptibility to severe pain.”. The CIA denied the allegations, claiming they never performed any experiments, and saying “The report is just wrong”; however, the U.S. government never investigated the claims.[141][142][143][144][145][146]

In August 2010, the U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon announced that it had partnered with a jail in Castaic, California in order to use prisoners as test subjects for a new non-lethal weapon system that “fires an invisible heat beam capable of causing unbearable pain.”[147]

Academic research[ edit]
In 1939, at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport, Iowa, twenty-two children were the subjects of the so-called “monster” experiment. This experiment attempted to use psychological abuse to induce stuttering in children who spoke normally. The experiment was designed by Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the nation’s most prominent speech pathologists, for the purpose of testing one of his theories on the cause of stuttering.[148]

In 1961, in response to the Nuremberg Trials, the Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram performed his “Obedience to Authority Study”, also known as the Milgram Experiment, in order to determine if it was possible that the Nazi genocide could have resulted from millions of people who were “just following orders”. The Milgram Experiment raised questions about the ethics of scientific experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress sufered by the participants, who were told, as part of the experiment, to apply electric shocks to test subjects (who were actors and did not really receive electric shocks).

Pharmacological research[ edit]
At Harvard University, in the late 1940s, researchers began performing experiments in which they tested diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen, on pregnant women at the Lying-In Hospital of the University of Chicago. The women experienced an abnormally high number of miscarriages and babies with low birth weight. None of the women was told that she was being experimented on.[149]

In 1962, researchers at the Laurel Children’s Center in Maryland tested experimental acne medications on children. They continued their tests even after half of the children developed severe liver damage from the medications.[84]

From 1988 to 2008, the number of overseas clinical trials for drugs intended for American consumption increased by 2,000%, to approximately 6,500 trials. These trials are often conducted in areas with large numbers of poor and illiterate people who grant their consent by signing an “X” or making a thumb print on a form. These tests are rarely monitored by the FDA. In some cases, they have had fatal results, such as a 30-month trial in New Delhi, India during which 49 babies died. The cost of testing in countries without safety regulations is much lower than in the United States. Due to lax policies or oversight, pharmaceutical corporations (or research companies they’ve contracted out to) are able to more easily suppress research that demonstrates harmful efects and report only positive results.[150][151]

Other experiments[ edit]
The 1846 journals of Dr. Walter F. Jones of Petersburg, Virginia, describe how he poured boiling water onto the backs of naked slaves afflicted
with typhoid pneumonia, at four-hour intervals, because he thought that this might “cure” the disease by “stimulating the capillaries”.[152][153][154]

From early 1940 until 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected pediatric neuropsychiatrist who practiced at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, performed electroshock experiments on at least 100 children. The children’s ages ranged from 3–12 years. Some reports indicate that she may have performed such experiments on more than 200. From 1942 to 1956, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital, including Bender’s experiments; from 1956 to 1969, ECT was used at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service. Publicly, Bender claimed that the results of the “therapy” were positive, but in private memos, she expressed frustration over mental health issues caused by the treatments.[155] Bender would sometimes shock schizophrenic children (some less than 3 years old) twice per day, for 20 consecutive days. Several of the children became violent and suicidal as a result of the treatments.[156]

In 1942, the Harvard University biochemist Edward Cohn injected
64 Massachusetts prisoners with cow blood, as part of an experiment sponsored by the U.S. Navy.[157][158][159]

In 1950, researchers at the Cleveland City Hospital ran experiments to study changes in cerebral blood flow: they injected people with spinal anesthesia, and inserted needles into their jugular veins and brachial arteries to extract large quantities of blood and, after massive blood loss which
caused paralysis and fainting, measured their blood pressure. The experiment was often performed multiple times on the same subject.[84]

In a series of studies which were published in the medical journal Pediatrics, researchers from the University of California Department of Pediatrics performed experiments on 113 newborns ranging in age from 1-hour to 3 days, in which they studied changes in blood pressure and blood flow. In one of the studies, researchers inserted a catheter through the babies’umbilical arteries and into their aortas, and then submerged their feet in ice water. In another of the studies, they strapped 50 newborn babies to a circumcision board, and turned them upside down so that all of their blood rushed into their heads.[84]

The San Antonio Contraceptive Study was a clinical research study published in 1971 about the side efects of oral contraceptives. Women coming to a clinic in San Antonio to prevent pregnancies were not told they were participating in a research study or receiving placebos. 10 of the women became pregnant while on placebos.[160][161][162]

In the 2000s (decade), artificial blood was transfused into research subjects across the United States without their consent by Northfield Labs.[163] Later studies showed the artificial blood caused a significant increase in the risk of heart attacks and death.[164]

Legal, academic and professional policy[edit]
Main article: Human subject research legislation in the United States

During the Nuremberg Medical Trials, several of the Nazi doctors and scientists who were being tried for their human experiments cited past unethical studies performed in the United States in their defense, namely the Chicago malaria experiments conducted by Dr. Joseph Goldberger.[11][49] Subsequent investigation led to a report by Andrew Conway Ivy, who testified that the research was “an example of human experiments which were ideal because of their conformity [with the highest ethical standards of human experimentation”. [165] The trials contributed to the formation of theNuremberg Code in an efort to prevent such abuses.[166]

A secret AEC document dated April 17, 1947, titled Medical Experiments in Humans stated: “It is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with humans that might have an adverse reaction on public opinion or result in legal suits. Documents covering such fieldwork should be classified Secret.”[58]

At the same time, the Public Health Service was instructed to tell citizens downwind from bomb tests that the increases in cancers were due to neurosis, and that women with radiation sickness, hair loss, and burned skin were sufering from “housewife syndrome”.[58]

In 1964, the World Medical Association passed the Declaration of Helsinki, a set of ethical principles for the medical community regarding human experimentation.

In 1966, the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office for Protection of Research Subjects (OPRR) was created. It issued its Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects,which recommended establishing independent review bodies to oversee experiments. These were later called institutional review boards.

In 1969, Kentucky Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Steinfeld dissented in Strunk v. Strunk, 445 S.W.2d 145. He made the first judicial suggestion that the Nuremberg Code should be applied to Americanjurisprudence.

In 1974 the National Research Act established the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects. It mandated that the Public Health Service come up with regulations to protect the rights of human research subjects.

Project MK-ULTRA was first brought to wide public attention in 1975 by the U.S. Congress, through investigations by the Church Committee, and by a presidential commission known as theRockefeller Commission.[167][168]

In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (DHEW) created regulations which included the recommendations laid out in the NIH’s 1966 Policies for the Protection of Human Subjects. Title 45 of the Code of Federal Regulations, known as “The Common Rule,” requires the appointment and use of institutional review boards (IRBs) in experiments using human subjects.

On April 18, 1979, prompted by an investigative journalist’s public disclosure of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare(later renamed toHealth and Human Services) released a report entitled Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, written by Dan Harms. It laid out many modern guidelines for ethical medical research.

In 1987 the United States Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Stanley, 483 U.S. 669, that a U.S. serviceman who was given LSD without his consent, as part of military experiments, could not sue the U.S. Army for damages.

Dissenting the verdict in U.S. v. Stanley, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor stated:

No judicially crafted rule should insulate from liability the involuntary and unknowing human experimentation alleged to have occurred in this case. Indeed, as Justice Brennan observes, the United States played an instrumental role in the criminal prosecution of Nazi scientists who experimented with human subjects during the Second World War, and the standards that the Nuremberg Military Tribunalsdeveloped to judge the behavior of the defendants stated that the ‘voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential … to satisfy moral, ethical, and legal concepts.’ If this principle is violated, the very least that society can do is to see that the victims are compensated, as best they can be, by the perpetrators.

On January 15, 1994, President Bill Clinton formed the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE). This committee was created to investigate and report the use of human beings as test subjects in experiments involving the efects of ionizing radiation in federally funded research. The committee attempted to determine the causes of the experiments, and reasons why the proper oversight did not exist. It made several recommendations to help prevent future occurrences of similar events.[169]
As of 2007, not a single U.S. government researcher had been prosecuted for human experimentation. Many of the victims of U.S. government experiments have not received compensation or, in many cases, acknowledgment of what was done to them.[170]

See also[edit]
United States portal

• Belmont Report
• Eugenics in the United States
• Henry Cotton (doctor)
• Human rights in the United States
• Japanese human experimentation
• Nazi human experimentation
• North Korean human experimentation
• Operation Big Buzz
• Operation Crossroads
• Operation Dew
• Operation Drop Kick
• Operation LAC
• Operation May Day
• Project MKUltra
• Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services
• Research involving prisoners

References[edit]
Notes[edit]

1. Jump up^ Hornblum Allen M.; Newman Judith Lynn; Dober Gregory J. (2013). Against Their Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War America. Palgrave
Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-34171-5.

2. Jump up^ Some defend ‘father of gynecology’ by Barron H. Lerner, The Tuscaloosa News, Oct 30, 2003 (accessed: 02/17/2010)
3. Jump up^ Washington, 2008: pp. 62-63
4. Jump up^ Cina & Perper, 2010: p. 88
5. ^ Jump up to:a b Lederer, 1997: pp. 7–8
6. ^ Jump up to:a b c d Grodin & Glantz, 1994: pp. 7–11
7. ^ Jump up to:a b The Strange Career of Leo Stanley: Remaking Manhood and Medicine at San Quentin State Penitentiary, 1913–1951, Ethan Blue, Pacific Historical Review, May 2009, Vol. 78, No. 2, pp. 210–241, DOI 10.1525/phr.2009.78.2.210
8. Jump up^ Hornblum, 1998: p. 79
9. Jump up^ Lederer, 1997: p. 3
10.Jump up^ Shamoo & Resnick, 2009: pp. 238–239
11.^ Jump up to:a b c d Germ War: The US Record – Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch
12.^ Jump up to:a b Cina & Perper, 2010: p. 89
13.^ Jump up to:a b Hornblum, 1998: pp. 76–77
14.Jump up^ Roger Cooter (1992). In the Name of the Child. Routledge. pp. 104–105. ISBN 978-0-203-41223-7.
15.Jump up^ Reviews and Notes: History of Medicine: Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War, Annals of Internal Medicine,American College of Physicians, July 15, 1995 vol. 123 no. 2 159
16.Jump up^ “Tuskegee Study – Timeline”. NCHHSTP. CDC. June 25, 2008. Retrieved 2008-12-04.
17.Jump up^ The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Borgna Brunner. Retrieved 2010-03-25
18.Jump up^ Meiklejohn, Gordon N., M.D. “Commission on Influenza.” in Histories’ of the Commissions Ed. Theodore E. Woodward, M.D., The Armed Forced Epidemiological Board, 1994
19.Jump up^ Halpern, 2006: p. 199
20.Jump up^ Lederer, Susan E. Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995/1997
21.Jump up^ Grodin & Glantz, 1994: p. 14
22.Jump up^ Brody, 1998: p. 120
23.Jump up^ Cina & Perper, 2010: p. 94
24.Jump up^ Black WC (February 1942). “The etiology of acute infectious gingivostomatitis (Vincent’s stomatitis)”. The Journal of Pediatrics 20 (2): 145–60. doi:10.1016/S0022-3476(42)80125-0.
25.Jump up^ George Annas & Michael Grodin, 1995: p. 267
26.Jump up^ Hornblum, 1999: p. 76
27.Jump up^ Rothman, 1992: p.36
28.Jump up^ “U.S. sorry for Guatemala syphilis experiment”. CBC News. October 1, 2010.
29.Jump up^ Rob Stein (October 1, 2010). “U.S. apologizes for newly revealed syphilis experiments done in Guatemala”.The Washington Post.
30.Jump up^ “US sorry over deliberate sex infections in Guatemala”. BBC News. October 1, 2010.
31.Jump up^ Chris McGreal (October 1, 2010). “US says sorry for ‘outrageous and abhorrent’ Guatemalan syphilis tests”.The Guardian (London).
32.Jump up^ Moreno, 2001: pp. 233–234
33.Jump up^ Blum, William (2006). Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Zed Books. pp. 147–149.ISBN 978-1-84277-827-2.
34.Jump up^ “How the U.S. Government Exposed Thousands of Americans to Lethal Bacteria to Test Biological Warfare”, Democracy Now!, July 13, 2005
35.Jump up^ Howard Gordon Wilshire, Jane E. Nielson, Richard W. Hazlett (2008). The American West at Risk: Science, Myths, and Politics of Land Abuse and Recovery. Oxford University Press.
p. 176. ISBN 978-0-19-514205-1.
36.Jump up^ Tansey, Bernadette (October 31, 2004). “Serratia has dark history in region: Army test in 1950 may have changed microbial ecology”. San Francisco Chronicle.
37.Jump up^ Anía BJ (October 1, 2008). “Serratia: Overview”.eMedicine. WebMD. Retrieved November 23, 2011.
38.Jump up^ Cole, 1996: p. 17
39.Jump up^ Melnick, Alan L. (2008). Biological, Chemical, and Radiological Terrorism: Emergency Preparedness and Response for the Primary Care Physician. Springer. p. 2. ISBN 978-0-387-47231-7.
40.Jump up^ Hornblum, 1998: p. 91
41.Jump up^ Frederick Adolf Paola, Robert Walker, Lois Lacivita Nixon, ed. (2009). Medical Ethics and Humanities. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. pp. 185–186. ISBN 978-0-7637-6063-2.
42.Jump up^ Hammer Breslow, Lauren. “The Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act of 2002: The Rise of the Voluntary Incentive Structure and Congressional Refusal to Require Pediatric Testing”, Harvard Journal of Legislation, Vol. 40
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44.Jump up^ Goliszek, 2003: p. 228
45.^ Jump up to:a b c Blum, William (2006). Rogue state: a guide to the world’s only superpower. Zed Books. pp. 150–151.ISBN 978-1-84277-827-2.
46.Jump up^ Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race, St. Martins Press, 1989, pp.74–81, Excerpt available online at:[1] (Retrieved February 18, 2010)
47.Jump up^ Biological Warfare and the National Security State: A Chronology, Tom Burghardt
48.Jump up^ Cole, 1996: pp. 28–30
49.^ Jump up to:a b Loue, 2000: pp. 26–29
50.Jump up^ Blum, William (2006). Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower. Zed Books. pp. 152–154.ISBN 978-1-84277-827-2.
51.Jump up^ Moreno, 2001: p. 234
52.Jump up^ Cina & Perper, 2010: p. 95
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56.^ Jump up to:a b American Nuclear Guinea Pigs : Three Decades of Radiation Experiments on U.S. Citizens. United States. Congress. House. of the Committee on Energy and Commerce. Subcommittee on Energy Conservation and Power, published by U.S. Government Printing Office, 1986, Identifier Y 4.En 2/3:99-NN, Electronic Publication Date 2010, at the University of Nevada, Reno, unr.edu
57.Jump up^ Goliszek, 2003: pp. 130–131
58.^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Goliszek, 2003: pp. 132–134
59.Jump up^ Rebecca Leung. “A Dark Chapter In Medical History“.CBS News, 11 February 2009.
60.Jump up^ Perni, Holliston (2005). A Heritage of Hypocrisy. Pleasant Mount Press, Inc.
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61.Jump up^ Atomic Energy Commission’s Declassification Review of Reports on Human Experiments and the Public Relations and Legal Liability Consequences, presented as evidence during the 1994 ACHRE hearings.
62.^ Jump up to:a b Goliszek, 2003: pp. 136–137
63.Jump up^ Moreno, 2001: p. 132
64.Jump up^ LeBaron, Wayne D. (1998). America’s nuclear legacy. Nova Publishers.
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65.^ Jump up to:a b Moss, William; Eckhardt, Roger (1995). “The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments”. Los Alamos Science. Radiation Protection and the Human Radiation Experiments (23): 177–223. Retrieved 6 December 2013.
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69.Jump up^ “Plutonium Files: How the U.S. Secretly Fed Radioactivity to Thousands of Americans”, Democracy Now!, May 5, 2004
70.^ Jump up to:a b LeBaron, Wayne D. (1998). America’s nuclear legacy. Nova Publishers. pp. 97–98. ISBN 978-1-56072-556-5.
71.Jump up^ Pacchioli, David, (March 1996) “Subjected to Science”, Research/Penn State, Vol. 17, no. 1
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74.^ Jump up to:a b Abhilash R. Vaishnav (1994). The Tech online edition. The Tech.
75.Jump up^ Perni, Holliston (2005). A Heritage of Hypocrisy. Pleasant Mount Press, Inc.
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81.Jump up^ Skloot, Rebecca (2010, 2011). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway Paperbacks. p. 33.ISBN 978-1-4000-5218-9.
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84.^ Jump up to:a b c d e Goliszek, 2003: pp. 223–225
85.Jump up^ Institute of Medicine (U.S.). Committee on Thyroid Screening Related to I-131 Exposure, National Research Council (U.S.). Committee on Exposure of the American People to I-131 from the Nevada Atomic Bomb Tests, ed. (1999). Exposure of the American people to Iodine-131 from Nevada nuclear-bomb tests: review of the National Cancer Institute report and public health implications. National Academies Press. pp. 113–114. ISBN 978-0-309-06175-9. – deaths taken from 90% survival rate, applied to # of cases
86.Jump up^ ACHRE Report:New Ethical Questions for Medical Researchers
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93.Jump up^ “Human Experiments”. Netti.fi. Retrieved 2012-12-16.
94.Jump up^ Cockburn, Alexander; Jefrey St. Clair (1998). Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. New York: Verso. pp. 157–159. ISBN 1-85984-258-5.
95.Jump up^ Goliszek, 2003: Ch. 4
96.Jump up^ Moreno, 2001: pp. 40–43
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98.Jump up^ Pechura, Constance M. & Rall, David P., ed. (1993).Veterans at Risk: the health effects of mustard gas and Lewisite. National Academies Press. p. 31. ISBN 978-0-309-04832-3.
99.Jump up^ Cina & Perper, 2010: p. 96
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101.Jump up^ B.M. Ansell, F. Antonini, L.E. Glynn: “Cantharides blisters in children with rheumatic fever”. Clinical Science, November 1953, 12 (4): 367–373.
102.Jump up^ Hornblum, 1998: p. 216
103.Jump up^ Cina & Perper, 2010: pp. 92–93
104.Jump up^ Washington, 2008: pp. 249–262
105.^ Jump up to:a b c d Kaye, Jonathan. “Retin-A’s Wrinkled Past”,Pennsylvania History Review, Spring 1997.
106.Jump up^ Hornblum, 1998: p. 320
107.Jump up^ “Ex-Inmates Sue Penn and Kligman over Research”.The Pennsylvania Gazette (The University of Pennsylvania). January/February 2001. Retrieved November 9, 2009.
108.Jump up^ Hornblum, 2007: p. 52
109.Jump up^ Goliszek, 2003: p. 226
110.^ Jump up to:a b c d Goliszek, 2003: pp. 152–154
111.Jump up^ Michael Evans. “Science, Technology and the CIA”. Gwu.edu. Retrieved 2012-12-16.
112.Jump up^ Church Committee; p. 390 “MKULTRA was approved by the DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] on April 13, 1953”
113.^ Jump up to:a b c Estabrooks, G.H. “Hypnosis comes of age”.Science Digest, 44–50, April 1971
114.Jump up^ Gillmor, D. I Swear by Apollo: Dr. Ewen Cameron and the CIA-Brainwashing Experiments. Montreal: Eden press, 1987.
115.Jump up^ Scheflin, A.W., & Opton, E.M. The Mind Manipulators. New York: Paddington Press, 1978.
116.Jump up^ Thomas, G. Journey into Madness: The Secret Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse. New York: Bantam, 1989 (paperback 1990).
117.Jump up^ Weinstein, H. Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1990.
118.Jump up^ Otterman, 2007: p. 23
119.Jump up^ Otterman, 2007: pp. 21–22
120.Jump up^ John S. Friedman, ed. (2005). The Secret Histories: Hidden Truths that Challenged the Past and Changed the World. Macmillan. p. 146. ISBN 978-0-312-42517-3.
121.Jump up^ Cole, 1996: pp. 31–32
122.^ Jump up to:a b c McCoy, 2006: pp. 28–30
123.Jump up^ Goliszek, 2003: p. 155
124.Jump up^ APPENDIX C: Documents Referring To Subprojects– 1977 Senate MKULTRA Hearing (Retrieved February 18, 2010)
125.^ Jump up to:a b Otterman, 2007: pp. 24–25
126.^ Jump up to:a b Cockburn, Alexander; Jefrey St. Clair (1998).Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. New York: Verso. pp. 206–209. ISBN 1-85984-258-5.
127.Jump up^ Otterman, 2007: pp. 45–47
128.^ Jump up to:a b c d e f Naomi Klein (2007). “1”. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 0-8050-7983-1.
129.Jump up^ Goliszek, 2003: pp. 170–171
130.Jump up^ Marks, John D., Chapter 8, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate
131.Jump up^ Otterman, 2007: p. 27
132.Jump up^ Mohr, Clarence L.; Joseph E. Gordon (2001). Tulane: the emergence of a modern university, 1945-1980. LSU Press. p. 123. ISBN 978-0-8071-2553-3.
133.Jump up^ Baumeister, Alan A. (2000). “The Tulane Electrical Brain Stimulation Program. A historical Case Study in Medical Ethics”. Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 9 (3): 262–278.
134.Jump up^ “Final report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate : together with additional, supplemental, and separate views”. Archive.org. Retrieved 2012-12-16.
135.^ Jump up to:a b Gillmor, D. I Swear by Apollo. Dr. Ewen Cameron and the CIA-Brainwashing Experiments. Montreal: Eden Press, 1987.
136.^ Jump up to:a b Scheflin, A.W., & Opton, E.M. The Mind Manipulators, New York: Paddington Press, 1978.
137.^ Jump up to:a b Thomas, G. Journey into Madness. The Secret Story of Secret CIA Mind Control and Medical Abuse, New York: Bantam, 1989 (paperback 1990).
138.^ Jump up to:a b Weinstein, H. Psychiatry and the CIA: Victims of Mind Control, Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1990.
139.Jump up^ McCoy, 2006: pp. 50–53
140.Jump up^ Alfred W. McCoy, “U.S. Has a History of Using Torture”, Z Magazine
141.Jump up^ Sheldon Richman (June 23, 2010). “Did the CIA Conduct Medical Experiments on Detainees?”.Counterpunch.
142.Jump up^ Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program, Physicians for Human Rights, June 2010
See also:
*Related Publications
*Outside Academic Experts Respond to Experiments in Torture
*Complaint to Office of Human Research Protections Regarding Evidence of CIA Violations of Common Rule *Experiments in Torture (video)
143.Jump up^ Experiments in Torture: Medical Group Accuses CIA of Carrying Out Illegal Human Experimentation,Democracy Now!, June 8, 2010
144.Jump up^ Accounting for Torture: Being Faithful to our Values, (video) National Religious Campaign Against Torture(cited by PHR)
145.Jump up^ Risen, James (June 6, 2010). “Medical Ethics Lapses Cited in Interrogations”. The New York Times.
146.Jump up^ ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody, International Committee of the Red Cross, February 14, 2007
147.Jump up^ “California Jail to Test Ray Gun on Prisoners”.Democracy Now!. August 23, 2010.
148.Jump up^ “Theory improved treatment and understanding of stuttering:” Ethics concerns led researchers to conceal the experiment Decades later, the experiment’s victims struggle to make sense of their past, Jim Dyer, San Jose Mercury News, Monday, June 11, 2001 (Retrieved February 17, 2010)
149.Jump up^ Loue, 2000: p. 30
150.Jump up^ “Deadly Medicine: FDA Fails to Regulate Rapidly Growing Industry of Overseas Drug Testin”, Democracy Now!, December 17, 2010
151.Jump up^ Barlett, Donald L. & Steele, James B. (January 2011).“Deadly Medicine”. Vanity Fair.
152.Jump up^ Washington, 2008: pp. 60–63
153.Jump up^ Savitt, Todd Lee (2002). Medicine and Slavery: The Diseases and Health Care of Blacks in Antebellum Virginia. University of Illinois Press. p. 299. ISBN 978-0-252-00874-0.
154.Jump up^ Shamoo & Resnick, 2009: p. 239
155.Jump up^ Albarelli Jr., H.P.; Kaye, Jefrey S.; “The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA’s Experiments on Children”, Truthout, Wednesday August 11, 2010
156.Jump up^ Whitaker, Robert (2010). Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill. Basic Books. p. 315. ISBN 978-0-465-02014-0.
157.Jump up^ Cina & Perper, 2010: p. 92
158.Jump up^ Hornblum, 1999: p. 80
159.Jump up^ Dober, Gregory “Cheaper than Chimpanzees: Expanding the Use of Prisoners in Medical Experiments”, Prison Legal News, VOL. 19 No. 3, March 2008
160.Jump up^ Goldzieher JW, Moses LE, Averkin E, Scheel C, Taber BZ. “A placebo-controlled double-blind crossover investigation of the side efects attributed to oral contraceptives”, Fertil Steril. 1971 Sep;22(9):609-23.“PMID4105854”
161.Jump up^ Levine, Robert J. “Ethics and regulation of clinical research, 2nd ed”. Yale University Press, 1986, p.71-72. ISBN Special:BookSources/0806711124
162.Jump up^ Veatch RM. “Experimental pregnancy: the ethical complexities of experimentation with oral contraceptives”. Hastings Cent Rep. 1971 Jun; (1):2–3.“PMID4137658”
163.Jump up^ Brian Ross (May 23, 2007). “Test of Controversial Artificial Blood Product a Failure”. ABC News, “The Blotter”.
164.Jump up^ Ed Edelson (April 28, 2008[when?]). “Experimental Blood Substitutes Unsafe, Study Finds”. ABC News.
165.Jump up^ Bernard, Larry. “Historian examines U.S. ethics in Nuremberg Medical Trial tactics.” Cornell Chronicle
166.Jump up^ Weindling, Paul (Spring 2001). “The Origins of Informed Consent – Nuremberg Code”, Bulletin of the History of Medicine
167.Jump up^ Science, Technology, and the CIA, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book, Jefrey T. Richelson, Editor, September 10, 2001 (Retrieved February 18, 2010)
168.Jump up^ “U.S. Senate: Joint Hearing before The Select Committee on Intelligence and The Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources”, 95th Cong., 1st Sess. August 3, 1977.
169.Jump up^ “Final report of ACHRE”. Eh.doe.gov. Retrieved 2012-12-16.
170.Jump up^ Henry N. Pontell, Gilbert Geis, ed. (2007). International Handbook of White-Collar and Corporate Crime. Springer. p. 62. ISBN 978-0-387-34110-1.

Bibliography[ edit]
• Annas, George J.; Grodin, Michael A. (1995). The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg
Code: human rights in human experimentation. Oxford University
Press. ISBN 978-0-19-510106-5.
• Brody, Baruch A. (1998). The Ethics of Biomedical Research: An international
perspective. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-509007-9.
• Cina, Stephen J.; Perper, Joshua A. (2010). When Doctors Kill.
Springer. ISBN 978-1-4419-1368-5.
• Cole, Leonard A. (1996). The Eleventh Plague: The Politics of Biological and
Chemical Warfare. MacMillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-7214-3.
• Eckart, Wolfgang Uwe (2006). Man, Medicine, and the State: The human body as
an object of government sponsored medical research in the 20th century. Franz
Steiner Verlag.ISBN 978-3-515-08794-0.

• Goliszek, Andrew (2003). In The Name of Science. New York: St. Martin’s

Press. ISBN 978-0-312-30356-3.
• Grodin, Michael A. & Glantz, Leonard H., ed. (1994). Children as Research
Subjects: Science, ethics, and law. Oxford University Press
US. ISBN 978-0-19-507103-0.
• Halpern, Sydney A. (2006). Lesser Harms: The Morality of Risk in Medical
Research. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-31452-5.
• Hornblum, Allen M. (1998). Acres of Skin: Human experiments at Holmesburg
Prison, a story of abuse and exploitation in the name of medical science.
Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-91990-6.
• Hornblum, Allen M. (2007). Sentenced to Science: One Black Man’s Story of
Imprisonment in America. The Pennsylvania State University
Press. ISBN 978-0-271-03336-5.
• Lederer, Susan E. (1997). Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in
America Before the Second World War. JHU Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-5709-6.
• Loue, Sana (2000). Textbook of research ethics: theory and practice.
Springer. ISBN 978-0-306-46448-5.
• McCoy, Alfred W. (2006). A question of torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold
War to the War on Terror. New York: Metropolitan Books. ISBN 978-0-8050-8041-4.
• Moreno, Jonathan D. (2001). Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans.
Routledge. ISBN 0-415-92835-4.
• Otterman, Michael (2007). American torture: from the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and
beyond. Melbourne Univ. Publishing. ISBN 978-0-522-85333-9.
• David J. Rothman (1992). Strangers at the Bedside: A History of How Law and
Bioethics Transformed Medical Decision Making. Basic
Books. ISBN 978-0-465-08210-0.
• Shamoo, Adil E.; Resnik, David B. (2009). Responsible Conduct of Research.
Oxford University Press US. ISBN 978-0-19-536824-6.
• Washington, Harriet A. (2008). Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical
Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Random
House. ISBN 978-0-7679-1547-2.
Further resources[edit]
General[edit]
• “Human Research Report” – a monthly newsletter on protecting human subjects
• Frankel, Mark S. (1975). “The Development of Policy Guidelines Governing Human
Experimentation in the United States”. Ethics in Science and Medicine 2.
• Hornblum, Allen M.; Newman, Judith Lynn; Dober, Gregory J. (2013). Against Their
Will: The Secret History of Medical Experimentation on Children in Cold War
America. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-34171-5.
• Jonsen, Albert R. (1998). The Birth of Bioethics. Oxford University Press.
• Kalechofsky, Roberta. Human Experimentation: Before the Nazi Era and After.
• Weyers, Wolfgang (2003). The Abuse of Man: An illustrated history of dubious
medical experimentation. Ardor Scribendi. ISBN 978-1-893357-21-1.
Biological warfare and disease/pathogen experiments[edit]
• Bibliography of Chemical and Biological Warfare documents
• The History of Bioterrorism in America, Richard Sanders, Race and History,

Sunday, November 24, 2002 (Retrieved February 18, 2010)
• Biological Weapons – Federation of American Scientists
• Franz, et al., The U.S. Biological Warfare and Biological Defense Programs
• US Army Activities in the US Biological Warfare Program, 1977 Congressional

report
• Christopher et al., “Biological warfare. A historical perspective”, Journal of the
American Medical Association. 6 August 1997;278(5):412-7.
• Years Ago, The Military Sprayed Germs on U.S. Cities“, Wall Street Journal, October
22, 2001, via American Patriot Friends Network. Retrieved November 13, 2008.
• http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2012/09/24/researcher-poor-st-louis-minorities-targeted
-for-secret-cold-war-chemical-testing/
Human radiation experiments[edit]
Books[edit]
• Killing Our Own: The disaster of America’s experience with atomic radiation, by
Harvey Wasserman, Delacorte Press, c1992, ISBN 978-0-440-04567-0
• The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments, by Eileen Welsome,
The Dial Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-385-31402-2
• The Treatment: The Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests, by
Martha Stephens, Duke University Press, c2002, Durham, N.C., ISBN
0-8223-2811-9
• Bravo for the Marshallese: Regaining Control in a Post-Nuclear, Post-Colonial
World, by Holly M. Barker, Wadsworth, 2004. ISBN 0-534-61326-8
Government documents[edit]
• Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) – National
Security Archives
• Exposure of the American population to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons
tests: a review of the CDC-NCI draft report on a feasibility study of the health
consequences to the American population from nuclear weapons tests conducted
by the United States and other nations, National Research Council (U.S.).
Committee to Review the CDC-NCI Feasibility Study of the Health Consequences
from Nuclear Weapons Tests, National Academies Press, 2003 ISBN
978-0-309-08713-1
Journals[edit]
• “‘A Little Touch of Buchenwald’: America’s Secret Radiation Experiments”, Reviews
in American History – Volume 28, Number 4, December 2000, pp. 601–606
• Chair’s Perspective on the Work of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation
Experiments by Ruth Faden
Psychological/torture/interrogation experiments[edit]
• Bibliography of U.S. interrogation/torture research
• Truth, torture, and the American way, Jennifer Harbury
• Biderman, A. Social-Psychological Needs and “Involuntary” Behavior as Illustrated
by Compliance in Interrogation, Sociometry, Vol. 23, No. 2 (June, 1960),
pp. 120–147
• The CIA: Mind-Bending Disclosures – Time Magazine, Monday, August 15, 1977
(Retrieved February 18, 2010)
• Resources on Drug Experimentation and Related Mind Control Experiments by the
U.S. Government

• Khatchadourian, Raffi (December 7, 2012) “Operation Delirium”, The New Yorker

Video[ edit]
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony A – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony B – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings
• MKULTRA Victim Testimony C – 1977 MKULTRA Congressional Hearings
• President Clinton apologizes for Human Radiation Experiments
• Complete transcript of Clinton’s apology for Human Radiation Experiments
• Physicians for Human Rights Accuses CIA of Carrying Out Illegal Human

Experimentation – video report by Democracy Now!
• The Dark History of Medical Experimentation from the Nazis to Tuskegee to Puerto
Rico – video report by Democracy Now!

Categories:

• Ethical issues in medicine
• Human rights abuses
• Human subject research in the United States
• Medical research
• Human rights abuses in the United States

Conclusion: What should we do?

“Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.” – Albert Einstein
When we are hungry, we eat. When we are thirsty, we drink. When we are threatened for our very existence, we must also rely on our own instincts to survive

II. MURDER INC.
by Jacob G. Hornberger
October 10, 2011

Lyndon Johnson once remarked, We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.

What Johnson was referring to was the CIA’s assassination program during the 1960s in which the agency targeted Latin American leaders for assassination. Johnson’s statement is a reminder that the CIA, which recently assassinated American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, has been in the assassination business for a long time.

It was an interesting term that Johnson used to describe the CIA’s assassination operation, given that murder connotes the wrongful taking of human life and Murder Inc connotes the Mafia, which just happened to be the CIA’s assassination partner in their attempt to assassinate Cuba’s president Fidel Castro.

President Obama and the CIA are remaining mum as to why they took Awlaki out, but statist supporters are claiming that the hit was justified because (1) Awlaki was supposedly exhorting Muslims to resist U.S. imperialist actions with force, and (2) that he supposedly was actively participating in al-Qaeda’s commission of terrorist actions against the United States.

The problem, of course, is that no one really knows what Awlaki did to merit his assassination. All that we know is that we now live in a country in which a super-secret presidential committee wields the authority to secretly designate Americans as assassination targets and that the president wields the non-reviewable, omnipotent authority to order the hit.

Leaving aside what Awlaki did to justify his assassination, one big problem is that governments often end up viewing citizens who oppose their policies as enemies of the state, ones who are considered just as dangerous to national security as those who actually take up arms against the government. Thus, governments with the omnipotent, non-reviewable power to take out their own citizens oftentimes end up sliding the assassination scale to encompass those who are threatening national security or demoralizing the war effort by simply opposing what the regime is doing.

Returning to Cuba provides a good example. The CIA considered its assassination attempts against Castro to be entirely proper, both from a moral standpoint and a legal standpoint. In the eyes of the CIA and the rest of the national security state, Castro was a communist and a socialist and, even worse, one who refused to kowtow to the U.S. government. Unlike his predecessor Fulgencio Batista, Castro refused to place Cuba under the control of the U.S. government. Since the United States was at war against communism, it was considered proper to take out a recalcitrant communist ruler through assassination.

Now, reverse the situation. Suppose Castro had been the one who assassinated Kennedy.

Well, then the CIA’s perspective changes. The CIA would have considered that assassination to have been morally wrong and unlawful. Its exactly what we would expect from a no-good, rotten communist, CIA officials would have said.

So, same action the assassination of a leader of another country, but with a different perspective. When the CIA does the assassinating, its considered good, moral, and lawful. When a communist does it, its considered bad, immoral, and unlawful.

Obviously there is another perspective: that assassination of rulers of other countries is wrong per se, even when it is carried out by the U.S. government. That’s the position that libertarians take. We believe it was just as wrong for the CIA to have been assassinating foreign leaders as it would have been for foreign leaders to be assassinating other foreign leaders. We believe it was wrong for the CIA to be trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, even if he happened to be the most committed communist and most committed socialist in the world and even if he refused to submit the dictates of the U.S. Empire.

Many government officials simply cannot understand the libertarian mindset. In their minds, if you’re not supporting the CIA’s assassination attempts (or the invasions, occupations, torture, or other aspects of U.S. foreign policy), then that must mean that you support Fidel Castro, or communism, or socialism, or terrorism.

In their minds, whatever the U.S. government is doing to combat communism or terrorism has to be good and anyone who opposes it must be helping the communists or the terrorists. The best way to describe this statist mindset is through the simplistic statement, You’re either with us or against us. Thus, if a person is opposing the governments actions against communists and terrorists, that person must be supporting the communists or the terrorists.

That’s how dissidents and critics end up on their governments watch lists, terrorist lists, communist lists, no-fly lists, or assassination lists. By standing up against the governments policies, they are inevitably viewed as enemies of the state by government officials.

Lets return to our Cuba example. Consider an organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), an American organization that played an interesting role relating to the John Kennedy assassination.

First of all, let me say that I don’t profess to know much about the organization and my knowledge of it is mostly based on a few Internet articles, including Wikipedia.

But from what I gather, this organization was formed with the aim of opposing the U.S. governments actions against the Castro regime. This included opposition to the CIA’s invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, the U.S. embargo placed on Cuba, and the CIA’s innumerable assassination attempts on Castro’s life.

Most of the members in the organization seem to have been ardent leftists people who were sympathetic with Castro’s socialist aims. Some of them were prominent American liberals people like Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and William Appleman Williams.

That combination ardent socialists and opposition to the U.S. governments policies against Cuba convinced the U.S. national security state that the Fair Play for Cuba Committee was a grave threat to national security. Thus the organization was targeted, both by the CIA and J. Edgar Hoovers FBI, two of the principal parts of the national security state.

Now, imagine that. On the one hand, the federal government is purporting to protect the freedom of the American people by targeting the head of a foreign state for assassination while, at the same time, its targeting a domestic organization that supports socialism and opposes foreign interventionism in Cuba.

Yet, doesn’t a free society encompass the right to be a socialist and to promote socialist views? Doesn’t a free society encompass the right to defend foreign nations from U.S. imperialism? Doesn’t a free society encompass the right to oppose invasions, embargoes, and assassinations conducted by ones own government? Indeed, doesn’t a free society encompass the right to be a communist, join the Communist Party, promote communism, and speak out in favor of communism and communist regimes?

Fortunately, it doesn’t seem that the CIA targeted any of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee members with assassination, but the CIA and the FBI certainly did spy on them, monitor them, and even target them for character assassination. According to this article at Spartacus Educational,

It was not long before the CIA was taking a close interest in the activities of the FPCC. Two days after the publication of the advert, William K. Harvey, head of the CIA’s Cuban affairs, told FBI counterintelligence chief Sam Papich, For your information, this Agency has derogatory information on all individuals listed in the attached advertisement.

Of course, that was the modus employed by Hoover for decades gather up embarrassing information on people and then use it to blackmail them into submission or to humiliate them or destroy their reputation. According to the Spartacus Education article,

On April 27, 1961, J. Edgar Hoover himself ordered his agents to focus on pro-Castro activists, stating that the FPCC illustrated the capacity of a nationality group organization to mobilize its efforts in such a situation so as to arrange demonstrations and influence public opinion. Under orders from Hoover, Cartha DeLoach began a red-baiting campaign against the FPCC during May 1961. According to Bill Simpich: As part of his counterintelligence responsibilities, DeLoach developed a Mass Media Program that included over 300 newspaper reporters, columnists, radio commentators, and television news investigators.

The Fair Play for Cuba Committee was ultimately put out of business with Lee Harvey Oswald’s assassination. During Oswald’s time in New Orleans prior to the Kennedy assassination, he had been distributing FPCC pamphlets. Interestingly, the return address that Oswald had stamped on some of the pamphlets was 544 Camp Street in New Orleans, which just happened to lead to the offices of a retired FBI agent, Guy Bannister, whose private investigation firm happened to be located near the New Orleans offices of the CIA and FBI. According to Wikipedia, Bannister was a fierce anti-communist who allegedly served as a munitions supplier for the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion. In any event, Oswald’s purported association with the FPCC was enough to put the organization out of business after the Kennedy assassination, which had been the aim of the CIA and FBI prior to the assassination.

Delegating the power to assassinate citizens to the government is a dangerous thing because inevitably governments come to believe that citizens who oppose its policies are enemies of the state, enemies that are as dangerous to national security if not more so than those against whom the policies are being carried out.

III. JULY 24, 2009 “A Damned Murder Inc.”

by ALEXANDER COCKBURN FacebookTwitterGoogle+RedditEmail

Some time in early or mid-1949 a CIA officer named Bill (his surname is blacked out in the file, which was surfaced by John Kelly in the early 1990s) asked an outside contractor for input on how to kill people. Requirements included the appearance of an accidental or purely fortuitous terminal experience suffered by the Agency’s victim.

Bill’s friend – internal evidence suggests he was a doctor – offered practical advice: “Tetraethyl lead, as you know, could be dropped on the skin in very small quantities, producing no local lesion, and after a quick death, no specific evidence would be present.” Another possibility was “the exposure of the entire individual to X-ray.” (In fact these two methods were already being inflicted on a very large number of Americans in lethal doses, in the form of leaded gasoline and radioactive fallout from the atmospheric nuclear test program in Nevada.) “There are two other techniques,” Bill’s friend concluded bluffly, which “require no special equipment beside a strong arm and the will to do such a job. These would be either to smother the victim with a pillow or to strangle him with a wide piece of cloth, such as a bath towel.”

As regular as congressmen being taken in adultery or receiving cash bribes, every year or two the Central Intelligence Agency has go into damage-control mode to deal with embarrassing documents like the memo to Bill, and has to square up to the question – does it, did it ever, have its in-house assassins, a Double O team.

It just happened. In mid-July the news headlines were suddenly full of allegations that in the wake of the 9/11/2001 attacks, vice president Dick Cheney had ordered the formation of a CIA kill squad and expressly ordered the Agency not to disclose the program even to congressional overseers with top security clearances, as required by law. As soon as CIA offials disclosed the program to CIA director Leon Panetta, he ordered it to be halted.

And regular as the congressmen taken in adultery seeking forgiveness from God and spouse, the CIA rolled out the familiar response that yes, such a program had been mooted, but there had been practical impediments. “It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it’s not that easy,” one former intelligence official told the New York Times. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?” The C.I.A. insisted it had never proposed a specific operation to the White House for approval.

With these pious denials we enter the Theater of the Absurd. We’re talking about a US Agency that ran the Phoenix Program, that supervised executive actions across Latin America, that…

Before irrefutable evidence of its vast kidnapping and interrogation program in the post-2001 period surfaced the CIA similarly used to claim, year after year, that it had never been in the torture business either. Torture manuals drafted by the Agency would surface – a 128-page secret how-to-torture guide produced by the CIA in July 1963 called “Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation”, another 1983 manual, enthusiastically used by CIA clients in the “contra” war against Central American leftist nationalists in President Reagan’s years – and the Agency would deny, waffle and evade until the moment came simply to dismiss the torture charge as “an old story.”

In fact the Agency took a practical interest in torture and assassination from its earliest days, studying Nazi interrogation techniques avidly and sheltering noted Nazi practitioners. As it prepared its coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1953 the Agency distributed to its agents and operatives a killer’s training manual (made public in 1997) full of hands-on advice:

“The most efficient accident, in simple assassination, is a fall of 75 feet or more onto a hard surface. Elevator shafts, stair wells, unscreened windows and bridges will serve. … The act may be executed by sudden, vigorous [excised] of the ankles, tipping the subject over the edge. If the assassin immediately sets up an outcry, playing the “horrified witness”, no alibi or surreptitious withdrawal is necessary.

“…In all types of assassination except terroristic, drugs can be very effective. An overdose of morphine administered as a sedative will cause death without disturbance and is difficult to detect. The size of the dose will depend upon whether the subject has been using narcotics regularly. If not, two grains will suffice.

“If the subject drinks heavily, morphine or a similar narcotic can be injected at the passing out stage, and the cause of death will often be held to be acute alcoholism.”

What about targets of assassination attempts by the CIA, acting on presidential orders? We could start with the bid on Chou En-lai’s life after the Bandung Conference in 1954; they blew up the plane scheduled to take him home, but fortunately for him, though not his fellow passengers, he’d switched flights. Then we could move on to the efforts, ultimately successful in 1961, to kill the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, in which the CIA was intimately involved, dispatching among others the late Dr Sidney Gottlieb, the Agency’s in-house killer chemist, with a hypodermic loaded with poison. The Agency made many efforts to kill General Kassim in Iraq. The first such attempt on October 7, 1959 was botched badly, and one of the assassins, Saddam Husssein, was, spirited out to an Agency apartment in Cairo. There was a second Agency effort in 1960-1961 with a poisoned handkerchief. Finally they shot Kassim in the coup of February 8/9, 1963.

The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well-attested efforts by the Agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. It was Lyndon Johnson who famously said shortly after he took office in 1963, “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” Reagan’s first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House’s effort to bomb Muammar Q’addafi to death in his encampment , though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force. Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shiite leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.

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 leader), 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, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic…

And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only US government player in the assassination game. The US military have their own teams. A friend of mine once had a gardener – “a very scary looking guy” — who remarked that he’d been part of a secret unit in the U.S. Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true either side of the executive order, issued by president Gerald Ford in 1976, banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order 11905.

One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They wanted teams to hunt down Osama and his crew and kill them. They cheered the reports – now resurfacing – of U.S., British and French special forces presiding over and directing the slaughter in November, 2001, of about 1,000 prisoners of war by the Northern Alliance at Mazar-e-Sharif, with the Taliban prisoners shut in containers left out in the sun with an okay by US personnel, till their occupants roasted and suffocated. Over the next few months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was “shocked and saddened” after reading the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the torture of detainees at CIA “black sites.” “Shocked and saddened”, after what we know and what we have seen already? It must be pretty bad. As William Polk remarks on this site today of the evidence of sodomy, rape and torture captured in the photograph collection that Obama first wanted to release and then changed his mind: “Those who profess to know say that what these pictures show is truly horrible. Some have compared them to the vivid record the Nazis kept of their sadism.”

The CIA death squads and kindred units from the military killed and tortured to death many, many people and most certainly there was extensive “collateral damage” – meaning innocent people being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by president George Bush: “All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”

The CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked that “There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavory things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it’s going to handicap future activities.” Just because vice president Dick Cheney may have been supervising Murder Inc it doesn’t mean that CIA officers who became his operational accomplices won’t be legally vulnerable. At the moment President Obama is trying to keep the lid on still secret crimes committed by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.

Ending the “Third Degree”

“Eighty years ago, with the publication of the Wickersham Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, America learned that torture didn’t work…and promptly forgot.

“Debates on the morality and practical efficacy of torture periodically erupt in American politics. Now, the issue has re-emerged with the efforts of ex-Bush administration officials and allies to defend their legacy and their legal impunity against the current administration’s stated desire to move beyond coercive interrogations…”

This is Peter Lee in our latest CounterPunch newsletter, in an enthralling piece of historical excavation about how a commission appointed by Herbert Hoover managed to include a savage expose of torture as practiced by US police departments. Lee shows how exactly the torture techniques of our current era and their rationales mirror those of the practitioners and sponsors of torture in the last century.

Also in this crackerjack issue is Marcus Rediker’s diary of his lectures in Auburn Prison on pirates and how the inmates responded to them.

Only in CounterPunch.

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A shorter version of the first item appears in The First Post.

ALEXANDER COCKBURN can be reached at [email protected]

IV. The American Empire: Murder Inc.

Monday, January 04, 2016
by Truthdig

by Chris Hedges
23 Comments

As Indonesia’s former President Suharto lay ill in 2008, a supporter displayed a portrait of him outside the Jakarta hospital where the military dictator died two weeks later. It was in Suharto’s brutal three-decade reign that Indonesia invaded East Timor, where investigative journalist Allan Nairn covered atrocities the general’s troops committed. (Vincent Thian / AP)

Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.

Countries we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and Afghanistan, are intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of control. But the reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and cheap labor around the globe.

There are very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage, tenacity and integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has reported from Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti and Indonesia—where Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested him. His reporting on the Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw him branded a “threat to national security” and officially banned from occupied East Timor. Nairn returned clandestinely to East Timor on numerous occasions. His dogged reporting of torture and killing of civilians by the Indonesian military contributed to the U.S. Congress suspending military aid to Jakarta in 1993. He exposed U.S. complicity with death squads and paramilitary organizations carrying out murderous rampages in El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti. During the 2014 presidential elections in Indonesia, where he spends much of his time, Nairn was threatened with arrest for exposing presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto’s role in atrocities. Nairn’s reporting on army massacres was an important component in the trial of former Guatemalan President Efrain Ríos Montt. Gen. Montt ordered the killing of over 1,700 people in the Ixil region of the country in the early 1980s and was convicted in 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The conviction was later overturned.

Nairn, whom I spoke with in New York, reaches back to the genocide carried out against Native Americans, the institution of slavery and the murder of hundreds of workers and labor union organizers in the 19th and early 20th century to explain the roots of American imperial violence. He noted that, although wholesale massacres have become taboo on American soil in recent generations, the FBI was carrying out selective assassinations of black radicals, including Fred Hampton, in the 1960s. And police show little constraint in gunning down unarmed people of color in poor communities.

But overseas there are no restrictions. The indiscriminate slaughter of real or imagined opponents is considered a prerogative of imperial power. Violence is the primary language we use to speak to the rest of the world. Equivalents of Wounded Knee and My Lai take place beyond our borders with an unacknowledged frequency.

“To this day,” Nairn said, “it is politically permissible for U.S. forces to carry out or sponsor assassinations of civilians—students, journalists, religious leaders, peasant organizers, whomever. In fact, in U.S. politics, if presidents are reluctant, or seem reluctant to do this, they get castigated. They get called a wimp. George Bush Sr. came under vicious attack when he attempted through covert means to mount a coup in Panama against [Manuel] Noriega and it failed. And there was a cover [of Newsweek, with the headline ‘Fighting the “Wimp Factor” ’] where they were attacking Bush Sr. for not being strong enough.”

“I think it was within a week after that he invaded Panama formally, an invasion that included the burning of the neighborhood called El Chorrillo, where hundreds were killed, a poor neighborhood. The New York Times then ran a front-page analysis by R.W. Apple which said that Bush Sr. had completed his presidential initiation rite by demonstrating his willingness to shed blood,” Nairn went on. “Not his own blood, but the blood of foreigners, including of foreign civilians.”

“It’s basically a refusal on the part of American society to enforce the murder laws when the killings are done by presidents or generals, and where the victims are foreigners,” he said. “Now, all big powers do this. But in the recent period, because the U.S. has been the dominant power, the U.S. has the biggest death toll. If you added all the operations up it would go into the several millions. Just to list the ones that I’ve personally seen and tried to expose and fight against: Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, South Africa, Palestine, East Timor, Indonesia, southern Thailand. I’m sure I’m leaving out a few. The U.S. has used the Pentagon, the CIA, occasionally the State Department to set up or back local forces, help them gather intelligence on dissidents, and help them provide the means to carry out systematic assassinations.”

Assassinations and torture are often accompanied in these wars and proxy wars by massacres by government troops that routinely “wipe out whole villages,” Nairn said,

“The Guatemalan military did that, especially during the early ’80s when the Reagan administration was backing them enthusiastically under the time of the dictator Gen. Rios Montt,” Nairn said. “They would go into villages in the Mayan highlands in the northwest. … I was there, I spoke to the soldiers as they were doing it, I spoke to survivors … [and] they would decapitate people. They would crucify people. They would use the tactics that ISIS today puts on video that are now shocking the world.”

“The powers have always been willing to use these tactics,” he said. “And for centuries they were proud of it. All you have to do is look at the holy texts of the major religions—the Bible, the Quran, the Torah. They’re full of one massacre after another. People forget. The story of David and Goliath is put forward as a great story. At the end of that story David decapitates Goliath. He parades around holding up his head. For years and years the powers were proud of these tactics. They advertised it.”

“As recently as the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. presidents were still boasting about it,” Nairn said. “Go back and read [Roosevelt’s] writings. He’s repeatedly … talking about the necessity to shed blood, the necessity to kill. Otherwise a person could not be healthy, otherwise a polity could not be healthy. This was Teddy Roosevelt. You can’t do that in today’s U.S. You can’t do that really in any major country today. The only partial exception to that at the level of rhetoric is Israel. Israeli generals and politicians still talk openly about the need to shed Palestinian blood. But they’re really the only ones. Everywhere else—Europe, Russia, China, the U.S.—they have to hide their [activities].”

I first met Nairn in 1984 while I was covering the war in El Salvador. In that year he published an explosive investigative piece in The Progressive magazine titled “Behind the Death Squads.” The article detailed U.S. backing, training and arming of the death squads in El Salvador that were murdering, and often torturing and mutilating, hundreds of people a month. His article led to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

U.S. commanders in Iraq, attempting to quell the Sunni insurgency in 2004, reached back to the terror tactics used in El Salvador. They formulated a plan called “The Salvador Option” to train and arm Shiite paramilitary units. Former U.S. Army Col. James Steele, who in the 1980s in El Salvador headed the U.S. Military Group or MilGroup, which advised the Salvadoran army during the war, was sent to Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld as a civilian adviser. Steele, who had fought in Vietnam, was assigned to the Iraqi paramilitary Special Police Commandos, a unit known as the “Wolf Brigade.”

U.N. officials, and an investigative team from The Guardian newspaper, later accused these Shiite paramilitary units of widespread death-squad killings and running a network of clandestine detention centers that carried out torture while under Steele’s supervision. The Shiite paramilitary units, which were given money from a $2 billion fund controlled directly by Gen. David Petraeus, terrorized and enraged the Sunni population. The abuse, torture, assassinations and network of clandestine prisons fueled Iraq’s sectarian civil war and led to the creation of radical Sunni groups such as Islamic State.

“The Salvadoran death squad apparatus was created by the U.S., starting during the Kennedy administration through mainly U.S. Special Forces and the CIA,” Nairn said. “[They] … created this intelligence-gathering system which linked Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua. They would have central files organized for them with the help of the CIA. They would teach them [the squads] how to go out and watch on a systematic basis the campuses, the courts, the plantations [and] especially the factories, run by the local oligarchs but also the American investors. They would compile files.”

Nairn spent 13 hours interviewing former Salvadoran Gen. Jose Alberto Medrano, the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads, who was assassinated a year later, in 1985, by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels.

“He explained to me how Salvadoran priests, nuns, catechists [and] unionists were all controlled by Moscow,” Nairn said. “He would draw these schematics showing from Moscow to Havana to here to there. And he said they all became targets; it was our mission to kill them. He described in great detail how he did this while working on the payroll of the United States.”

“These were the death squads that produced actions like the rape and murder of the nuns,” Nairn said, referring to American lay missionary Jean Donovan and three American nuns—Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford—who were killed by national guard soldiers in El Salvador in December 1980. Eight months earlier, the death squads had carried out the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. More than 75,000 Salvadorans died in the conflict, thousands at the hands of the death squads, which often “disappeared” their victims.

“The world is finally starting to understand what’s involved with political killing when they see the videos of ISIS,” Nairn said. “… In Salvador, not only would they kill but they would cut off hands, they would cut off arms, and they would display their handiwork on the road. Passersby would see it. In the same period—I spent most of those years in Guatemala, which was even worse—they were killing more than 100,000, perhaps more than 200,000 by some estimates. One day in the library of the Polytechnica, the military academy of Guatemala, I found the Spanish translation of a U.S. military counterinsurgency document. It gave instructions on how to create terror; this was the way they put it. And they described methods used in the Philippines in the campaign against the Huks.”

“In the case of the Philippines they were talking about leaving the bodies by the rivers,” he said. “So you mutilate the bodies, you cut them, you amputate, and then you display the bodies on the riversides to stir terror in the population. And of course that’s exactly what ISIS is doing today.”

The same tactics were used in Indonesia against ethnic Chinese, labor organizers, artists, intellectuals, student leaders and members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) after the 1965 U.S.-backed anti-communist purge that eventually ousted the independence leader President Sukarno. Sukarno was replaced in a 1967 coup by Gen. Suharto, who brutally ran the country for 31 years. During the army and paramilitary killings as many as a million Indonesians were murdered. The bodies were often left floating in rivers or on roadsides.

“The CIA weighed in with a list of 5,000 targets for assassination,” Nairn said. “The U.S. press was hailing it at the time. They were calling it a gleam of light in Asia. Gen. Suharto was installed in power as a result of this process. Suharto later, in the mid-’70s, sought the permission of President Ford and Henry Kissinger to invade the small neighboring country of East Timor, which was then emerging into independence from having been a Portuguese colony. They gave the green light. They just said do it quickly. They went in [and] killed a third of the population.”

“In ’91 they staged a massacre in front of a cemetery, which I happened to survive,” he said. “I was there with Amy Goodman. They killed more than 200 people right before our eyes. They fractured my skull with their American M-16 rifle butts.

“This is standard procedure. I’ve tried to go over to the countries where the repression is most intense, and where the U.S. is backing it, and expose it and stop it.”

“It’s systematic,” he went on. “It’s the exact same tactics in country after country, with local adaptations, and often the officers are all trained at the same U.S. military bases—Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Leavenworth [and] at the Inter-American Defense College, in the case of the Latin American officers.”

“It’s not unique to the U.S.,” Nairn said. “This is standard for big powers. … If you wanted to have any kind of impact in politics you had to align yourself with some kind of killer force, be it the Americans, NATO or the Taliban, or some other armed faction capable of fast mass killing. Without that you had no chance.”

“In Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, it’s reached the point of political and social breakdown,” Nairn said. “There’s no stopping it. It’s out of control. There are not two sides. It [has fractured into] many sides. It’s analogous to what happened in Cambodia, with the massive U.S. bombing of Cambodia, which paved the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. [It has destroyed] any semblance of normal politics or even society. In that kind of environment the most evil, the most violent, have a better chance to rise and prevail.”

Ceaseless war and indiscriminant killing define the U.S. imperial power. But this policy, he said, has backfired.

“Unless you have enough of an enemy out there, unless you have enough fighting going on, unless you have enough drama going on, a big powerful state, one of whose pillars is war, like the United States, or like, say, today’s Israel—[both of them examples] of Sparta-type states—they can’t sustain themselves,” he said. “They need a high level of dramatic tension. They have to constantly be provoking, constantly causing trouble here and there.”

“We’re now in a moment where these operations of willful murder on the part of the U.S. and provocation have come back to bite [the United States],” he said. “That doesn’t usually happen. There was no consequence like that from Central America. There was no consequence like that from Haiti, Palestine or South Africa. But in this case it happened. Operations like the U.S. backing of the mujahedeen to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan … the U.S. backing of the various anti-Assad Islamist forces in Syria, have given birth to first al-Qaida and then ISIS. That wasn’t the U.S. intention. They didn’t want to create al-Qaida in the sense of the al-Qaida that attacks the U.S. They didn’t want to create an ISIS, which is now a political nightmare.”

“The Bible says they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind,” he said. “Well, usually that isn’t true. It’s not true most of the time. It’s like the other slogan: The people united will never be defeated. Not true. The people united get defeated all the time. They get crushed. They get massacred. They get thrown into mass graves. But sometimes you sow the wind and you do reap the whirlwind. And that’s what’s happening now to the West with ISIS.”