[News] Assassinations and Coups - Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Aug 6 11:10:25 EDT 2009
http://www.counterpunch.org/blum08062009.html
August 6, 2009
Assassinations and Coups
Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes
By WILLIAM BLUM
If you catch the CIA with its hand in the cookie
jar and the Agency admits the obvious what your
eyes can plainly see that its hand is indeed in
the cookie jar, it means one of two things:
a) the CIA's hand is in several other cookie jars
at the same time which you don't know about and
they hope that by confessing to the one instance
they can keep the others covered up; or
b) its hand is not really in the cookie jar
it's an illusion to throw you off the right scent
but they want you to believe it.
There have been numerous news stories in recent
months about secret CIA programs, hidden from
Congress, inspired by former vice-president Dick
Cheney, in operation since the September 11
terrorist attacks, involving assassination of al
Qaeda operatives or other
non-believers-in-the-Empire abroad without the
knowledge of their governments. The Agency admits
to some sort of program having existed, but
insists that it was canceled; and if it was an
assassination program it was canceled before
anyone was actually assassinated. Another report
has the US military, not the CIA, putting the
plan or was it a different plan? into
operation, carrying out several assassinations
including one in Kenya that proved to be a severe
embarrassment and helped lead to the quashing of
the program. (The Guardian, July 13, 2009.)
All of this can be confusing to those following
the news. And rather irrelevant. We already know
that the United States has been assassinating
non-believers, or suspected non-believers, with
regularity, and impunity, in recent years, using
unmanned planes (drones) firing missiles, in
Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Somalia, if not
elsewhere. (Even more victims have been produced
from amongst those who happened to be in the same
house, car, wedding party, or funeral as the
non-believer.) These murders apparently don't
qualify as "assassinations", for somehow killing
"terrorists" from 2000 feet is morally and
legally superior to doing so from two feet away.
But whatever the real story is behind the current
rash of speculation, we should not fall into the
media's practice of at times intimating that
multiple or routine CIA assassination attempts
would be something shocking or at least very unusual.
I've compiled a list of CIA assassination
attempts, successful and unsuccessful, against
prominent foreign political figures, from 1949
through 2003, which, depending on how you count
it, can run into the hundreds (targeting Fidel
Castro alone totals 634 according to Cuban
intelligence)2; the list can be updated by adding
the allegedly al Qaeda leaders among the drone
attack victims of recent years. Assassination and
torture are the two things governments are most
loath to admit to, and try their best to cover
up. It's thus rare to find a government document
or recorded statement mentioning a particular
plan to assassinate someone. There is, however,
an abundance of compelling circumstantial
evidence to work with. The following list does
not include several assassinations in various
parts of the world carried out by anti-Castro
Cubans employed by the CIA and headquartered in the United States.
1949 - Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader
1950s - CIA/Neo-Nazi hit list of more than 200
political figures in West Germany
to be "put out of the way" in the event of a Soviet invasion
1950s - Chou En-lai, Prime minister of China, several attempts on his life
1950s, 1962 - Sukarno, President of Indonesia
1951 - Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea
1953 - Mohammed Mossadegh, Prime Minister of Iran
1950s (mid) - Claro M. Recto, Philippines opposition leader
1955 - Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India
1957 - Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt
1959, 1963, 1969 - Norodom Sihanouk, leader of Cambodia
1960 - Brig. Gen. Abdul Karim Kassem, leader of Iraq
1950s-70s - José Figueres, President of Costa Rica, two attempts on his life
1961 - Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, leader of Haiti
1961 - Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo (Zaire)
1961 - Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Republic
1963 - Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam
1960s-70s - Fidel Castro, President of Cuba, many attempts on his life
1960s - Raúl Castro, high official in government of Cuba
1965 - Francisco Caamaño, Dominican Republic opposition leader
1965-6 - Charles de Gaulle, President of France
1967 - Che Guevara, Cuban leader
1970 - Salvador Allende, President of Chile
1970 - Gen. Rene Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of Army, Chile
1970s, 1981 - General Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama
1972 - General Manuel Noriega, Chief of Panama Intelligence
1975 - Mobutu Sese Seko, President of Zaire
1976 - Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica
1980-1986 - Muammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya,
several plots and attempts upon his life
1982 - Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran
1983 - Gen. Ahmed Dlimi, Moroccan Army commander
1983 - Miguel d'Escoto, Foreign Minister of Nicaragua
1984 - The nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate
1985 - Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah,
Lebanese Shiite leader (80 people killed in the attempt)
1991 - Saddam Hussein, leader of Iraq
1993 - Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia
1998, 2001-2 - Osama bin Laden, leading Islamic militant
1999 - Slobodan Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia
2002 - Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Afghan Islamic leader and warlord
2003 - Saddam Hussein and his two sons
For those of you who collect lists about splendid
US foreign policy post-World War II, here are a
few more that, lacking anything better to do,
I've put together: Attempts to overthrow more
than 50 foreign governments, most of which had
been democratically-elected. (* = successful ouster of a government.)
Albania 1949-53
East Germany 1950s
Iran 1953 *
Guatemala 1954 *
Costa Rica mid-1950s
Syria 1956-7
Egypt 1957
Indonesia 1957-8
British Guiana 1953-64 *
Iraq 1963 *
North Vietnam 1945-73
Cambodia 1955-70 *
Laos 1958-60 *
Ecuador 1960-63 *
Congo 1960 *
France 1965
Brazil 1962-64 *
Dominican Republic 1963 *
Cuba 1959 to present
Bolivia 1964 *
Indonesia 1965 *
Ghana 1966 *
Chile 1964-73 *
Greece 1967 *
Costa Rica 1970-71
Bolivia 1971 *
Australia 1973-75 *
Angola 1975, 1980s
Zaire 1975
Portugal 1974-76 *
Jamaica 1976-80 *
Seychelles 1979-81
Chad 1981-82 *
Grenada 1983 *
South Yemen 1982-84
Suriname 1982-84
Fiji 1987 *
Libya 1980s
Nicaragua 1981-90 *
Panama 1989 *
Bulgaria 1990 *
Albania 1991 *
Iraq 1991
Afghanistan 1980s *
Somalia 1993
Yugoslavia 1999
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 *
Iraq 2003 *
After his June 4 Cairo speech, President Obama
was much praised for mentioning the 1953 CIA
overthrow of Iranian prime minister Mohammed
Mossadegh. But in his talk in Ghana on July 11 he
failed to mention the CIA coup that ousted
Ghanian president Kwame Nkrumah in 1966,
referring to him only as a "giant" among African
leaders. The Mossadegh coup is one of the most
well-known CIA covert actions. Obama could not
easily get away without mentioning it in a talk
in the Middle East looking to mend fences. But
the Nkrumah ouster is one of the least known;
indeed, not a single print or broadcast news
report in the American mainstream media saw fit
to mention it at the time of the president's talk. Like it never happened.
And the next time you hear that Africa can't
produce good leaders, people who are committed to
the welfare of the masses of their people, think
of Nkrumah and his fate. And think of Patrice
Lumumba, overthrown in the Congo 1960-61 with the
help of the United States; Agostinho Neto of
Angola, against whom Washington waged war in the
1970s, making it impossible for him to institute
progressive changes; Samora Machel of Mozambique
against whom the CIA supported a
counter-revolution in the 1970s-80s period; and
Nelson Mandela of South Africa (now married to
Machel's widow), who spent 28 years in prison thanks to the CIA.
William Blum is the author of
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567512526/counterpunchmaga>Killing
Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since
World War II,
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567511945/counterpunchmaga>Rogue
State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power.
and
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1887128727/counterpunchmaga>West-Bloc
Dissident: a Cold War Political
Memoir<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567511945/counterpunchmaga>.
He can be reached at: <mailto:BBlum6 at aol.com>BBlum6 at aol.com
Freedom Archives
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415 863-9977
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