CIA Agents Infest US Mass Media -- 3rd of 4 parts

DANIEL SHEEHAN:
And that, of course, was what were the high halcyon days of this, under George Bush, when he was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and a little bit earlier when Richard Nixon was the President of the United States. And when you have that kind of attitude toward the rest of the world, it becomes inevitable, of course, that that kind of infection tends to feed back into the domestic policies of the United States, such that you have Richard Nixon engaging the "Plumbers" unit, and the others who began to use espionage and basically terrorist tactics against the domestic citizenry of the United States: infiltrating Black civil rights organizations, the feminist organizations, the anti-war groups. And, in fact, they began playing dirty tricks on them: writing false memos, accusing the leaders of certain movements of committing adultery, or of having affairs with other people inside [their organizations]; consciously attempting to disrupt and to destroy any type of democratic citizens' organization that took a position that was contrary to the position advocated SECRETLY by the Central Intelligence Agency.

That's the kind of infection that is at the heart of the democratic principles of our nation that we still see manifesting in things like the Iran-Contra Scandal with Oliver North and Richard Secord and the others who, in fact, secretly defied all of our democratic institutions: the resolutions of the Congress, the clearly enunciated voice of the majority of the people of our country who did not want to support the Contras in Latin America who were the former military national guard officers of the dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. And so, these men went underground and undertook criminal covert warfare which inevitably led them into seeking illicit sources of money, since they couldn't get it from the tax moneys of the American People. And they ended up establishing alliances with the Colombian cocaine cartel, that is still in the news, even as of this morning, with Pablo Escobar fighting his way out of his own luxury prison to escape.

We have this kind of history, tracking all the way from the end of the Second World War in 1945 and 1946, all the way up to today, the very day that we're speaking here, with manifestations of this type of criminal undercover alliance that they have. And it is hacking at the very heart of the institutions of democracy.

GARY NULL:
Thank you, Dan, for that explanation. I'm wondering at what point we will also begin to connect the corporate structures that function as a government policy think tank, frequently in the multi-national corporations in different countries, that decide that THEIR use of the natural resources, THEIR use of the cheap labor, THEIR use of the local population, THEIR general support of the dictators, all of this is in THEIR economic best interests. And then, if there is any dissent ... if there is any journalistic dissent, political dissent, social dissent -- they can then contact THEIR friends in OUR State Department who then use OUR Defense Department as a weapon of foreign policy to protect the interests of these multi-national corporations.

Then they whip the media into a frenzy, always showing THEIR side. But it is never an honest projection, so that when they do intervene, they can violate the national sanctity of other countries, just like they did with Grenada and Nicaragua and El Salvador [worst of all, with Panama and Iraq] and these other countries.

DANIEL SHEEHAN:
Well, there are a number of very stark examples of this, of course. Historically, Gary, one of the most transparent is the action taken against Guatemala in 1954, wherein the United Fruit Company, a member of the board of directors of which was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Allen Dulles,

[JD: Allen Dulles also was, ostensibly, one of the masterminds who engineered the murder of President John F. Kennedy. Jim Garrison has said that "Allen Dulles is a thoroughly evil man!"]

the brother of John Foster Dulles, who, in fact, was the Secretary of State of the United States [under President Eisenhower]. His brother, Allen, was the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and a member of the board of Directors of United Fruit Company, which owned VAST land holdings in the country of Guatemala, which had been SEIZED from the peasants by a major military government that was basically installed and kept in power by covert means of the Central Intelligence Agency.

When, in fact, the citizenry of Guatemala had organized themselves and had, in fact, installed a democratic government in Guatemala under Arbenz, the Central Intelligence Agency coordinated a major covert alliance with elements of the military in Guatemala and undertook a military seizure of the government in 1954. That was coordinated by E. Howard Hunt.

[JD: C.I.A. operative Marita Lorenz has testified, under oath in a civil court, that E. Howard Hunt was the paymaster to the assassins of President Kennedy. So Hunt has been Dulles' C.I.A. underling through at least a decade of C.I.A. atrocities.]

Now, that overthrow was -- for one of the major reasons -- to reinstall the United Fruit Company because the new democratic government under Arbenz had begun to question the legitimacy of the United Fruit Company to hold hundreds of thousands of acres of irrigatable land under the control of growing bananas for export, instead of allowing the peasants -- who had originally owned all of that land which had been illegitimately seized by the military government --to be reinstated with the possession of their land.

So, it was very clear, in that particular instance, that there is a direct relationship between the economic interests of a privately-owned, profit-making company, the United Fruit Company, and American foreign policy, which was undertaken covertly and criminally by the Central Intelligence Agency, at the helm of which was a member of the board of directors of the United Fruit Company.

[JD: There is, indeed, a domination of our U.S. State Department and U.S. Central Intelligence Agency by the United Fruit Company. A personal acquaintance of mine told me that, as a worker, he had witnessed banana boats of the United Fruit Company having their decks reinforced with steel plates in preparation for the C.I.A.'s Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in April of 1961. He also told me that when these banana boats returned from their combat mission, their decks were riddled with holes, presumably caused by heavy-caliber aircraft machine gun rounds.]

Now, those things have happened again and again. We have examples in Panama. We have examples in, of course, El Salvador, and we have examples in Nicaragua. There is some very unheralded writing in books about this. There is a former general of the United States Marine Corps, a man named Smedley Butler, who led three of the expeditionary forces of the United States Military into Nicaragua, back during the 1930s. And he eventually -- from direct experience on the ground -- came to his own personal conclusion that he could no longer participate in doing those kinds of things because, as he said, he realized that he was just a gun-thug for Brown Brothers- Harriman, the major American capital investment corporation.