BEYOND THE MEDIA MATRIX

PAGE 18

THE INFORMATION PRESENTED BELOW MAY ASSIST YOU IN BREAKING THROUGH THE MEDIA MATRIX TO FIND EXPLANATIONS - CLOSER TO THE TRUTH - THAT THE GLOBAL OLIGARCHY-CONTROLLED CORPORATE MEDIA TRY VERY HARD TO PREVENT YOU FROM KNOWING.

THE SUBJECTS ARE LISTED ALPHABETICALLY.

SURVEILLANCE STATE

"Society would be dominated by an elite ... which would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control.
... The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieve/review by the authorities."

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era", 1970

"The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell's "1984" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World." The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second."

Chris Hedges, 2010

"The goal of the corporate state is to create a total control society - one in which the government is able to track the movements of people in real time and control who does what, when and where. In exchange, the government promises to provide security and convenience, the two highly manipulative, siren-song catchwords of our modern age."

John W. Whitehead, 2010

"We are going to have a war on terror which you can never win, and so you can always keep taking people's liberties away. The media is going to convince everybody that the war on terror is real. The ultimate goal is to get everybody in the world chipped with an RFID chip, and have all money be on the chips, and if anyone wants to protest what we do, we turn off the chip."

Nicholas Rockefeller to producer Aaron Russo - eleven months before the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks

"Whether for good or bad, surveillance machines are going to get smarter. They're already starting to recognise people's faces in the street, and systems that spot abnormal behavior will not be far behind... Once connected to such intelligent systems, closed-circuit television (CCTV) will shift from being a mainly passive device for gathering evidence after a crime, to a tool for crime prevention...[The system works by detecting any behaviors that deviate from the 'normal' range of human behavior:] the computer recognises them as pattems. If anyone deviates from these patterns, the system sounds the alarm... it spots any abnormal behavior."

New Scientist, December 11, 1999

"We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government."

US Supreme Court Justice William O.Douglas

"In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life."

Prof. Alfred W. McCoy, 2009

"One of the first booms for the homeland security industry was surveillance cameras, 4.2 million of which have been installed in Britain, one for every fourteen people, and 30 million in the U.S.."

Naomi Klein in her book "The Shock Doctrine"

"There's going to be an event. We are going to go into Afghanistan. We are going to go into Iraq... We are going to have a war on terror which you can never win, and so you can always keep taking people's liberties away ... The media is going to conviince everybody that the war on terror is real... The ultimate goal is to get everybody in the world chipped with an RFID chip, and have all money be on the chips, and if anyone wants to protest what we do, we turn off the chip."

Nicholas Rockefeller to Aaron Russo, producer of the film 'America:Freedom to Fascism', eleven months before the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001

"FEMA became, under President Ronald Reagan, the agency responsible for preserving and refining the 'Garden Plot' strategies for surveillance and detention of domestic protest."

Peter Dale Scott in his book "The Road to 9/11"

"While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq, military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here."

Prof. Alfred W. McCoy, 2009

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

George Orwell, from his novel "1984"

"The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyzes them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government, or someone that they suspect of terrorism, they are collecting your communications to do so."

Edward Snowden

"Totalitarian systems accrue to themselves omnipotent power by first targeting and demonizing a defenseless minority. Poor African-Americans, like Muslims, have been stigmatized by elites and the mass media. The state, promising to combat the "lawlessness" of the demonized minority, demands that authorities be emancipated from the constraints of the law. Arguments like this one were used to justify the "war on drugs" and the "war on terror"."

Chris Hedges, 2014

"In the future, whether it's entering your home, opening your car, entering your workspace, getting a pharmacy prescription refilled, or having your medical records pulled up, everything will come off that unique key that is your iris. iris. Every person, place, and thing on this planet will be connected to the iris system."

Jeff Carter, CDO of Global Rainmakers

"The capacity to assert social and political control over the individual will vastly increase. It will soon be possible to assert almost continuous control over every citizen and to maintain up-to-date files, containing even the most personal details about health and personal behavior of every citizen, in addition to the more customary data. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. Power will gravitate into the hands of those who control information. Our existing institutions will be supplanted by pre-crisis management institutions, the task of which will be to identify in advance, likely social crises and to develop programs to cope with them."

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book 'Between Ages, America's Role in the Technetronic Era'

"I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.
... I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy, and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."

Edward Snowden

"[The National Security Agency's monitoring capability] at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it ç doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology... I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America."

Senator Frank Church, chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence in 1975

"New security technologies could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy."

Prof. Alfred W. McCoy

"The shadow of Orwell's nightmarish vision of a totalitarian society with its all-embracing reach of surveillance and repression now works its way through American politics like a lethal virus. Orwell's dystopia has come to fruition, reshaping the American body politic."

Henry Giroux, 2014

"Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite's brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control."

Chris Hedges

"One of the characteristics of tyranny is the monitoring and surveillance of citizens. Done primarily as a means of control, this has existed in every authoritarian state, not to mention totalitarian dictatorship, which seeks total control of the population. The defense is almost always based on national security grounds."

William F. Pepper in his book "An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"

"Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. ...it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use this system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life."

Edward Snowden

"Police and national intelligence and security agencies, which carry out wholesale surveillance against the population and serve as the corporate elite's brutal enforcers, are omnipotent by intention. They are designed to impart fear, even terror, to keep the population under control. And until the courts and the legislative bodies give us back our rights - which they have no intention of doing - things will only get worse for the poor and the rest of us. We live in a post-constitutional era."

Chris Hedges

SUTTON, ANTONY
British-born economist and historian (1925-2002) who exposed in his books
the corporate and financial elite's global agenda of monopoly capitalism
as well as their economic and political support for both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia

quotations from the book
"Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution"
by Antony C. Sutton, 1974

"Monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers."

*

"Before World War I, the financial and business structure of the United States was dominated by two conglomerates: Standard Oil, or the Rockefeller enterprise, and the Morgan complex of industries-finance and transportation companies. Rockefeller and Morgan trust alliances dominated not only Wall Street but, through interlocking directorships, almost the entire economic fabric of the United States."

*

"The major money powers of the west enlarged their monopoly ambitions and broadened horizons on a global scale. The gigantic Russian market was to be converted into a captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few high-powered American financiers and the corporations under their control."

*

"A syndicate of international financiers ... wanted markets that could be exploited monopolistically without fear of competition from Russians, Germans, or anyone else - including American businessmen outside the charmed circle. This closed group was apolitical and amoral. In 1917, it had a single-minded objective - a captive market in Russia, all presented under, and intellectually protected by, the shelter of a league [League of Nations] to enforce the peace."

*

"The technique, used by the monopolists to gouge society, was set forth in the early twentieth century by Frederick C. Howe 'Confessions of a Monopolist'. First, says Howe, politics is a necessary part of business. To control industries it is necessary to control Congress and the regulators and thus make society go to work for you, the monopolist. So, according to Howe, the two principles of a successful monopolist are, "First, let Society work for you; and second, make a business of politics. "These, wrote Howe, are the basic "rules of big business.""

*

"The Russian governments refusal to allow the deal between the Rockefellers and Rothschilds and other major oil monopolies to divide up the world's oil reserves, may well have spurred discontent among these powerful interests. If Russia refused to allow them to control all the oil and have a right to all oil, did this mean that Russia was planning on building a domestic oil industry? If this were the case, it could pose a threat to all the entrenched economic and financial interests, particularly those of the Rockefellers and Rothschilds, as Russia's significant oil reserves and resources would allow it to possibly even surpass the United States in industrialization."

*

"During the civil war in Russia between the Reds and the Whites, while Wall Street financiers were aiding the Bolsheviks quietly, they also began to finance Aleksandr Kolchak (of the Whites) with millions of dollars, in order to ensure that whoever emerged victorious in the war, Wall Street would win."

*****

quotations form the book
"Wall Street and FDR"
by Antony C. Sutton, 1976

"John D. Rockefeller and his 19th century fellow-capitalists were convinced of one absolute truth: that no great monetary wealth could be accumulated under the impartial rules of a competitive laissez faire society. The only sure road to the acquisition of massive wealth was monopoly: drive out your competitors, reduce competition, eliminate laissez-faire, and above all get state protection for your industry through compliant politicians and government regulation. This last avenue yields a legal monopoly, and a legal monopoly always leads to wealth."

*

"Corporate socialism is a system where those few who hold the legal monopolies of financial and industrial control profit at the expense of all others in society."

*

"The philosophy of Wall Street financiers was anything but laissez-faire competition, which was the last system they envisaged. Socialism, communism, fascism or their variants were acceptable. The ideal for these financiers was "cooperation," forced if necessary. Individualism was out, and competition was immoral... compulsory cooperation was their golden road to a legal monopoly."

*

"In the writing of Bernard Baruch is seen the basic objectives of Karl Marx writing in The Communist Manifesto. What is different between the two systems are the names of the elitist few running the operation known as state planning; the vanguard of the proletariat in Karl Marx is replaced by the vanguard of big business in Bernard Baruch."

*
"The story of an attempted takeover of executive power in the United States [the plot to overthrow Franklin Roosevelt] was suppressed, not only by parties directly interested, but also by several institutions usually regarded as protectors of constitutional liberty and freedom of inquiry. Among the groups suppressing information were (1) the Congress of the United States, (2) the press, notably Time magazine and The New York Times, and (3) the White House itself. It is also notable that no academic inquiry has been conducted into what is surely one of the more ominous events in recent American history."

*
"Franklin D. Roosevelt privately believed that the U.S. government was owned by a financial elite."

*
"Corporate socialism is the political way of running an economy that is more attractive to big business because it avoids the rigors and the imposed efficiency of a market system... through business control or influence in regulatory agencies and the police power of the state, the political system is an effective way to gain a monopoly, and a legal monopoly always leads to wealth."

*

"The objective of [the financial elite] is monopoly acquisition of wealth - corporate socialism. It thrives on the political process, and it would fade away if it were exposed to the activity of a free market."

*****

quotations from the book
"Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"
by Antony C. Sutton, 1976

"It is in the pecuniary interests of the international bankers to centralize political power - and this centralization can best be achieved within a collectivist society, such as socialist Russia, national socialist Germany, or a Fabian socialist United States.
There can be no full understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century American politics and foreign policy without the realization that this financial elite effectively monopolizes Washington policy."

*

"In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power center that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obviously subversive - foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits, if you will), for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families."

*

"We find persistent recurrence of the same names: Owen Young, Gerard Swope, Hjalmar Schacht, Bernard Baruch, etc.; the same international banks: J. P. Morgan, Guaranty Trust, Chase Bank.
This group of international bankers backed the Bolshevik Revolution and subsequently profited from the establishment of a Soviet Russia. This group backed Roosevelt and profited from New Deal socialism. This group also backed Hitler and certainly profited from German armament in the 1930s."

*

"The total result of the manipulation of society by the Establishment elite has been four major wars in sixty years, a crippling national debt, abandonment of the Constitution, suppression of freedom and opportunity, and creation of a vast credibility gulf between the man in the street and Washington, D.C. While the transparent device of two major parties trumpeting artificial differences, circus-like conventions, and the cliché of "bipartisan foreign policy" no longer carries credibility, and the financial elite itself recognizes that its policies lack public acceptance, it is obviously prepared to go it alone without even nominal public support."

*

"Paul Warburg's revolutionary plan to get American Society to go to work for Wall Street was astonishingly simple. Even today, academic theoreticians cover their blackboards with meaningless equations, and the general public struggles in bewildered confusion with inflation and the coming credit collapse, while the quite simple explanation of the problem goes undiscussed and almost entirely uncomprehended - the Federal Reserve System is a legal private monopoly of the money supply operated for the benefit of the few under the guise of protecting and promoting the public interest."

*

"Both fascist and communist systems are based on naked, unfettered political power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.P. Morgan and J.D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to 'go political' and make society go to work for the monopolists," and that, "the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers.
... Russia, then [early 20th century] and now, constituted the greatest potential competitive threat to American industrial and financial supremacy... The gigantic Russian market was to be converted into a captive market and a technical colony to be exploited by a few high-powered American financiers and the corporations under their control."

*

"Wars are started (and stopped) with no shred of coherent explanation. Political words have never matched political deeds. The reason is because the center of political power has been elsewhere than with elected and presumably responsive representatives in Washington, and this power elite has its own objectives, which are inconsistent with those of the public at large."

*

"I. G. Farben and Standard Oil of New Jersey suppressed development of the synthetic rubber industry in the United States, to the advantage of the German Wehrmacht and to the disadvantage of the United States in World War II."

*

"General Electric was prominent in financing Hitler, it profited handsomely from war production - and yet it managed to evade bombing in World War lI."

*

"Henry Ford and Edsel Ford respectively contributed money to Hitler and profited from German wartime production. Standard Oil of New Jersey, General Electric, General Motors, and I.T.T ... made financial or technical contributions which comprise prima facie evidence of "participating in planning or carrying out Nazi enterprises."

*

* The financing for Hitler and his S. S. street thugs came in part from affiliates or subsidiaries of U.S. firms, including Henry Ford in 1922, payments by I. G. Farben and General Electric in 1933, followed by the Standard Oil of New Jersey and I.T.T. subsidiary payments to Heinrich Himmler up to 1944."

*

* U.S. multi-nationals under the control of Wall Street profited handsomely from Hitler's military construction program in the 1930s and at least until 1942."

*****

quotations from the book
"America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones"
by Antony Sutton, 1983

"There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations, are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can never be the result of a conspiracy, they can never result from premeditated planned group action.
... Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non-existent."

*

"Without controlled conflict this New World Order will not come about... The International bankers backed the Nazis, the Soviet Union, North Korea, North Vietnam against the United States. The "conflict" built profits while pushing the world ever closer to One World Government. The process continues today."

*

"The so-called establishment in the U.S. uses "managed conflict." The practice of "managing" crises to bring about a favorable outcome - favorable to the elite."

*

"The manipulation of "left" and "right on the domestic front is duplicated in the international field where "left" and "right" political structures are artificially constructed and collapsed in the drive for a one-world synthesis.

*

"College textbooks present war and revolution as more or less accidental results of conflicting forces. The decay of political negotiation into physical conflict comes about, according to these books, after valiant efforts to avoid war. Unfortunately, this is nonsense. War is always a deliberate creative act by individuals."

*

"Western textbooks have gigantic gaps. For example, after World War II the Tribunals set up to investigate Nazi war criminals were careful to censor any materials recording Western assistance to Hitler. By the same token, Western textbooks on Soviet economic development omit any description of the economic and financial aid given to the 1917 Revolution and subsequent economic development by Western firms and banks."

*

"Revolution is always recorded as a spontaneous event by the politically or economically deprived against an autocratic state. Never in Western textbooks will you find the evidence that revolutions need finance and the source of the finance in many cases traces back to Wall Street."

*

"It can be argued that our Western history is every bit as distorted, censored, and largely useless as that of Hitler's Germany or the Soviet Union or Communist China. No Western foundation will award grants to investigate such topics, few Western academics can "survive" by researching such theses and certainly no major publisher will easily accept manuscripts reflecting such arguments."

*

"There is a largely unrecorded history and it tells a story quite different than our sanitized textbooks. It tells a story of the deliberate creation of war, the knowing finance of revolution to change governments, and the use of conflict to create a New World Order."

*

"Corporations - even large corporations - are dominated by banks and trust companies, and in turn these banks and trust companies are dominated by The Order [Skull and Bones] and its allies."

*

"The intellectual world is locked into a phony verbal battle between "left" and "right," whereas the real struggle is the battle between individual freedom and the encroaching power of the absolute State.
... In the West the choice is basically between a controlled "left-oriented" information and a controlled "right-oriented" information. The conflict between the two controlled groups keeps an apparent informational conflict alive. Unwelcome facts that fall into neither camp are conveniently forgotten. Books that fall into neither camp can be effectively neutralized because they will incur the wrath of both "right" and "left".
In brief, any publication which points up the fallacy of the Left-Right dichotomy is ignored... and citizens keep trooping down to the polling booths in the belief they have a 'choice"."

*

The Bush family [was] involved with the early development of the Soviet Union, then with financing the Nazis.

*****

quotations from the book
"The Federal Reserve Conspiracy"
by Antony Sutton, 1995

"The world bankers have been building an international money machine: an international Federal Reserve System with power to control the worlds financial and economic system."

*

"The Congress handed over all monetary powers to the Fed [Federal Reserve] in 1913. The Fed is a private bank, owned by banks, and pays dividends on its shares owned only by banks. The Fed is a private Bankers Bank."

*

"The Fed has a legal monopoly of money granted by Congress in 1913 proceedings that were unconstitutional and fraudulent."

*

"The Congress has never investigated the Fed and is highly unlikely to do so. No one sees Fed accounts; they are not audited. No balance sheets are issued. No one, but no one, ever criticizes the Fed and survives."

*

"Academicians are interested in protecting the Fed monopoly. An academic book criticizing the Fed will never find a publisher and the economist author would probably find tenure denied."

SYRIA

"The American war against Syria and its covert actions against Iran are part of a larger strategy to weaken and encircle Russia.
... The goal of the American elite is to make Syria, and then Iran, and then Russia join the ranks of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. The plan is to smash it into ethnic and religious lines, and to fuel fighting between these groups for many years."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"In 2009, Bashar Assad announced that he would refuse to sign an agreement to allow a Qatar/Turkey pipeline to run through Syria.
Assad further enraged the Gulf's Sunni monarchs by endorsing a Russian-approved pipeline running from Iran's side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon. This pipeline would make Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market and dramatically increase Tehran's influence in the Middle East and the world.
... Secret cables and reports by the U.S., Saudi and Israeli intelligence agencies indicate that the moment Assad rejected the Qatari pipeline, military and intelligence planners quickly arrived at the consensus that fomenting a Sunni uprising in Syria to overthrow the uncooperative Bashar Assad was a feasible path to achieving the shared objective of completing the Qatar/Turkey gas link. In 2009, soon after Bashar Assad rejected the Qatar pipeline, the CIA began funding opposition groups in Syria."

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., 2016

"Over 100 people died in Paris (November 2015). While thousands are dying in Yemen, every month... While 17,000 already vanished in Iran - victims of West-sponsored terrorism... While hundreds of thousands have been dying in Libya and Syria... While millions have been dying in Somalia and Iraq... While some 10 millions already died in a looted and raped DRC (the Democratic Republic of Congo) ... All of them victims of Western assaults and banditry or of Western-sponsored terrorism directly."

Andre Vltchek, 2015

"In 2013, the Pentagon published the Wright plan, which programmed the creation of a new state straddling Iraq and Syria in order to cut the Silk Road between Baghdad and Damascus. This mission was carried out by Daesh.
China therefore modified the layout of its route. Beijing finally decided to build the route through Egypt, and invested in the doubling of the Suez Canal and the creation of a vast industrial zone 120 kilometres from Cairo."

Thierry Meyssan, voltairnet.org, 2018

"[The Syrian conflict as a war for control of the region's resources with] the west, Gulf countries and Turkey supporting [Assad's] opposition, while Russia, China and Iran support the regime.
If the situation unravels, there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria, and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want in order to isolate the Syrian regime."

a study by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency - August 12, 2012

"Two members of the Turkish parliament, high-level American sources and others admitted that the Turkish government - a NATO country - carried out the chemical weapons attacks in Syria and falsely blamed them on the Syrian government; and high-ranking Turkish government admitted on tape plans to carry out attacks and blame it on the Syrian government."

Washington's Blog March 30, 2016

"The reason ISIS is in Iraq and Syria is that the US equipped ISIS and sent ISIS to overthrow Assad when the British Parliament and the Russian government blocked Obama's planned invasion of Syria. ISIS is Washington's creation, just as is Al Qaeda."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2017

"In Yemen the U.S. and France are helping Saudi Arabia in its massive air war against Houthi Shi'ites. And it's the case in Syria, the scene of the most destructive war game of them all, where Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states are channeling money and arms to Al Qaeda, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS, ISIL and Daesh), and similar forces with the full knowledge of the U.S."

Daniel Lazare , 2015

"By one estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.
There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe.
There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.
... Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war."

Philip Giraldi, 2015

"The National Security Establishment is unwilling to negotiate an end to the Syrian crisis. It created the crisis as part of a long term strategy to defend Israel and help effectuate its racist, expansionist policies, while gobbling up the region's resources and countering Russian influence."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"The primarily UK Foreign Office-funded White Helmets, since their creation in 2013, is a faux first-responder organisation, established in Turkey and trained by an ex-British military mercenary.
... The majority of Syrians living in the heavily populated areas of Syria have never heard of the White Helmets.
... The White Helmets are one of the biggest propaganda heists ever seen in recent colonialist history. To suggest this organisation is "unarmed and neutral" is fraudulent. To suggest they are humanitarian is inaccurate and misleading as their videos demonstrate minimal paramedic expertise and maximum cinematic exploitation. They are a rag tag collection of armed fighters, co-opted into the terrorist and extremist gangs that are occupying areas of Syria and persecuting the civilians of those areas.
... The real Syria Civil Defence has none of the funding of the their US, British, NATO intelligence shadow state counterpart, but they have ten thousand times the integrity. They are recognised and respected by the Syrian people as the ones they call when they are in trouble. They are the officially recognised Syria civil defence that has received accolades for its global humanitarian excellence. In Syria, they are irreplaceable, despite the best efforts of the US, British, NATO and Gulf state organised crime syndicate."

Vanessa Beeley, 2017

TAX-EXEMPT FOUNDATIONS

"Powerful elite circles of the United States ... backed the introduction of genetically modified seeds into the world food chain as a strategic priority. That elite included not only the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and most other foundations tied to the large private family fortunes of the wealthiest American families. It also included the US State Department, the National Security Council, the US Department of Agriculture, as well as the leading policy circles of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, along with agencies of the United Nations including WHO and FAO."

F. William Engdahl

"The World Health Organization, the World Bank, the UN environmental department, the UN Population Fund, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are closing in on all of humanity with mass-scale vaccination programmes and genetically engineered food."

Jurriaan Maessen, 2012

"By 1956 the Ford Foundation had spent more than one billion dollars in contributions to 'education' and had thereby become a well-nigh all-encompassing influence over hundreds of colleges and universities."

Rene Wormser in the book "Foundations: Their Power and Influence"

"The organization of tax-exempt fortunes of international financiers into foundations [was] to be used for educational, scientific, and other public purposes... [The inheritance tax] drove the great private fortunes dominated by Wall Street into tax-exempt foundations, which became a major link in the Establishment network between Wall Street, the Ivy League, and the federal government... The foundations managed to acquire control over the primary Ivy League colleges, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The World Health Organization, the World Bank, the UN environmental department, the UN Population Fund, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are closing in on all of humanity with mass-scale vaccination programmes and genetically engineered food."

Jurriaan Maessen - "Vaccination Campaigns Part Of Population Reduction Policy", 2012

"Foundations use their funds to subvert and control American education."

Rene Wormser in the book "Foundations: Their Power and Influence"

TERRORISM

"War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times."

Howard Zinn, 2001

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

"Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies wage secret wars against the people which it would be politically impossible to wage openly. Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program: the purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy."

Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book "9/11 Synthetic Terror - made in the USA"

"Just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Barack Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so."

journalist Allan Nairn, 2010

"Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria."

Howard Zinn in his book "Terrorism and War"

"What occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time ... The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel. ... Many foreign nations and peoples hate Americans for the very reasons most Americans loathe me. Think about that."

Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran who bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995 - in a letter to Rita Cosby, Fox News Correspondent, April 27 2001

"There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism."

Noam Chomsky

"If they do it it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom."

Anthony Quainton, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984

"[Terrorism is] the unlawful use of force or violence committed by a group or individual, who has some connection to a foreign power or whose activities transcend national boundaries, against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives."

FBI definition of terrorism

THINK TANKS

INFLUENTIAL THINK TANKS

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS (CFR)
TRILATERAL COMMISSION (TC)
BILDERBERG GROUP
CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES (CSIS)
BUSINESS ROUND TABLE
ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION
FORD FOUNDATION
CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE
BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION
OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATION
BROOKINGS INSTITUTION
RAND CORPORATION
HERITAGE FOUNDATION
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
HOOVER INSTITUTION
HUDSON INSTITUTE
MANHATTEN INSTITUTE
CATO INSTITUTE
PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY (PNAC)

CHATHAM HOUSE / ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS (RIIA)
EUROPEAN ROUND TABLE OF INDUSTRIALISTS (ERT)
INTERNATIONAL CHAMBER OF COMMERCE (ICC)
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM
WORLD BUSINESS COUNCIL FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT (WBCSD)

"Right-wing think tanks producing an incessant flow of market-oriented studies were established in the 1970s. Among them are the Heritage Foundation, the American Economic Institute for Public Policy Research, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Business Roundtable.
... These think tanks virtually created the new conservative movement of the 1970s.
... The actual agenda of these corporate-funded think tanks is to (a) decrease government regulation of big business, (b) decrease taxes for corporations and for the rich, (c) destroy the unions, and (d) increase profits."

Helen Caldicott in her book "If You Love This Planet"

"Conservative funding finances right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, which provide easy jobs for conservatives who produce the sound bites and op-eds to fill up the mainstream news stories and editorial pages.
Although many progressive think tanks exist (including the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the World Policy Institute), media professionals don't like to use them.
... Conservative think tanks usually have more money than progressive ones, because the right is willing to serve wealthy corporate interests. Conservative pundits are often quite willing to sell their services. As intellectuals for hire, the right offers journalists mouthpieces for corporate America with the veneer of neutrality provided under the guise of a think tank."

John K. Wilson in his book "How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People"

"A comprehensive Nexis search for the twenty-five largest think tanks in U.S. news media for 2002 showed that explicitly conservative think tanks accounted for nearly half of the 25,000 think-tank citations in the news, whereas progressive think tanks accounted for only 12 percent... The pro-business Right understood that changing media was a crucial part of bringing right-wing ideas into prominence and their politicians into power."

Robert W. McChesney in his book "The Problem of the Media"

"The proliferation of movement conservative think tanks since the 1970s means that it's possible for a movement intellectual to make quite a good living by espousing certain positions. There's a price to be paid - you're expected to be an apparatchik, not an independent thinker - but many consider it a good deal."

Paul Krugman in his book "Conscience of a Liberal"

"The organized intellectual powers of the West -- namely, the principle think tanks and banking interests -- have sought to create a perfect global system of governance, one in which power does not sway from nation to nation, or West to East, but rather that power is centralized globally... it is through crises -- economic, political, and social -- that this process of global governance can be rapidly accelerated."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"Journalists have recused themselves from ranking the legitimacy of "experts," so corporate and political front groups with lofty names have the same opportunity to inject themselves into public debate as research institutions that still cling to old-fashioned standards of evidence and accuracy. These "think tanks" manufacture debate. That's what they do: Their aim is to create the illusion of controversy, even when the facts are indisputable, because they know how enslaved contemporary journalism is by the tyranny of false equivalence. What's more, the louder you are, the more outrageous your claim, the less civil your discourse, the farther you stand from common ground, the more welcome you will be as a guest and a source. It is not necessary to be right; to make the sale, it is only necessary to get attention."

Martin Kaplan in the book "What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics"

"Corporations and corporate foundations fund think tanks which formulate policies which will be favorable to business. Corporate attorneys draft legislation which will make those policies the law of the land. Corporate political action committees pay for the election campaigns of the politicians who ensure that such legislation becomes law, and lobbyists make sure the politicians stay bought. Corporate executives are appointed to lead the regulatory agencies which enforce (or dismantle) the laws that aren't favorable to business. National and multilateral trade and development agencies design and subsidize an international trading system dominated by the largest corporations. Governments and banks use public monies to subsidize and insure corporate investment."

George Draffan in his book "The Elite Consensus"

"Wall Street, multinational corporations, international banks and wealthy people have formed elite groups to serve as vehicles for their interests. These include Think Tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and others, which are interlocked with the Tax-exempt Foundations and the Federal Reserve."

Antony Sutton

"In 2000, the think tank and war lobby Project for a New American Century (PNAC) proposed a massive augmentation in US military power. In laying out this program, PNAC'S leadership recognized that the costly implementation of its far-reaching proposals to confirm, extend, and consolidate the coercive machinery of US global dominance would depend on a massive transformation in public opinion - through something akin to the surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941."

Anthony J. Hall in his book "Earth into Property"

"The major think tanks of the nation, specifically the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) ... are the policy-makers of the American Empire. Think tanks bring together elites from most power sectors of society ­ the military, political, corporate, banking, intelligence, academia, media, etc. ­ and they discuss, debate and ultimately produce strategy blueprints and recommendations for American foreign policy. Individuals from these think tanks move in and out of the policy-making circles, creating a revolving door between the policy-planners and those that implement them. The think tanks, in this context, are essentially the intellectual engines of the American Empire."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2011

THIRD WORLD

"By the 1980s, U.S. policymakers were rejecting the view that a more prosperous, economically independent Third World would work to the interests of U.S. capitalism. Instead, they sought to subordinate the economies of Third Word nations by rolling back development programs and weakening the political efficacy of their governments. The goal has been to create a world free for maximizing profits irrespective of the human and environmental costs.
One rollback weapon is the debt. Third World governments are burdened with huge debts and desperately strapped for funds. In order to meet payments and receive new credits from the U.S.dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), these governments have had to agree to heartless "structural adjustments;" including reductions in social programs, cuts in wages, the elimination of import controls, the removal of restrictions on foreign investments, and the privatization of state enterprises."

Michael Parenti in his book "Dirty Truths"

"By early 2000, the process of global financial deregulation was in many regards a fait accompli. Wall Street routinely invaded country after country. The domestic banking system was put on the auction block and reorganized under the surveillance of external creditors. National financial institutions were systematically destabilized and driven out of business; mass unemployment and poverty are the invariable results."

Michel Chossudovsky

"The whole third world is indebted to the banks. And it really is the financial power clique that keeps countries poor. Why does poverty continue? Because it has a purpose."

financial expert Jean-Pierre van Rossem

"The youth of the Third World will no longer tolerate living in circumstances that give them no hope for the future. From the young boys I met in the demobilization camps in Sierra Leone to the suicide bombers of Palestine and Chechnya, to the young terrorists who fly planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, we can no longer afford to ignore them. We have to take concrete steps to remove the causes of their rage, or we have to be prepared to suffer the consequences."

former Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who commanaded the UN peacekeping force in Rwanda in 1993-1994

"The TRIPS [Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights] agreement was designed by multinational corporations to seize the genetic resources of the planet, chiefly in Third World countries, which have the greatest biodiversity."

Marie-Monique Robin in the book "The World According to Monsanto", 2008

"We [economic hit men] ... will identify a third world country that has resources our corporations covet, such as oil, and then we arrange a huge loan to that country from the World Bank or one of its sister organizations. The money never actually goes to the country. It goes instead to US corporations, who build big infrastructure projects -- power grids, industrial parks, harbors, highways -- things that benefit a few very rich people but do not reach the poor at all. The poor aren't connected to the power grids. They don't have the skills to get jobs in industrial parks. But they and the whole country are left holding this huge debt, and it's such a big debt that the country can't possibly repay it. So at some point in time, we economic hit men go back to the country and say, Sell your oil real cheap to our oil companies. When we fail, which doesn't happen too often - then the jackals step in and either overthrow the governments or assassinate the leaders. If the jackals also fail, then and only then does the military go in."

John Perkins in his book "The Secret History of the American Empire"

"Every time weaker nations have attempted to reallocate their resources and undertake land reform to feed starving populations, powerful interests emanating from the rich world and its multilateral bodies have thwarted their efforts."

Susan George

"Is anyone in the U.S. innocent? Although those at the very pinnacle of the economic pyramid gain the most, millions of us depend - either directly or indirectly - on the exploitation of the LDCs [Less-Developed Countris] for our livelihoods. The resources and cheap labor that feed nearly all our businesses come from places like Indonesia, and very little ever makes its way back. The loans of foreign aid ensure that today's children and their grandchildren will be held hostage. They will have to allow our corporations to ravage their natural resources and will have to forego education, health, and other social services merely to pay us back. The fact that our own companies already received most this money to build the power plants, airports, and industrial parks does not factor into this formula. Does the excuse that most Americans are unaware of this constitute innocence? Uninformed and intentionally misinformed, yes - but innocent?"

John Perkins in his book "Confessions of Economic Hit Man"

"The real motivation behind US military interventions during the cold war was not Soviet deterrence but the crushing of popular, indigenous nationalist movements for independence, and the establishment of US control over strategic regions."

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed in his book "Behind the War on Terror"

"In the half century since the Korean War the United States has been involved in four major wars in the Third World: in Vietnam (1961-1975), in the Persian Gulf (1990-1991), in Colombia (1991-present), and in Afghanistan (2001-2002).' All four wars were fought in or near significant oil-producing areas. All four involved reliance on proxies who were also major international drug traffickers. The American habit of training, arming, and financing its drug-trafficking allies in order to help secure oil resources abroad has been a major factor in the huge increase in global illicit drug trafficking since World War II."

Peter Dale Scott, 2003

"What has taken place since the early 1980s has been a wealth transfer from the capital-starved Third World, primarily into the financing of deficits in the United States, and to a lesser degree Britain. During the 1980s, the combined nations of the developing sector transferred a total of $400 billion into the United States alone. This allowed the Reagan administration to finance the largest peacetime deficits in world history, while falsely claiming credit for 'the world's longest peacetime recovery.'
With high U.S. interest rates, a rising dollar, and the security of American government backing, fully 43 per cent of the record high U.S. budget deficits during the 1980s were 'financed' by this de facto looting of capital from the debtor countries of the once-developing sector. As with the Anglo-American bankers in the post-First World War Versailles reparations debt process, the debt was merely a vehicle to establish de facto economic control over entire sovereign countries."

William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"

"Third World elites dread socialism the way the rest of us might dread poverty and hunger. So, when push comes to shove, the wealthy classes of Third World countries, with a great deal of help from the corporate-military-political elites in our country, will use fascism to preserve capitalism while claiming they are saving democracy from communism."

Michael Parenti in his book " Dirty Truths"

"Third world debt has grown to more than $2.5 trillion, and the cost of servicing it - over $375 billion per year as of 2004- is more than all third world spending on health and education, and twenty times what developing countries receive annually in foreign aid. Over half the people in the world survive on less than two dollars per day, which is roughly the same amount they received in the early 1970s. Meanwhile, the top 1 percent of third world households accounts for 70 to 90 percent of all private financial wealth and real estate ownership in their country; the actual percentage depends on the specific country."

John Perkins in his book "Confessions of Economic Hit Man"

"Globalization is a kind of intellectual sedative that lulls and distracts its Third World victims while rich countries cripple them, ensuring that they will never be able to challenge the imperial powers."

Chalmers Johnson

"After 1971, a White House policy was initiated, under the effective control of Henry Kissinger, to control the economies of the nations and to reduce their populations, rather than to facilitate technology transfer and industrial growth. The strategy was to force the price of the cartelized world oil up by about a factor of four, recover the Arab oil receipts back into the British and American central banks, and lend them to the Third World to acquire control over those countries.
... The great bulk of the petro-dollars were repatriated in purchasing U.S. government debt and in deposit accounts in Chase Manhattan, Citibank, et al. From there they were loaned to the Third World, which could not otherwise buy the fuel they needed to survive, whence many of those countries became enslaved to the bankers, and forced to follow their edicts on how to run their countries."

F William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"

"With the Mossadegh overthrow in Iran, the United States served notice that it was not a country to be trusted, not the defender of democracy we portrayed ourselves to be, and that our aim was not to help the Third World. We simply wanted to control resources."

John Perkins in his book "The Secret History of the American Empire"

"In what became known as the Third World, approximately 80 per cent of mankind lived on the flanks of superpower rivalry, supplying raw materials for the processing economies of the First and Second Worlds, and striving to become market extensions of the market economies of the First World.
Third world politicians at that time had a different view about their international role, however. They regarded political independence as merely one essential step in the path of growth and development. They sought generalized technological advance, which should be coterminous with diversification of agriculture and the insertion of such infrastructure as would lead to the industrialization, and thereby closing of the huge gaps that separated the different worlds.
Led by Britain and France, the economic theorists of the First World determined that the export receipts of the Third World should decide the pace and quality of development and, when these fell below expectations, resort should be had to the Bretton Woods system whose machinery had been set up in the late 1940s. Above all, this meant the requirement of the stamp-of-approval of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and submission to the barbarous conditionalities which were the underpinning of IMF intervention.
... The United Nations was chosen as the arena where it was hoped that a new era of global cooperation would emerge. These hopes were never realized. One by one, the outstanding advocates of Third World development were removed from the seats of domestic power, and their solidarity was defeated in detail by the age-old principle of 'divide and conquer.' Export receipts and import prices were manipulated to create enormous gaps in balances of payments, and Third World countries were told that they must get the seal of approval of the IMF before any government or private institution would advance further loans. The IMF insisted on austere programs based on currency devaluations which increased misery in the Third World, was directly responsible for the spread of disease and was also successful in encouraging drug cultivation, as those unfortunate countries sought the chimera of a quick cash crop as a panacea for their fiscal difficulties."

Frederick Wills, Guyana's minister of foreign affairs, about the Group of Non-Aligned Nations meeting in Sri Lanka in 1976

THIRD WORLD INTERVENTIONS
COUPS/REGIME CHANGE/COLOR REVOLUTIONS

"The United States has overthrown governments in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq, not to mention the Congo (1960); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); Brazil (1961 & 1964); the Dominican Republic (1961 & 1963); Greece (1965 & 1967); Bolivia (1964 & 1971); El Salvador (1961); Guyana (1964); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); and of course Haiti (1991 and 2004). We've replaced democracy with dictatorship, dictatorship with chaos, and local rule with US. domination and occupation."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum in his book "Killing Hope"

"The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect "regime change". The cloaks of "human rights" and of "democracy" were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts."

Professor Eric Waddell, Global Research, 2007

"Directing and encouraging ethnic cleansing, playing one nationality off of another, bombing civilian infrastructure and murdering civilians [in Yugoslavia in the 1990s] ­ these acts engaged in by the U.S. and its NATO allies took place under the pleasant halo of 'humanitarian intervention.'"

Paul D'Amato, Dissident Voice, 2008

"There has been almost no coup or government overthrow since 1945 not led by the US."

John McMurtry

"The U.S. military acts in the interests of the corporate and financial elite, as those countries that do not submit to American economic hegemony are deemed enemies, and the military is ultimately sent in to implement 'regime change'."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"So how do you improve the business climate in third world countries? Well, it's easy. You murder priests (that is, priests and other religiously oriented groups who are involved too much with the concerns of the people - i.e., the "Marynollers," the Quakers, Catholic priests involved in Liberation Theology, etc), you torture peasant organizers, you destroy popular organizations, you institute mass murder and repression to crush any popular organizations (which might try to help the poor). And that improves the investment climate. So there's a secondary correlation between American aid and the deterioration of human rights. It's entirely natural that we should tend to aid countries that are egregious violators of fundamental human rights and that torture their citizens, and that's indeed what we find."

Noam Chomsky

"The greatest myth concerning American foreign policies is the deeply-held belief that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the American government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable. Of that Americans are certain. They genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can't see how kind and generous and self-sacrificing America has been."

author William Blum

"The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect "regime change". The cloaks of "human rights" and of "democracy" were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts."

Professor Eric Waddell, The United States' Global Military Crusade (1945- ), Global Research, February 2007

"In the last decades of the twentieth century, self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support or resources to the globe's trouble spots. If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day."

former Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who commanaded the UN peacekeping force in Rwanda in 1993-1994

"The CIA had developed a program to assassinate the President of Zaire [later Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)] Patrice Lumumba. The operation, didn't work. It was to give poison to Lumumba. And they couldn't find a setting in which to get the poison to him successfully in a way that it wouldn't appear to be a CIA operation. Instead, the CIA chief of station in Zaire talked to Lumumba aide and Belgian security police informer Joseph Mobutu about the threat that Lumumba posed, and Mobutu had his men kill Lumumba."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"All during the length of my fight for the independence of my country, I have never doubted for a single instant the final triumph of the sacred cause to which my companions and myself have consecrated our lives. But what we wish for our country, its right to an honorable life, to a spotless dignity, to an independence without restrictions, Belgian colonialism and its Western allies - who have found direct and indirect support, deliberate and not deliberate among certain high officials of the United Nations, this organization in which we placed all our confidence when we called for their assistance - have not wished it.
... History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity."

Patrice Lumumba's last letter to his wife before his assassination, December 1960

"Do American leaders really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the words "god" and "prayer" are regularly invoked in their talks, while American Hellfire missiles are sent screaming into a city center or a village marketplace teeming with life ...when they carry on endlessly about democracy and freedom, while American soldiers are smashing down doors, dragging off the men, humiliating the women, traumatizing the children... when they proclaim the liberation of a people and the bringing forth of a better life, while vast quantities of American depleted uranium are exploding into a fine vapor which will poison the air, the soil, the blood, and the genes forever."

William Blum in is book "Freeing the World to Death"

"The Americans who engineered countless military coups, death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes - instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror".

Naomi Klein

"The coup against Aristide, then, must be understood not in isolation, but as the culmination of activities that really began the minute he was re-elected in 2000. Destabilization efforts by the U.S. government, active U.S. support for the creation of a so-called civil-society opposition, and eventually the invasion of Haiti by an armed band of criminals and murderers were all part of a process designed to ensure that Haiti would return fully to the fold of the U.S. empire and its minions in Haiti."

Bill Fletcher, Jr, 2004

"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests.
In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died.
In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put General Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990.
In Peru, a fragile democratic government is still unraveling the agency's role in a decade of support for the now-deposed and disgraced president, Alberto K. Fujimori.
The United States had to invade Panama in 1989 to topple its narco-dictator, Manuel A. Noriega, who, for almost 20 years, was a valued informant for American intelligence."

John Perkins in his book "Confessions of Economic Hit Man"

"The United States had invaded small Caribbean and Central American countries on numerous occasions throughout the 20th century. Indeed, before the onset of Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s, Washington routinely overthrew regimes it disliked."

Ted Galen Carpenter, 2010

"There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves and their government."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

"A Pentagon memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off with Iran."

General Wesley Clark, Democracy Now, March 2, 2007

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism."

Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran

"The CIA orchestrated coup[s] in Guatemala in 1954 and the military occupations of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983... Whatever other motives may have been involved, the Cold War provided the indispensable justification for intervention. And for all the rhetoric about democracy and human rights that U.S. presidents employed during the struggle against communism, there was no indication that Washington would later revert to the practice of coercing Latin American countries merely, in Woodrow Wilson's infamous words, to teach those societies "to elect good men.""

Ted Galen Carpenter, 2010

"Since World War Two the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders, helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements, has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet, in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

author William Blum, in a speech at the University of Vermont, November 2, 2007

"Interventions are not against dictators but against those who try to distribute: not against Jiménez in Venezuela but Chávez, not against Somoza in Nicaragua but the Sandinistas, not against Batista in Cuba but Castro, not against Pinochet in Chile but Allende, not against Guatemala dictators but Arbenz, not against the shah in Iran but Mossadegh."

Johan Galtung, Norwegian founder of the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies

"After World War II, in the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in, among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua ... By the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror - hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile-from which the region has yet to fully recover."

Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's Workshop"

"The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all "what the President ordered." They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created the CIA and assigned it "duties related to intelligence affecting the national security." The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws of the United States."

Stephen Kinzer in his book "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq"

"American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon the free market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization" as the highest good, that will not change its laws to favor foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the country's social services or standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil. Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be reduced to basket cases, or, where feasible, simply overthrown."

William Blum

"Patrice Lumumba was the first elected Prime Minister and ascended to power in the Congo on June 30, 1960, the date of Congo' s independence from Belgium. Within ten weeks of being elected, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup. He was subsequently imprisoned and assassinated on January 17, 1961 by Western powers (United States, Belgium, France, England and the United Nations) in cahoots with local leaders such as Moise Tshombe and Joseph Desire Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seko)."

friendsofthecongo.org

"The trigger for military coups in Latin America were fears of popular demands for social reform and democratic change."

J. Patrice McSherry in the book "Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America"

"The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed."

Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana 1957-1966

U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II

Iran (1953); Guatemala(1954); Thailand (1957); Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971 & 1980); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic (1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 & 2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003); Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967); Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia (1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975); Pakistan (1977); Grenada (1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso (1987); Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda (1996);and Libya (2011). This list does not include a roughly equal number of failed coups, nor coups in Africa and elsewhere in which a U.S. role is suspected but unproven.

from William Blum's book "Killing Hope"

"On June 28, 2009, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was awakened by gunfire. A coup was carried out by US-trained military officers, including graduates of the infamous US Army School of the Americas (WHINSEC) in Georgia. President Zelaya was illegally taken to Costa Rica.
Democracy in Honduras ended as a de facto government of the rich and powerful seized control. A sham election backed by the US confirmed the leadership of the coup powers. The US and powerful lobbyists continue to roam the hemisphere trying to convince other Latin American countries to normalize relations with the coup government."

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond, 2010

"It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.... We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that United States Government and American hand be well hidden."

cable outlining CIA objectives in Chile to the station chief in Santiago

"In Indonesia in 1965 a group of young military officers attempted a coup against the U.S.-backed military establishment and murdered six of seven top military officers. The Agency seized this opportunity to overthrow Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which had three million members... Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA ... operation run from one-half million to more than one million people."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"80 percent of the officers who carried out the 1964 coup against Brazilian President Goulart had been trained by the United States."

Penny Lernoux in her book "Cry of the People"

"Documents written by the CIA clearly show knowledge of the detailed plans for the coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002... Financial and advisory agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) financed all the groups, NGOs, trade unions, businesspeople, political parties and the media involved in the coup."

Eva Golinger, 2008

"Paul Kagame is possibly the greatest mass murderer alive today. The fact that Paul Kagame continues to live and work freely in the world, unthreatened by "international justice", celebrated as the Abe Lincoln of his war-torn domain in central Africa, and highly regarded and honored in the United States, Britain, and Canada, shows us unambiguously that when the events in Rwanda 1994 are at issue, things as fragile as truth and historical clarity are only able to survive as exiles from these powers."

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, 2014

"In Guatemala, United Fruit supported the CIA-backed 1954 military coup against President Jacobo Arbenz, a reformer who had carried out a land reform package. Arbenz' overthrow led to more than thirty years of unrest and civil war in Guatemala."

Nikolas Kozloff, 2009

"On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet orchestrated a coup d'état, with the aid and participation of the CIA, against the Allende government of Chile, overthrowing it and installing Pinochet as dictator. The next day, an economic plan for the country was on the desks of the General Officers of the Armed Forces who performed government duties. The plan entailed privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending, written up by U.S.-trained economists. These were the essential concepts in neoliberal thought, which, through the oil crises of the 1970s, would be forced upon the developing world through the World Bank and IMF."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

THIRDWORLDIZATION

"Corporations want to move in and grab hold of everything, be it education, health, medical care, water supplies, electrical utilities, whatever else. Privatize, privatize, deregulate ... That's their goal, the thirdworldization of America."

Michael Parenti, 2002

"Since the 1980s, a large share of the labor force in the United States has been driven out of high pay unionized jobs into low pay minimum wage jobs. Thirdworldization of Western cities is, in many respects, comparable to that of the Third World."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book "The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order"

"The middle classes will vanish and poverty will reign supreme, while the rich become immeasurably richer and more powerful. Naturally, people will rise up, take to the streets, protest, demonstrate, riot, even rebel and revolt. As sure as the people will resist, the state will repress with police, the military and the 'Homeland Security State' apparatus of surveillance and control. Make no mistake: this is the 'Thirdworldization' of the West: the 'Post-Industrial Revolution.'"

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2010

"The United States has a balance sheet that's starting to look more and more like a third-world country."

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York, 2008

"The US is 34th in infant mortality-with a level comparable to Croatia, Estonia, Poland and Cuba. US school children perform significantly below their counterparts in countries like Canada, France, Germany and Japan, and 14 percent of the population, some 40 million people, lack basic literacy and number skills.
Of the world's 30 richest nations, which comprise the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the United States has the highest proportion of children living in poverty, 15 percent, and the most people in prison, both in absolute numbers and as a percentage of the whole population.
... In overall life expectancy, the United States ranks an astonishing 42nd, behind not only Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and all the countries of Western Europe, but also Israel, Greece, Singapore, Costa Rica and South Korea. The US spends twice as much money per capita on health care as any of these countries, but its citizens live shorter lives.
With five percent of the world's population, the US has 24 percent of the world's prisoners."

Oxfam-commissioned "The Measure of America" report, 2008

"Just as our banks and corporations have plundered the Third World with rapacious delight over the past three decades, now they will be able to do the same to the populations of the rich nations themselves. The state will transform, as it did in the 'Third World', into a typically totalitarian institution which is responsible for protecting the super-rich and controlling, oppressing, or, in extreme cases of resistance, eliminating the 'problem populations' (i.e., the people)."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite's rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate. Our anemic democracy will be replaced with a robust national police state. The elite will withdraw into heavily guarded gated communities where they will have access to security, goods and services that cannot be afforded by the rest of us. Tens of millions of people, brutally controlled, will live in perpetual poverty. This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them. We can resist, which means street protests, disruptions of the system and demonstrations, or become serfs."

Chris Hedges, 2009

"Crisis has pushed the U.S. toward Third World policies with alarming swiftness... Citizens seem as disaffected and resigned as their Third World brethren, only occasionally roused from reality TV by their favorite pundit peddling the outrage du jour."

Ximena Ortiz, 2009

"There is a heavy price being paid for making military power the nation's top priority. With more than half of U.S. government discretionary spending going to feed the Pentagon, we should not be surprised that it is no longer considered feasible to use public resources to feed the hungry, heal the sick, or house the homeless."

Lawrence Wittner, 2010

"In the second decade of the 21st century, America's Zionist wars against Islam will expand. America's wars in behalf of Israel's territorial expansion will complete the bankruptcy of America. The Treasury's bonds to finance the US government's enormous deficits will lack for buyers. Therefore, the bonds will be monetized by the Federal Reserve. The result will be rising rates of inflation. The inflation will destroy the dollar as world reserve currency, and the US will no longer be able to pay for its imports. Shortages will appear, including food and gasoline, and "Superpower America" will find itself pressed to the wall as a third world country unable to pay its debts."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2009

"When a global currency is introduced, only then do I expect a sort of collapse of the US dollar versus this global currency. In this way, the world can carry on while the former global reserve currency called the US dollar will be free to depreciate to a level where solvency is regained and the now unpayable US debt is inflated away to the point where it can be repaid in depreciated dollars. US citizens will experience a continued decay as the US becomes to resemble more and more, a third world country."

Craig Harris, 2008

TORTURE

"To be considered torture, techniques must produce lasting psychological damage or suffering "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."

John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel of the US. Department of Justice, and Robert Delahunty, Justice Department Counsel, memorandum offering a newly flexible legal definition of torture, January 9, 2002

"We must all be prepared to torture. Having established that, we can then begin to work together to codify rules of interrogation for the very unpleasant but very real cases in which we are morally permitted - indeed morally compelled - to do terrible things."

Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, December 5, 2005

"Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud."

Deroy Murdock, Hoover Institution, 2007

"The United States does not transport, and has not transported, detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture."

Condoleezza Rice, U. S. Secretary of State, December 5, 2005

"The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, "I love to make a grown man piss himself""

Specialist Charles Graner, Abu Ghraib prison guard, 2004

"No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

1984 "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment," which was approved by 145 nations, including the United States in 1988

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