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The U.S. is backing Ukraine's extreme right-wing Svoboda
party and violent neo-Nazis whose armed uprising paved the way for a
Western-backed coup. Events in the Ukraine are giving us another glimpse
through the looking-glass of U.S. propaganda wars against fascism,
drugs and terrorism. The ugly reality behind the mirror is that the U.S.
government has a long and unbroken record of working with fascists,
dictators, druglords and state sponsors of terrorism in every region of
the world in its elusive but relentless quest for unchallenged global
power.
Behind a firewall of impunity and protection from the State
Department and the CIA, U.S. clients and puppets have engaged in the
worst crimes known to man, from murder and torture to coups and
genocide. The trail of blood from this carnage and chaos leads directly
back to the steps of the U.S. Capitol and the White House. As historian
Gabriel Kolko observed in 1988, "The notion of an honest puppet is a
contradiction Washington has failed to resolve anywhere in the world
since 1945." What follows is a brief A to Z guide to the history of that
failure.
1. Afghanistan
In the 1980s, the U.S. worked with Pakistan and Saudi
Arabia to overthrow Afghanistan's socialist government. It funded,
trained and armed forces led by conservative tribal leaders whose power
was threatened by their country's progress on education, women's rights
and land reform. After Mikhail Gorbachev withdrew Soviet forces in 1989,
these U.S.-backed warlords tore the country apart and boosted opium
production to an unprecedented level of 2,000 to 3,400 tons per year.
The Taliban government cut opium production by 95% in two years
between 1999 and 2001, but the U.S. invasion in 2001 restored the
warlords and drug lords to power. Afghanistan now ranks 175th out of 177 countries in the world for corruption, 175th out of 186
in human development, and since 2004, it has produced an unprecedented
5,300 tons of opium per year. President Karzai's brother, Ahmed Wali
Karzai, was well known as a CIA-backed drug lord.
After a major U.S. offensive in Kandahar province in 2011, Colonel
Abdul Razziq was appointed provincial police chief, boosting a heroin smuggling operation that already earned him $60 million per year in one of the poorest countries in the world.
2. Albania
Between 1949 and 1953, the U.S. and U.K. set out to
overthrow the government of Albania, the smallest and most vulnerable
communist country in Eastern Europe. Exiles were recruited and trained
to return to Albania to stir up dissent and plan an armed uprising. Many
of the exiles involved in the plan were former collaborators with the
Italian and German occupation during World War II. They included former Interior Minister Xhafer Deva,
who oversaw the deportations of "Jews, Communists, partisans and
suspicious persons" (as described in a Nazi document) to Auschwitz.
Declassified U.S. documents have since revealed that Deva was one of 743 fascist war criminals recruited by the U.S. after the war.
3. Argentina
U.S. documents declassified in 2003
detail conversations between U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
and Argentinian Foreign Minister Admiral Guzzetti in October 1976, soon
after the military junta seized power in Argentina. Kissinger explicitly
approved the junta's "dirty war," in which it eventually killed up to
30,000, most of them young people, and stole 400 children from the
families of their murdered parents. Kissinger told Guzzetti, "Look, our
basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed... the quicker you
succeed the better." The U.S. Ambassador in Buenos Aires reported that
Guzzetti "returned in a state of jubilation, convinced that there is no
real problem with the US government over that issue." (" Daniel Gandolfo," "Presente!")
