EMPIRE OF CHAOS

"Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct.
Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time.
If you're right and you know it, speak your mind.
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."

Mahatma Gandhi

Julian Assange

TRUTH-TELLERS.NET

INDEPENDENT VOICES COMMITTED TO THE TRUTH
(A PARTIAL LIST)

PHILIP AGEE
former CIA case officer

"A considerable proportion of the developed world's prosperity rests on paying the lowest possible prices for the poor countries' primary products and on exporting high-cost capital and finished goods to those countries. Continuation of this kind of prosperity requires continuation of the relative gap between developed and underdeveloped countries - it means keeping poor people poor. Increasingly, the impoverished masses are understanding that. The prosperity of the developed countries and of the privileged minorities in their own countries is founded on their poverty."

"What the CIA does is ordered by the President and the NSC [National Security Council]. The Agency neither makes decisions on policy nor acts on its own account. It is an instrument of the President."

"Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention (as in Vietnam) will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt intervention becomes - and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one needs."

"US national security, as preached by US leaders, is the security of the capitalist class in the US, not the security of the rest of the people."

"American capitalism, based as it is on exploitation of the poor, with its fundamental motivation in personal greed, simply cannot survive without force - without a secret police force. Now, more than ever, each of us is forced to make a conscious choice whether to support the system of minority comfort and privilege with all its security apparatus and repression, or whether to struggle for real equality of opportunity and fair distribution of benefits for all of society, in the domestic as well as the international order. It's harder now not to realize that there are two sides, harder not to understand each, and harder not to recognize that like it or not, we contribute day in and day out either to the one side or to the other."

WILLIAM BLUM

"American leaders are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care. The same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them, then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home- - he ones who make it back alive - with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things."

"Since the end of World War 2, the United States has:
1 - Attempted to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically-elected.
2 - Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.
3 - Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.
4 - Attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
5 - Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.
6 - Led the world in torture; not only the torture performed directly by Americans upon foreigners, but providing torture equipment, torture manuals, lists of people to be tortured, and in-person guidance by American teachers, especially in Latin America."

"U.S. foreign policy is cruel because American leaders are cruel. Our leaders are cruel because only those willing and able to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to."

"America cherishes her enemies. Without enemies, she is a nation without purpose and direction. The various components of the National Security State need enemies to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to protect their jobs, to give themselves a mission in the aftermath of the Soviet Union."

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

"The United States seeks to dominate the world. For economic reasons, nationalistic reasons, ideological, Christian, and for other reasons, world hegemony has long been America's bottom line. And let's not forget the powerful Executive Branch officials whose salaries, promotions, agency budgets and future well-paying private sector jobs depend upon perpetual war. These leaders are not especially concerned about the consequences for the world of their wars."

"The American people are very much like the children of a Mafia boss who do not know what their father does for a living, and don't want to know, but then they wonder why someone just threw a firebomb through the living room window."

"President Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it humanitarian intervention.
... The main purpose of the bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999 was to make life so difficult for the Yugoslav public that support of the government of Slobodan Milosevic would be undermined. This is the classic definition of 'terrorism', as used by the FBI, the CIA, and the United Nations: the use or threat of violence against a civilian population to induce the government to change certain policies."

"The increase in recent years in Honduran migration to the US is a direct result of the overthrow of Manuel Zelaya, whose crime was raising the minimum wage, giving subsidies to small farmers and instituting free education."

"Every socialist experiment of any significance in the past century has been corrupted, subverted, perverted, destabilized, crushed, overthrown, bombed, invaded or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement - from the Russian Revolution to Cuba, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FMLN in Salvador, from Communist China to Grenada, Chile and Vietnam - was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home."

"Whenever a progressive government comes to power in Latin America or threatens to do so, a government sincerely committed to fighting poverty, the United States helps to suppress the movement and/or supports the country's right-wing and military in staging a coup."

"The Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive America carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1969-70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.
... The United States supported Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan."

"Do American leaders really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the word "god" is 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?"

"It would be difficult to find a single brutal dictatorship of the second half of the twentieth century that the United States did not support, not only supported, but often put in power and kept in power against the wishes of the people."

"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."

"The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives: making the world safe for American corporations; enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress; preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model; extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible."

"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", 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 allow asbestos, banned pesticides and other products restricted in the developed world to be dumped onto their people, 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."

"Since 1945, the United States has 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."

"As cynical as many Americans are, they are frequently not cynical enough about the power elite's motivations. No matter how many times they're lied to, they still often underestimate the government's capacity for deceit, clinging to the belief that their leaders somehow mean well. As long as people believe that their elected leaders are well intentioned, the leaders can, and do, get away with murder. Literally."

GENERAL SMEDLEY BUTLER (1881-1940)
most decorated Marine in U.S. history at that time

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.
I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. 1 brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

"War is largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know. I've been in eleven of these expeditions."

"Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die."

"In the World War (World War I), we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side. It is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies, to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious."

"Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
We must take the profit out of war.
We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes."

"The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane."

"In the World War [World War I] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?"

"The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits, that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent-the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulder to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket-and are safely pocketed."

"Like all members of the military profession, I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service."

NOAM CHOMSKY

"International affairs is run like the mafia, and the Godfather (United States) does not accept disobedience. It's too dangerous. So you send in your goons to beat the disobedient shopkeeper (or country) to a pulp, so everyone else gets the idea - you don't disobey orders. That's the way international affairs are run."

"So how does the U.S, improve the business climate in third world countries? Well, it's easy. You murder priests, you torture peasant organizers, you destroy popular organizations, you institute mass murder and repression to crush any popular organizations. And that improves the investment climate."

"In 1990, Haiti had its first free election, and to the surprise and shock of Washington, the organized public in the slums and hills elected Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular priest committed to liberation theology. The United States at once moved to undermine the elected government and, after the military coup that overthrew it a few months later, lent substantial support to the vicious military junta and its elite supporters who took power.
In 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti, France and the United States, joined by Canada, kidnapped President Aristide - who had been elected again - and shipped him off to central Africa. Aristide and his party were then effectively barred from the 2010-11 elections."

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

"The total number of civilians killed, wounded, made homeless and impoverished by U.S. leaders or local regimes owing their power to the United States - in Indochina and Iraq, Mexico, El Salvador, Israel/Palestine, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Egypt, Iran, South Africa, Chile, East Timor, Haiti, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Jamaica, the Philippines and Indonesia - is in the tens of millions."

"Wrecking a Third World country's economy and savaging its civilians are such standard U.S. elite behavior that it is barely noticed, let alone criticized in the mass media or halls of Congress. "

"A stunning illustration of the success of propaganda is the cult of the great killer and torturer Ronald Reagan, one of the grand criminals of the modern era, who had an unerring instinct for favoring the most brutal terrorists and murderers around the world."

"The old colonial world was shattered during World War II, and the resultant nationalist-radical upsurge threatened traditional Western hegemony and the economic interests of Western business. To contain this threat the United States has aligned itself with elite and military elements in the Third World whose function has been to contain the tides of change. Under frequent U.S. sponsorship the neo-fascist National Security State and other forms of authoritarian rule have become the dominant mode of government in the Third World."

"The Middle East is center of the world's energy resources. It's been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access. The issue has always been control. Control is the source of strategic power."

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

"Under Ronald Reagan, USAID and the World Bank set up very explicit programs, explicitly designed to destroy Haitian agriculture. They didn't cover it up. They gave an argument that Haiti shouldn't have an agricultural system, it should have assembly plants; women working to stitch baseballs in miserable conditions."

"The US supports democracy around the world only if it conforms to strategic and economic interests."

"One of the traditional and obvious ways of controlling people in every society is to frighten them. If people of a democracy or a military dictatorship are frightened they'll cede authority to their superiors, who will protect them. So, the fear of drugs, the fear of crime, the fear of terrorism is very much stimulated by state and business propaganda."

"The U.S. government played a significant role in the 1965 Indonesian genocide by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them."

"United State's aid is closely correlated with improvement in a country's Investment climate - a result commonly achieved by murdering priests and union leaders, massacring peasants trying to organize, blowing up the independent press, and soon."

"Somebody's paying the corporations that destroyed Iraq and the corporations that are rebuilding it. They're getting paid by the American taxpayer in both cases. So we pay them to destroy the country, and then we pay them to rebuild it."

"There are good reasons why the CIA and drugs are so closely linked. Clandestine terror requires hidden funds, and the criminal elements to whom the intelligence agencies naturally turn expect a quid pro quo. Drugs are the obvious answer. Washington's long-term involvement in the drug racket is part and parcel of its international operations."

"Over 440 villages were totally destroyed and well over 100,000 civilians were killed or "disappeared" in Guatemala, all with the enthusiastic support of the Reagan Administration. The toll is estimated at about 200,000 unarmed civilians killed or disappeared."

"That Cuba has survived at all under a total U.S. economic embargo is an achievement in itself. That it registered the highest per capita increase in gross social product (wages and social benefits) of any economy in Latin America-and almost double that of the next highest country over the period 1981-1990 is quite remarkable. Moreover, despite the economic difficulties, the average Cuban is still better fed, housed, educated and provided for medically than other Latin Americans."

MICHEL CHOSSUDOVSKY

"The 'war on terrorism' purports to defend the American Homeland and protect the 'civilized world'. It is upheld as a 'war of religion', a 'clash of civilizations', when in fact the main objective of this war is to secure control and corporate ownership over the region's extensive oil wealth, while also imposing under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank, the privatization of state enterprises and the transfer of the countries' economic assets into the hands of foreign capital.
... The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The ultimate objective, combining military action, covert intelligence operations and war propaganda, is to break down the national fabric and transform sovereign countries into open economic territories, where natural resources can be plundered and confiscated under "free market" supervision."

"When war is upheld as a humanitarian endeavor, justice and the entire international legal system are turned upside down. Pacifism and the antiwar movement are criminalized. Opposing the war becomes a criminal act. Meanwhile, the war criminals in high office have ordered a witch hunt against those who challenge their authority."

"Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA going back to the Soviet-Afghan war.
It was supported and financed from its inception in the early 1980s by the CIA."

"It is not Iran and North Korea which are a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel. Western European governments which possess nuclear weapons have joined the bandwagon. In chorus, Western Europe and the member states of the Atlantic alliance (NATO) have endorsed the US-led military initiative against Iran."

"The proceeds of the Afghan heroin trade are the source of wealth formation outside Afghanistan, largely reaped by powerful financial and business/criminal interests within Western countries. This process of wealth accumulation resulting from the drug trade is sustained and supported by the US "War on Terrorism". Decision-making in the US State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon is instrumental in supporting this highly profitable multibillion dollar trade, third in commodity value after oil and the arms trade."

"The military and intelligence apparatus has clearly taken over the reins of foreign policy in close consultation with Wall Street. With key decisions taken behind closed doors at the CIA and the Pentagon, civilian political institutions including the US Congress increasingly become a facade.
The powers behind this system are those of the global banks and financial institutions, the military-industrial complex, the oil and energy giants, the biotech and pharmaceutical conglomerates and the powerful media and communications giants, which fabricate the news and overtly influence the course of world events by blatantly distorting the facts."

"The proceeds of the drug trade are deposited in the banking system. Drug money is laundered in the numerous offshore banking havens in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Channel Islands, the Cayman Islands and some 50 other locations around the globe. It is here that criminal syndicates involved in the drug trade and the representatives of the world's largest commercial banks interact. Dirty money is deposited in these offshore havens, which are controlled by major Western banks and financial institutions. The latter, therefore, have a vested interest in maintaining and sustaining the drug trade.
... Once the money has been laundered, it can be recycled into bona fide investments not only in real estate, hotels, etc, but also in other areas such as the services economy and manufacturing. Dirty and covert money is also funneled into various financial instruments including speculative stock exchange transactions (derivatives), primary commodities, stocks and government bonds."

"The IMF, acting on behalf of Wall Street, calls the shots on the reform of national monetary systems. National currencies in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and South East Asia are in large part controlled by Western financial institutions."

"U.S. military might supports the worldwide hegemony of the U.S. dollar. fostering the imposition of the U.S. dollar as a world currency. America is the largest debtor nation, and at the same time it is the world's creditor. Creating money out of thin air, while at the same time imposing the U.S. dollar as a global currency constitutes the ultimate instrument of conquest and imperial domination."

"The U.S. agenda for Pakistan is similar to that applied throughout the broader Middle East Central Asian region. U.S. strategy, supported by covert intelligence operations, consists in triggering ethnic and religious strife, abetting and financing secessionist movements, while also weakening the institutions of the central government.
... The broader objective is to foment separatist movements, fracture the Nation State and redraw the borders of Pakistan."

"There are powerful business and financial interests behind narcotics. From this standpoint, geopolitical and military control over the drug routes is as strategic as oil and oil pipelines. The bulk of the revenues associated with the global trade in narcotics are not appropriated by terrorist groups and warlords. Intelligence agencies, powerful business, drug traders and organized crime are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes.
... A large share of the multibillion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks together with their affiliates in the offshore banking havens launder large amounts of narco-dollars."

"War is inextricably linked to the impoverishment of people at home and around the world. Militarization and the economic crisis are intimately related. The provision of essential goods and services to meet basic human needs has been replaced by a profit-driven "killing machine" in support of America's Global War on Terror. The poor are made to fight the poor. Yet war enriches the upper class, which controls industry, the military, oil and banking. In a war economy, death is good for business, poverty is good for society, and power is good for politics. Western nations, particularly the United States, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to murder innocent people in far-away impoverished nations, while the people at home suffer the disparities of poverty, class, gender and racial divides."

"Afghanistan produces 90 percent of the world's heroin. The underlying military and intelligence objective is to protect the cocaine and heroin markets, which feed billions of narco-dollars into the Western banking system. Drug trafficking constitutes the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade. Afghanistan and Colombia are the largest drug producing economies in the world, which feed a flourishing criminal economy. The drug trade is protected. The CIA has played a central role in the development of both the Latin American and Asian drug triangles."

"From the mid-1980s, the Kampala government under Ugandan President Yoweri Musaveni had become Washington's African showpiece of "democracy". Uganda had also become a launchpad for US-sponsored guerilla movements into the Sudan, Rwanda and the Congo."

"Estimates of the Israeli nuclear arsenal range from a minimum of 200 to a maximum of about 500. A staple of the Israeli nuclear arsenal are "neutron bombs," miniaturized thermonuclear bombs designed to maximize deadly gamma radiation while minimizing blast effects and long term radiation - in essence designed to kill people while leaving property intact."

"The civil war in Rwanda was a brutal struggle for political power between the Hutu-led Habyarimana government supported by France and the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) backed financially and militarily by Washington. Ethnic rivalries were used deliberately in the pursuit of geopolitical objectives.
... Major General Paul Kagame personally ordered the shooting down of Rwandan President Habyarimana's plane with a view to taking control of the country. He was fully aware that the assassination of Habyarimana would unleash a genocide against Tutsi civilians. RPA (Rwanda Patriotic Army) forces had been fully deployed in Kigali at the time the ethnic massacres took place and did not act to prevent it from happening.
... Kagame was an instrument of Washington. The loss of African lives did not matter. The Rwandan civil war and the ethnic massacres were an integral part of US foreign policy, carefully staged in accordance with precise strategic and economic objectives.
... By supporting the build up of Ugandan and Rwandan forces and by directly intervening in the Congolese civil war, Washington also bears a direct responsibility for the ethnic massacres committed in the Eastern Congo."

WILLIAM ENGDAHL

"The National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the George Soros Open Society Institute, Freedom House and Gene Sharp's Albert Einstein Institution (a US intelligence asset), are used to spark "non-violent" regime change around the world on behalf of the US strategic agenda.
...The NED is a US government-funded 'private' entity whose activities are designed to support US foreign policy objectives, doing today what the CIA did during the Cold War."

"After August 1971, the dominant U.S. policy under the White House national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger, was to control, not to develop, economies throughout the world. Population reduction in developing nations, rather than technology transfer and industrial growth strategies, became the dominating priority during the 1970s."

"In November 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. The new U. S. law provided that any part of Yugoslavia failing to declare independence from Yugoslavia within six months of the act would lose all U.S. financial support. The law demanded separate elections, supervised by the U.S. State Department, in each of the six Yugoslav republics. It also stipulated that any aid go directly to each republic, and not to the central Yugoslav government in Belgrade. In short, the Bush administration demanded the self-dissolution of the Yugoslav Federation.
In 1992 Washington imposed a total economic embargo on Yugoslavia, freezing all trade and plunging the economy into chaos, with hyperinflation and 70 per cent unemployment as the result."

"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 world 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."

"While Henry Kissinger's 1973 oil shock had a devastating impact on world industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for certain established interests - the major New York and London banks, and the Seven Sisters oil multinationals of the United States and Britain.
The bulk of the OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger's 'recycled petrodollars', was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank, all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil crisis."

"The public profile of Carter's presidency was 'human rights' for the Third World, 'negotiation, not confrontation'. He portrayed himself as an 'outsider' to the Washington power establishment, but the content of U.S. policy under Carter, with his preselected crew of establishment advisers, was to maintain the American century at all costs. Third World development was to be blocked, and a 'limits to growth' postindustrial policy was to be imposed, to maintain the hegemony of the dollar imperium. Carter's 'human rights' was to become a bludgeon to justify unprecedented U.S. intervention into the internal affairs of targeted Third World nations."

"Powerful British and U.S. multinationals followed the banks during the 1980s to set up child-labor sweatshops in places such as along the Mexican border with the United States. These maquiladores, as the low-skill assembly plants were named, employed desperate Mexican children aged 14 or 15 for wages of 50 cents an hour, to produce goods for General Motors or Ford Motor Company or various U.S. electrical companies. They were allowed by the Mexican government, because they 'earned' dollars needed to service the debt."

"Kuwaiti oil minister Sheikh Saud Nasir al-Sabah's daughter was the Kuwaiti woman who had told the U.S. Congress in October 1990 that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers taking Kuwaiti babies from their incubators. Her shocking testimony had been a major factor in getting U.S. popular support for Operation Desert Storm. That incident was later exposed as a PR stunt."

"As George W. Bush prepared his bid to secure reelection, a definite pattern to U.S. military policy and to U.S. energy policy was clear. The conclusion was inescapable. U.S. foreign and military policy was now about controlling every major existing and potential oil source and transport route on earth. Such control would be unprecedented. One superpower, the United States, would be in a position to decide who gets how much energy and at what price."

"When the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, tried to take more direct policy control of the Venezuelan state oil company, the Bush administration attempted a covert coup."

"Kissinger Associates (Henry Kissinger's high-powered consultancy firm) worked together with the New York banks and circles of the Washington administration to impose the most onerous debt collection terms since the Versailles reparations process of the early 1920s.
... The powerful private banking interests of New York and London managed to bring in the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and, most importantly, the powers of the International Monetary Fund, to act as international 'policemen,' in what was to become the most concerted organized looting operation in modern history, far exceeding anything achieved during the 1920s.
... Mexico, under this IMF regimen, was forced to slash subsidies on vital medicines, foodstuffs, fuels, and other necessities for its population. People, often infants, died needlessly for lack of the most basic medicine imports.
The same process was repeated in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, most of black Africa, including Zambia, Zaire and Egypt, and large parts of Asia. The IMF had become the global 'policeman' to enforce payment of usurious debts through imposition of the most draconian austerity in history. With the crucial voting bloc of the IMF firmly controlled by an American-British axis, the institution became the global enforcer of Anglo-American monetary and economic interests in a manner never before seen."

"At the start of the new millennium, the United Stated held a near monopoly on military technology and might. It commanded the world's reserve currency and with it was able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. Following the occupation of the oil fields of Iraq, the United States, now commanded a near monopoly on future energy resources. The Pentagon had a term for it - 'full spectrum dominance.' It meant that the United States should control military, economic and political developments, everywhere."

"The aim of Washington's IMF "market reforms" in the former Soviet Union was brutally simple: destroy the economic ties that bound Moscow to each part of the Soviet Union. IMF shock therapy was intended to create weak, unstable economies on the periphery of Russia, dependent on Western capital and on dollar inflows for their survival - a form of neocolonialism. The Russians were to get the standard Third World treatment. IMF conditionalities and a plunge into poverty for the population. A tiny elite were allowed to become fabulously rich in dollar terms, manipulatable by Wall Street bankers and investors.
The West, above all the United States, clearly wanted a deindustrialized Russia, to permanently break up the economic structure of the old Soviet Union. A major area of the global economy, which had been largely closed to the dollar domain for more than seven decades, was to be brought under its control."

"For over 40 years, Washington had quietly supported Yugoslavia, and the Tito model of mixed socialism, as a buffer against the Soviet Union. As Moscow's empire began to fall apart, Washington had no more use for a buffer - especially a nationalist buffer which was economically successful, one that might convince neighboring states in eastern Europe that a middle way other than IMF shock therapy was possible. The Yugoslav model had to be dismantled, for this reason alone, in the eyes of top Washington strategists. The fact that Yugoslavia also lay on a critical path to the potential oil riches of central Asia merely added to the argument."

"Through slick Madison Avenue marketing techniques and careful study of genuine protest movements, the US Government had perfected techniques for 'democratically' getting rid of any opponent, while convincing the world they were brought down by spontaneous outbursts for freedom. In fact, the 'color revolutions' had been founded, guided and financed covertly by the US Government via select NGOs."

"The goal of Washington in Eurasia was not only the strategic encirclement of Russia through a series of NATO bases, but the overarching goal of enabling NATO to control energy routes and networks between Russia and the EU.
... The NATO encirclement of Russia, the Color Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in Iraq, were all aspects of one and the same American geopolitical strategy: a grand strategy to de-construct Russia once and for all as a potential rival to a sole US Superpower hegemony."

"During the Cold War, US control of Africa and its vast mineral wealth had relied on assassination and civil wars which it covertly fuelled, or the cooperation of brutal former colonial powers such as Britain, France or Belgium."

"US policy towards China's economic emergence across Asia, Africa and beyond, incorporated unexpected weapons of war - 'Human Rights' and 'Democracy' - a 21st Century version of the 1840 Opium Wars.
... The main US targets in the new 'Opium War' against China, euphemistically termed 'promotion of democracy', were China's vital sources of raw materials. Specifically, the US targeted Myanmar, Sudan, and China itself - through the Dalai Lama organizations in Tibet and the Falun Gong 'religious' sect inside China. To accomplish their goal, the US clandestine intelligence services turned to an arsenal of NGOs they had carefully built up, using the battle cry of 'human rights violations' and weakening of 'democracy'."

"In 2000, Washington tested a new political template in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. It signaled a profound change in the course of US covert warfare. Unlike the regime-change operations of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in the Soviet Union, Poland, or China at the end of the 1980s, Washington had now perfected a more refined template that targeted the very election process itself in countries where the duly elected government opposed Washington's strategic agenda. On the surface, the new template purported to call for supporting a spontaneous and genuine grass roots democratic political 'movement'. In reality, it was the product of CIA and Pentagon techniques for removing 'uncooperative regimes'."

"Failing in its attempt to pressure Sudan to break its ties with China, Washington turned its guns on Khartoum directly. They launched a massive campaign to save Darfur.
... Washington and its NGOs chargeed Khartoum with genocide, as a pretext for bringing UN/NATO troops into the oil fields of Darfur and southern Sudan. Oil, not human misery, was behind Washington's new interest in Darfur."

"During the Vietnam War the CIA and special units of the US military worked with the Meo tribesmen in Laos to secure control over the heroin routes of South East Asia. The CIA then used the drug revenues, laundered through CIA banks, to finance other covert operations and intelligence activities."

"The US power elites are increasingly desperate to maintain their control of a global parasitical empire, called deceptively by their media machine, 'globalization'. To hold that dominance, it is essential that they be able to break up any emerging cooperation in the economic, energy or military realm between the two major powers of Eurasia that conceivably could pose a challenge to future US sole Superpower control - China and Russia."

"The Syrian White Helmets, a so-called "first emergency responder" NGO, was a fake. It was created by an ex-British military intelligence officer and financed by the US government via the CIA-tied United States Agency for International Development (USAID). White Helmets operators were repeatedly exposed filming fake videos of sarin poison gas victims, all aimed to build a case for war crimes and genocide against al-Assad."

"The US success in removing Serbia's president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 proved to the US State Department and intelligence community that their new model for covert regime change via nonviolent coup d'états worked. It seemed to be the ideal model for eliminating regimes opposed to US policy. It did not matter if a regime had been popular or democratically-elected. Any regime was potentially vulnerable to the Pentagon's new methods of warfare."

"There never was a government massacre of thousands of students at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. It was a fiction manufactured by the US Ambassador to China, the CIA, and their fake democracy apparatus.
The myth of the Tiananmen Square massacre was placed firmly in the minds of the world public, fed by a CIA propaganda operation."

"In Syria, by 2017, after more than six years, the war had created untold destruction of Syria's cities, deaths into many hundreds of thousands, more than 6 million internally displaced within Syria, and almost 5 million refugees outside of Syria, in Turkey, and across the EU."

"A network of CIA-linked Western bankers, corrupt KGB generals, and their protégé, Boris Yeltsin, set the stage for the wholesale theft of Russian Federation state assets. It was called shock therapy, and it was brought to Russia by George Soros.
The human cost of the US-imposed Russian shock was beyond belief. Between 1991 and 1997, the Russian GDP - the value of all goods and services that Russia produces - collapsed by 83 percent. Farm production declined by a staggering 63 percent. Investment into the economy decreased by 92 percent. More than 70,000 factories were closed down. Those who still had work had their wages cut in half. The average life span for men had been shortened by six years. Alcoholism became epidemic as depression spread among the population. It was a shock therapy indeed, the kind of shock a country experiences only in a major war."

"The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other 'fake democracy' NGOs worked together to interfere in the internal affairs of countries around the globe, topple unwanted governments, spend money for alternative media opposed to the existing regime, train opposition leaders, and commit other clear acts of interference. Yet because it was done in the open, with no attempt to hide, when governments protested US interference, they would be made to look 'antidemocratic' for crying out against honest civilian NGOs merely 'promoting democracy'.
In reality, that democracy was a thinly disguised attempt by the CIA and US State Department to eliminate unfriendly government leaders and install US-friendly ones in their place. Democracy had nothing to do with the task other than to give a highly effective fig leaf to the CIA. It was fake democracy.
Beginning in the mid-1980s, the NED, along with the closely associated organizations Freedom House and the Soros Foundation, were active everywhere the CIA and State Department wanted a Washington-friendly regime change. It soon became obvious it was no coincidence. The 'democracy' NGOs of Washington were the new template to do what the CIA did, but privately, concealed from public view."

"Since the Bush-Cheney Administration took office in January 2001, controlling the major oil and natural gas fields of the world had been the primary, though undeclared, priority of US foreign policy. Not only the invasion of Iraq, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, had nothing to do with 'democracy', and everything to do with pipeline control across Central Asia and the militarization of the Middle East."

"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."

"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."

CHRIS HEDGES

"War is not about flag-waving and patriotism. War is about killing and death."

"There are always people willing to commit unspeakable human atrocity in exchange for a little power and privilege."

"We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, governments destroy freedom, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."

"The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock."

"The North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA] was peddled by the Clinton White House as an opportunity to raise the incomes and prosperity of the citizens of the United States, Canada, and Mexico. NAFTA would also, we were told, stanch Mexican immigration into the United States.
... But NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, had the effect of reversing every one of Clinton's rosy predictions. Once the Mexican government lifted price supports on corn and beans grown by Mexican farmers, those farmers had to compete against the huge agribusinesses in the United States. Many Mexican farmers were swiftly bankrupted. At least 2 million Mexican farmers have been driven off their land since 1994.
... NAFTA was great if you were a corporation. It was a disaster if you were a worker.
... Bill Clinton's welfare reform bill, signed on August 22, 1996, obliterated the nation's social safety net. It threw 6 million people, many of them single mothers, off the welfare rolls within three years. It dumped them onto the streets without child care, rent subsidies, or continued Medicaid coverage.
... Clinton slashed Medicare by $115 billion over a five-year period and cut $25 billion in Medicaid funding.
... The Clinton administration signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, which ripped down the firewalls that had been established by the 1933 GlassSteagall Act. Glass-Steagall established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. It set in place banking reforms to stop speculators from hijacking the financial system. With Glass-Steagall demolished, and the passage of NAFTA, the Democrats, led by Clinton, tumbled gleefully into bed with corporations and Wall Street speculators."

"There are over 42 million American adults, 20 percent of whom hold high school diplomas, who cannot read, as well as the 50 million who read at a fourth- or fifth-grade level. Nearly a third of the nation's population is illiterate or barely literate... A third of high school graduates, along with 42 percent of college graduates, never read a book after they finish school. Eighty percent of the families in the United States last year did not buy a book."

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

"War in the end is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of soldiers by politicians, and of idealists by cynics."

"Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it."

"War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence - death - is hidden from public view."

"The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy. They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others. They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human connection."

"While we venerate and mourn our own dead we are curiously indifferent about those we kill. Thus killing is done in our name, killing that concerns us little, while those who kill our own are seen as having crawled out of the deepest recesses of the earth, lacking our own humanity and goodness. Our dead. Their dead. They are not the same. Our dead matter, theirs do not."

"The reason why most European states and America live in such opulence and determine the fate of so many others - we equip and train the most efficient killers on the planet."

"All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice."

"Those who pay the price, those who are maimed forever by war, are shunted aside, crumpled up and thrown away. They are war's refuse. We do not want to see them. We do not want to hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they bear from war is too painful for us to absorb .... If we really knew war, what war does to minds and bodies, it would be harder to wage. This is why the essence of war, which is death and suffering, is so carefully hidden from public view ... We taste a bit of war's exhilaration but are safe, spared the pools of blood, the wailing of a dying child."

"Despots, despite their proclaimed ideological, national and religious differences, speak the same language. Amoral, devoid of empathy and addicted to power and personal enrichment, they are building a world where all who criticize them are silenced, where their populations are rendered compliant by fear, constant surveillance and the loss of basic liberties and where they and their corporate enablers are the undisputed masters."

"The Gulf War made war fashionable again. It was a cause the nation willingly embraced. It gave us media-manufactured heroes and a heady pride in our military superiority and technology. It made war fun. And the blame, as in many conflicts, lay not with the military but the press.
Television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the military and the state.
The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort."

"There is little dispute that we live in an oligarchic state. The wealthiest one percent of America's families control 40 percent of the nation's wealth, a statistic similar to what is seen globally: The wealthiest 1 percent of the world's population owns more than half of the world's wealth. This wealth translates into political power.
Oligarchs accelerate social, political, cultural and economic collapse. The unchecked plunder leads to systems breakdown. The refusal to protect natural resources, or the economic engines that sustain the state, means that poverty becomes the norm and the natural world becomes a toxic wasteland. Basic institutions no longer work. Infrastructure is no longer reliable. Water, air and soil are poisoned. The population is left uneducated, untrained, impoverished, oppressed by organs of internal security and beset by despair. The state eventually goes bankrupt. Oligarchs respond to this steady deterioration by forcing workers to do more for less and launching self-destructive wars in the vain attempt to restore a lost golden age. They also insist, no matter how bad it gets, on maintaining their opulent and hedonistic lifestyles. They further tax the resources of the state, the ecosystem and the population with suicidal demands. They flee from the looming chaos into their gated compounds, modern versions of Versailles or the Forbidden City. They lose touch with reality. In the end, they are overthrown or destroy the state itself. There is no institution left in America that can be called democratic, and thus there is no internal mechanism to prevent a descent into barbarity."

EDWARD S. HERMAN

"U.S. Ieaders commit war crimes as a matter of institutional necessity, as their imperial role calls for keeping subordinate peoples in their proper place and assuring a 'favorable climate of investment' everywhere."

"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 country 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."

"The United States' National Security State represents and serves the interests of a tiny elite. Its economic policies of 'trickling-up', enforced by the machine gun, are rationalized on the ground that growth in the long run will trickle down to the lower orders. This is a self-serving ideology designed mainly to allow the western public to think well of themselves and their own country."

"Among Latin American elites, a peasant asking for a higher wage or a priest helping organize a peasant cooperative is a communist. And someone going so far as to suggest land reform or a more equitable tax system is a communist fanatic. There is no word or act suggesting the desirability of elite generosity toward the poor, or the need for education, organization or material advance for the majority, that has not been branded communistic in Latin America in recent decades. Since communism is the enemy and peasants trying to improve themselves, priests with the slightest humanistic proclivity, and naturally anyone seriously challenging the status quo, are communists, they are also, by definition, enemies."

"Human rights groups played an ugly role in the mass killings in Rwanda. Major organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as a matter of policy ignore the crime of aggression and focus on war crimes carried out in the wake of aggressions, as they did in the cases of the U.S. attacks on Yugoslavia and Iraq. This is very convenient for the United States, given its prolific record of aggression in recent decades."

"For the most part, Israel is the subcontractor for American arms to the 'Third World'. There is no terrible regime - Colombia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile during the time of the colonels, Burma, Taiwan, Zaire, Liberia, Congo, Sierra Leone - there is not one that does not have a major military connection to Israel. So, Israel is a key member of the American empire."

"A UN report of October 2002 cited an estimate that "more than 3.5 million excess deaths" had occurred in the DRCongo between August 1998 and September 2002; the report concluded that "These deaths are a direct result of the occupation by Rwanda and Uganda. A mortality study published in January 2009 estimated the "excess death toll in DR Congo since 1998 to be 5.4 million."

"There is a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives."

"There is a system of terroristic states - the real terror network - that has spread throughout Latin America and elsewhere over the past several decades, and which is deeply rooted in the corporate interest and sustaining political-military-financial propaganda mechanisms of the United States and its allies in the Free World."

"The United States has given frequent and enthusiastic support to the overthrow of democracy in favor of investor friendly regimes. The World Bank, IMF, and private banks have consistently lavished huge sums on terror regimes, following their displacement of democratic governments, and a number of quantitative studies have shown a systematic positive relationship between U.S. and IMF/World Bank aid to countries and their violations of human rights."

"The immiseration of the majority is an integral part of the Free World package for the Third World, the unsavory aspects of the package - the terror, the direct spoilation of people and resources, and western complicity - must be rationalized and, as far as possible, kept under the rug."

"The operative principles dictating U.S. support and hostility in the Third World have been business criteria first, military convenience second, and any humanistic considerations third and thus effectively irrelevant. In fact, they are less than irrelevant - they are in conflict with the first two criteria, and therefore humanizing forces become 'threats'."

"Paul Kagame's toll of victims, first in Rwanda and then in Zaire-DRC, runs into the millions, and exceeds that of Idi Amin by a factor of at least five. And yet, in one of the miracles of modern propaganda, Kagame became a savior-modernizer-moral giant for the U.S., U.K., and Canadian establishment to admire and exploit.This favorable portrayal of Kagame flows from the fact that he served U.S. and other powerful interests in the African Great Lakes region."

"As human rights conditions deteriorate, factors affecting the 'climate of investment', like the tax laws and labor repression, improve from the viewpoint of the multinational corporation. This suggests an important line of causation - military dictatorships tend to improve the investment climate. The multinational corporate community and the U.S. government are very sensitive to this factor. Military dictators enter into a tacit joint venture arrangement with Free World leaders: They will keep the masses quiet, maintain an open door to multinational investment, and provide bases and otherwise serve as loyal clients. In exchange, they will be aided and protected against their own people, and allowed to loot public property."

CHALMERS JOHNSON

"By 1995, the United States was the source of 49 percent of global arms exports. It shipped arms of various types to some 140 countries, 90 percent of which were either not democracies or are human rights abusers.
By selling advanced weaponry throughout the world, American military contractors not only weaken national security and squeeze taxpayers at home, but also strengthen dictators and worsen human misery abroad."

"Even though it remains a small, failed Communist regime that has no petroleum, North Korea is a useful whipping boy for any number of interests in Washington. If the military needs a post-Cold War opponent to justify its existence, North Korea is less risky than China. Politicians seek partisan advantage by claiming that others are 'soft' on defending the country from 'rogue regimes'. And the arms lobby has a direct interest in selling its products to each and every nation in East Asia, regardless of its political orientation."

"The collapse of the Soviet Union ended China's main usefulness to the United States as an ally, while enhancing its new status as a possible long-term rival to American hegemony. In the wake of the Cold War, with the Pentagon intent on maintaining near Cold War levels of military spending, enemies on the global horizon were much needed.
With the Soviet army increasingly seen as a disintegrating 'paper tiger', China's economic emergence as a major power in the Pacific offered one possible fit with the Pentagon's need for a major enemy."

"The IMF is essentially a covert arm of the U.S. Treasury, yet beyond congressional oversight because it is formally an international organization. Its voting rules ensure that it is dominated by the United States and its allies."

"Following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation."

"There is ample evidence that, when it comes to the freedom of women, education levels, governmental services, relations among ethnic groups, and quality of life - all were infinitely better under the Afghan communists than under the Taliban or the present Afghan government."

"The military-industrial complex warmly welcomed the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq as good for business. Actions just short of war, such as bombings and missile strikes, are also giant bazaars for selling the wares of the armaments manufacturers."

"The United States has been busy arming opponents in ongoing conflicts - Iran and Iraq, Greece and Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel, and China and Taiwan.
Saddam Hussein, the number one "rogue" leader of the 1990s, was during the 1980s an outstanding customer with an almost limitless line of credit because of his country's oil reserves."

"Most Americans do not recognize - or do not want to recognize - that the United States dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, they are often ignorant of the fact that their government garrisons the globe. They do not realize that a vast network of American military bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire."

"The growth of militarism, official secrecy, and a belief that the United States is no longer bound, as the Declaration of Independence so famously puts it, by 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind' is probably irreversible. A revolution would be required to bring the Pentagon back under democratic control, or to abolish the Central Intelligence Agency."

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States's nuclear arsenal comprised 5,400 multiple-megaton warheads atop intercontinental ballistic missiles based on land and at sea; an additional 1,750 nuclear bombs and cruise missiles ready to be launched from B-2 and B-52 bombers; and a further 1,670 nuclear weapons classified as "tactical' Not fully deployed but available are an additional 10,000 or so nuclear warheads stored in bunkers around the United States."

"Israel has provided the U.S. with sites in the Negev desert for military bases, now under construction, which will be far less vulnerable to Muslim fundamentalists than those in Saudi Arabia. These are officially nonexistent sites."

"There is no known case in which globalization has led to prosperity in any Third World country, and none of the world's twenty-four reasonably developed capitalist nations, regardless of their ideological explanations, got where they are by following any of the prescriptions contained in globalization doctrine."

"The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank are actually surrogates for the U.S. Treasury. Their voting rules ensure that they can do nothing without the approval of the secretary of the Treasury."

"The total of America's military bases in other people's countries in 2005 was 737. If there were an honest count, the actual size of our military empire would probably top 1,000 different bases overseas."

"As the CIA developed over time, it was made clear to every president that he had at his disposal a private army. It is totally secret. There is no form of oversight. He can do anything he wants to with it. He could order assassinations. He could order governments overthrown. He could order economies subverted that seemed to get in our way. He could instruct Latin American military officers in state terrorism. He can carry out extraordinary renditions and order the torture of people, despite the fact that it is a clear violation of American law and carries the death penalty if the torture victim should die, and they commonly do in the case of renditions to places like Egypt."

"Clandestine activities are kept totally secret from the American public, so that when the retaliation does come, they're unable ever to put it in context, to see it in cause-and-effect terms. They usually lash out against the alleged perpetrators, usually simply inaugurating another cycle of blowback."

"When Ronald Reagan coined the phrase 'evil empire', he was referring to the Soviet Union. But today, it is the U.S. that is widely perceived as an evil empire."

"By 1990, the value of the weapons, equipment, and factories devoted to the Department of Defense was 83 percent of the value of all plants and equipment in American manufacturing. Military industries crowd out the civilian economy and lead to severe economic weaknesses - a form of slow economic suicide.

"During the Gulf War of 1991 the United States dropped some ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq in the space of forty-three days, intentionally destroying the civilian infrastructure, including eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and the water-pumping and sanitation systems."

"The CIA remains the main executive-branch department in charge of overthrowing foreign governments, promoting regimes of state terrorism, kidnapping people of interest to the administration and sending them to friendly foreign countries to be tortured and/or killed, assassination and the torture of prisoners in violation of international and domestic law, and numerous other actions that both the president and the country in which they are executed want be able to deny."

"Institutional speculators and international banks raped Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea (1997) then turned the shivering survivors over to the IMF, not to help victims, but to insure that no Western bank was stuck with non-performing loans in the devastated countries."

RALPH NADER

"There isn't a single department agency in the US government whose outside influence overwhelmingly is not corporate. They control from the outside, they put their representatives into government positions, funding the members of Congress with their cash and 35,000 full-time lobbyists in Washington. They are the government."

"We have corporate socialism in this country where profits are kept and losses are socialized on the back of the taxpayer."

"Corporations are artificial entities. They're not real human beings. They don't vote. They don't die in Iraq. They don't have children. They are entities that are dominating our politics, our electoral systems, our universities, and increasingly, dominating almost everything."

"By a vote of 5 to 4, the U.S. Supreme Court [Citizens United, January 2010] gave carte blanche to the world's largest corporations to spend unlimited sums of money to support or oppose candidates for elected office.
... In the absence of a future court overturning 'Citizens United', the fundamental response should be a constitutional amendment. We must exclude all commercial corporations and other artificial commercial entities from participating in political activities."

"James Madison and others did not want anybody but Congress to deliberate and take our country to war. They were adamant about this. Today, we have accepted, as a people, that the president can go anywhere in the world, with any troops, at any time, under any pretext. Period."

"One-third of America's public lands, plus what is offshore, belongs to the people. We own them. But the oil, gas, uranium and the gold and silver industries control them. They take our resources for nothing or five bucks an acre."

"The corporations have weakened the labor movement. The two parties, under the influence of corporate power, are converging. These corporations game the electoral process. Money and politics is cleverly distributed. They have deregulated the regulatory state. They are beginning to block the courtroom door. All the countervailing forces, which were built up in the late 19th century and the early 20th century to curb corporate power, are powerless."

"In terms of foreign and military policy, Barack Obama's policy is a distinct continuity with Bush - Iraq, Afghanistan, the militarization of foreign policy, the continued expansion of the Pentagon budget and pursuing more globalized trade agreements are the same."

"America is a corporate-controlled country with the symbols of democracy."

"The moment China, the oil-rich states and other international investors stop buying treasury bonds the dollar will become junk. Inflation will rocket upward. We will become Weimar Germany. A furious and sustained backlash by a betrayed and angry populace, one unprepared intellectually and psychologically for collapse, will sweep aside the Democrats and most of the Republicans. A cabal of proto-fascist misfits who we naively dismiss as buffoons, will find a following with promises of revenge and moral renewal. The elites, the ones with their Harvard Business School degrees and expensive vocabularies, will retreat into their sheltered enclaves of privilege and comfort. We will be left bereft and abandoned outside the gates."

"A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity."

"When are we going to understand that either the people are going to control our government or we're going to cede control increasingly to global corporations that have no allegiance to America, no allegiance to communities, other than to control them or abandon them."

"TV stations are using our property. We own the public airwaves. We're the landlords. They're just tenants. And they use our property free. They don't pay as much as you pay for your auto license. And they decide who is on and who isn't on TV."

"Franklin Roosevelt warned Congress in 1938 that when government is controlled by private economic power, he called that fascism. And he would consider today's control by private economic power - namely, giant corporations astride the world - as an even more advanced form of what he called fascism: control of government by corporate interests. The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power. And corporations now have their executives in high government positions. They have 35,000 full-time lobbies here. And they have 10,000 political action committees."

"Third parties, which were the first to raise the seminal issues of our past - from slavery to abolition to the status of women, minorities, labor, and farmers - are now deemed 'spoilers'."

"What good is freedom of speech if nobody can afford it? Is speech truly free if only the wealthy can buy it?"

"There is no reason why patriotism has to be so heavily associated, in the minds of the young as well as adults, with military exploits, jets and missiles. Citizenship must include the duty to advance our ideals actively into practice for a better community, country and world, if peace is to prevail over war."

"We should tax things we don't like. We should tax pollution. And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest lobor, like food."

"Corporations have taken over the government and turned it against its own people."

ILAN PAPPE

"Israel's policy, in the last 60 years, stems from a racist hegemonic ideology called Zionism, shielded by endless layers of righteous fury. Despite the predictable accusation of anti-Semitism. it is time to associate in the public mind the Zionist ideology with the by now familiar historical landmarks of the land: the ethnic cleansing of 1948, the oppression of the Palestinians in Israel during the days of the military rule, the brutal occupation of the West Bank and now the massacre of Gaza."

"On 9 April 1948, Jewish forces occupied the village of Deir Yassin [Palestine]. As they burst into the village, the Jewish soldiers sprayed the houses with machine-gun fire, killing many of the inhabitants. The remaining villagers were then gathered in one place and murdered in cold blood, their bodies abused while a number of the women were raped ad then killed."

"Self-righteousness is a powerful act of self-denial and justification. It explains why the Israeli Jewish society would not be moved by words of wisdom, logical persuasion or diplomatic dialogue. And if one does not want to endorse violence as the means of opposing it, there is only one way forward: challenging head-on this righteousness as an evil ideology meant to cover human atrocities. Another name for this ideology is Zionism and an international rebuke for Zionism, not just for particular Israeli policies, is the only way of countering this self-righteousness. We have to try and explain not only to the world, but also to the Israelis themselves, that Zionism is an ideology that endorses ethnic cleansing, occupation and now massive massacres. What is needed now is not just a condemnation of the present massacre but also delegitimization of the ideology that produced that policy and justifies it morally and politically."

"Challenging, by nonviolent means, the self-righteous ideological state of Israel - that allows itself, aided by a mute world, to dispossess and destroy the indigenous people of Palestine - is a just and moral cause."

"Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion with his aides (1946) began working on a general strategy that could be implemented against the Palestinian population the moment the British were gone (1948). This strategy became Plan C.
Plan C aimed to prepare the military forces of the Jewish community in Palestine for the offensive campaigns they would be engaged in against rural and urban Palestine the moment the British were gone. The purpose of such actions would be to 'deter' the Palestinian population from attacking Jewish settlements, and to retaliate for assaults on Jewish houses, roads and traffic. Plan C spelled out clearly what punitive actions of this kind would entail:
Killing the Palestinian political leadership.
Killing Palestinian inciters and their financial supporters.
Killing Palestinians who acted against Jews.
Killing senior Palestinian officers and officials [in the Mandatory system I.
Damaging Palestinian transportation.
Damaging the sources of Palestinian livelihoods: water wells, mills, etc.
Attacking nearby Palestinian villages likely to assist in future attacks.
Attacking Palestinian clubs, coffee houses, meeting places, etc."

MICHAEL PARENTI

"Tallying only the death toll inflicted by US. armed forces or U.S.-backed surrogate forces around the world, the estimates are as follows: 3,000,000 in Vietnam, 1,000,000 in Cambodia, 1,000,000 in Mozambique, 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia, 600,000 in Angola, 300,000 in Laos, 250,000 in East Timor, 200,000 in Iraq, 200,000 in Afghanistan, 150,000 in Guatemala, 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and tens of thousands in Chile, Argentina, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Somalia, South Yemen, Western Sahara, and other countries."

"The central organizing principle of US foreign policy is to make the world safe for the multinational corporations and the free-market capital-accumulation system.
The goal now, as always, is to obliterate every trace of an alternative system, to make it clear that there is no road to take except that of the free market."

"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."

"In the last decade, U.S. forces or proxy mercenary forces wreaked massive death and destruction upon Iraq, Mozambique, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, East Timor, Libya, and other countries. In the span of a few months, President Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq repeatedly, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the US national security state was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and various other places. And US forces occupied Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, and were deployed across the globe at some 300 major overseas bases- all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, counter-terrorism, and humanitarianism."

"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."

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominate political mythology."

"With unfailing consistancy, U.S. intervention has been on the side of the rich and powerful of various nations at the expense of the poor and needy. Rather than strengthening democracies, U.S. leaders have overthrown numerous democratically elected governments or other populist regimes in dozens of countries, whenever these nations give evidence of putting the interests of their people ahead of the interests of multinational corporate interests."

"The United States invaded Granada to serve notice to the people of the world that they cannot drop out of the client-state free-market system. That, if they use their land, their labor, their resources, their capital and their markets to benefit the needs of their people rather than to serve foreign investors, they will be punished."

"The real menace we face today is global rollback. The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world."

"Throughout history there has been only one thing that ruling classes have ever wanted - and that is everything: all the choice lands, forests, game, herds, harvests, mineral deposits and precious metals of the earth; all the wealth, riches, and profitable returns; all the productive facilities, gainful inventiveness, and technologies; all the surplus value produced by human labor; all the control positions of the state and other major institutions; all public supports and subsidies, privileges and immunities; all the protections of the law with none of its constraints; all the services, comforts, luxuries, and advantages of civil society with none of the taxes and costs. Every ruling class has wanted only this: all the rewards and none of the burdens."

"Structural adjustments work wonderfully for the transnational corporations by depressing wages, intensifying the level of exploitation, and boosting profit rates. They also leave the economies and peoples of these various countries measurably worse off."

"Yugoslavia's relatively prosperous industrial base with an economy that was three-fourths publicly owned, could no longer be tolerated to compete with western capitalist production. Secession and war accomplished the goal of breaking up Yugoslavia into small rightwing client states under the economic domination of transnational corporations."

"The goal of US global policy is the Third Worldization of the entire world including Europe and North America, a world in which capital rules supreme with no labor unions to speak of; no prosperous, literate, well-organized working class with rising expectations; no pension funds or medical plans or environmental, consumer, and occupational protections, or any of the other insufferable things that cut into profits."

"The Third World is capitalism at its best, at its freest, the place where it is least troubled by labor unions, high wages, work benefits, occupational safety regulations, consumer protections, environmental controls, costly social benefits, public sector services, business taxes, and other progressive taxes. For half a century, commentators have been talking about bringing the prosperity of the Western world to the Third World. What is overlooked is that the real goal has been the other way around: to bring the Third World to the Western world, rolling back the century of democratic gains won by working people in North America and Europe."

"The real motives behind most of U.S foreign policy as measured by the kinds of countries U.S. Ieaders support and the kinds of countries or political movements they try to destroy, is to keep the world safe for the Fortune 500 corporations. To make sure that the transnational corporations and international global finance capital continues to control the land, labor, resources, and markets of most of the world, and ultimately, all of the world on terms that are extremely favorable to them. The goal is to destroy, to obliterate, to thwart any social movement or national leader who is trying for an alternative way of using the land, the labor, the natural resources, the markets, the capital of his or her country."

"Since World War II, the U.S. government has given some hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid to train, equip, and subsidize some millions of troops and internal security forces in more than eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend these nations from outside invasion, but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anti-capitalist insurgency."

"U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected reformist governments-guilty of introducing redistributive economic programs-in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Cyprus, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, and numerous other nations- were overthrown by their respective military forces funded and advised by the U.S.."

"Cuba's move away from a free-market system dominated by U.S. firms and toward a not-for-profit socialist economy caused it to become the target of an unremitting series of attacks perpetrated by the U.S. national security state. These attacks included U.S.-sponsored sabotage, espionage, terrorism, hijackings, trade sanctions, embargo, and outright invasion. The purpose behind this aggression was to undermine the Revolution and deliver Cuba safely back to the tender mercies of global capitalism."

"United States' leaders are not dedicated to advancing social justice and democracy in the world. Their real dedication is to create a US-dominated free-market globalism. Such a patriotism is better recognized by its real name: imperialism."

"Upon taking the Philippines from Spain in 1898, the US then fought a bloody three-year war against Filipino rebels. In Luzon alone over 600,000 people were killed by American troops or died from war-related diseases and privations- as the war against the guerrillas became a war against the people who supported the guerrillas. US General Arthur MacArthur issued a proclamation renouncing "precise observance of the laws of war." Among other things, MacArthur's troops tortured and executed prisoners (civilians included), destroyed crops, food stores, domestic animals, boats, and whole villages, and forced tens of thousands of Filipinos into "relocation camps."

"Yugoslavia remained the only nation in Europe that would not voluntarily discard what remained of its socialism and install an unalloyed free-market system. It also proudly had no interest in joining NATO. The US goal has been to transform Yugoslavia into a Third World region, a cluster of weak right-wing principalities"

"In El Salvador, a small number of super-rich families control the bulk of its domestic wealth, while most of its people live on subsistence diets and have no access to medical care.
... Of the more than 60,000 Salvadorans killed in the war between 1979 and 1987, many thousands are believed to have been murdered by rightwing death squads. Another 540,000 have fled into exile, and another 250,000 have been displaced or forced into resettlement camps within El Salvador, a country of only 4 million people.
The Salvadoran army massacred whole villages suspected of being sympathetic to the guerrillas. On December 11, 1981, a US-trained elite battalion killed more than 1,000 people in the village of Mozote and some nearby hamlets."

"US policymakers use fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming they are saving democracy from Communism."

"Should popular forces in U.S. client-state 'democracies' mobilize too successfully, developing political parties, labor unions, and peasant organizations that gain a real measure of power, there is a good chance that the military, funded by the United States and waiting in the wings to thwart the "Communist menace," will take over, suspend the constitution, make the necessary arrests and executions, and restore 'stability'."

"Cuban life expectancy rose from fifty-five years in 1959 to seventy-three years by 1984. Infant mortality has dropped to the lowest in Latin America, on a par with developed countries. Cuba's per capita food consumption is the second highest in Latin America. It has a free public-health system. The literacy rate is over 95 percent, the highest in Latin America and higher than in the USA; almost all children under sixteen are attending school. In Cuba, the paint may be peeling off some of the buildings, but unlike so many other Latin American countries, there are no hungry children begging in the streets. And this is why many progressive people look positively upon social revolutions. The children are fed and the people are far better off than in non-revolutionary Third World countries."

"The lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why Europeans went to so much trouble to steal and plunder them.
The Third World is rich, only its people are poor, and it is because of the pillage they have endured."

"After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, usually the United States."

"A low-intensity war is a proxy war, using the mercenary troops of the U.S.-backed Third World government. With Washington providing military trainers and advisers, superior firepower, surveillance and communications assistance, and generous funds, these forces are able to persist indefinitely, destroying a little at a time, with death squad assassinations in the cities and villages."

"Capitalism is much more comfortable with fascism than with social democracy."

"In Vietnam, the US. dropped several times more tons of bombs than were used in all of World War II by all sides.
In mid-June, 1994, the Vietnamese government announced that three million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians had been killed in the war, four million injured, two million made invalids."

"Almost from the beginning, the CIA engaged not only in the collection of intelligence information, but also in covert operations which involved rigging elections and manipulating labor unions abroad, carrying on paramilitary operations, overturning governments, assassinating foreign officials, protecting former Nazis and lying to Congress."

"For the ruling interests, it is time to return to nineteenth-century standards, the kind that currently obtain throughout the Third World: an unorganized working populace that toils for a bare subsistence; a mass of unemployed, desperate poor who help to depress wages and serve as a target for the misplaced resentment of those just above them; a small, shrinking middle class that hangs on by its bleeding fingers; and a tiny, obscenely rich owning class that has it all."

"On foreign affairs the press' role as a cheerleader of the national security state and free-market capitalism seems almost without restraint. Virtually no favorable exposure has ever been given to indigenous Third World revolutionary or reformist struggles or to protests at home and abroad against U.S. overseas interventions. The media's view of the world is much the same as the view from the State Department and the Pentagon. The horrendous devastation wreaked upon the presumed beneficiaries of U.S. power generally goes unmentioned and unexplained, as do the massive human rights violations perpetrated by U.S.-supported forces in dozens of free-market client states."

"The objective of U.S. world domination is not just power for its own sake but power to insure plutocratic control of the planet, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere - including the people of North America - the blessings of an untrammeled 'free market' corporate capitalism. The struggle is between those who belleve that the land, labor, capital, technology, and markets of the world should be dedicated to maximizing capital accumulation for the few, and those who believe that these things should be used for the communal benefit and socio-economic development of the many."

JOHN PERKINS

"Economic hit men (EHMs) are highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign 'aid' organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet's natural resources. Their tools include fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization."

"Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We EHMs failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in."

"The United States spends over $87 billion conducting a war in Iraq, while the United Nations estimates that for less than half that amount we could provide clean water, adequate diets, sanitation services, and basic education to every person on the planet."

"Ronald Reagan was a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy. He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government - men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire."

"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 Gen. 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, and his disreputable spy chief, Viadimiro Montesinos.
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. And the U.S. supported an armed opposition against Nicaragua's leftists in the 1980s by any means necessary, including selling arms to Iran for cash."

"In the 1970s the U.S. worked out a deal whereby the House of Saud would reinvest petrodollars in U.S. treasury securities.
Part of the agreement also was for Saudi Arabia to maintain the price of oil at a level acceptable to us and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power."

"The U.S. has 5 percent of the world's population and we're consuming more than 25 percent of the world's resources. That's not a model that can be replicated. What we are is a failure that is causing unheard of inequality and environmental damage on a global scale. Ours is an empire in the throes of collapse."

"The Group of Eight are the wealthiest countries in the world, and basically they run the world. And the leader is the United States, and it's actually the corporations within these countries that run it. It's not the governments, because, after all, the governments serve at the pleasure of the corporations.
In our own country, the next two final presidential candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, are going to each have to raise something like half a billion dollars. And, that's going to come from the people who own and run our big corporations. They are totally beholden to the government. So the G8 really is this group of countries that represent the biggest multinational corporations in the world and really serve at their behest."

"Congo has coltan - every cell phone and laptop computer has coltan in it. And several million people in the last few years in the Congo have been killed over coltan, because all of us in the G8 countries want to see our computers inexpensive and our cell phones inexpensive. But in order to do that, these people in the Congo are being enslaved. The miners, the people mining coltan, they're being killed. There are vast wars going on to provide us with cheap coltan."

"Most people look at Vietnam and Iraq as defeats. But the corporations made a huge amount of money off Vietnam, the military industry, huge corporations, the construction companies. And, they're doing it in a very big way in Iraq. So the corporatocracy, the people that are in fact insisting that our young men and women continue to go to Iraq and fight, they're making a tremendous amount of money. These are not failures for them; they're successes from an economic standpoint"

"This empire that we've created really has an emperor - the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. They are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they're not democratically elected, they don't serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this."

"East Timor declared itself independent from Portugal on November 28, 1975. Nine days later Indonesia invaded. The brutal occupation forces slaughtered an estimated 200,000 people, one third of the population of East Timor.
The U.S. government not only supplied the weapons used in the massacre but also explicitly approved the invasion. According to these records, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with Suharto on December 6, 1975, and agreed with his planned attack, which was launched the next day."

"During the 1970s, autocratic governments in Latin America experimented with economic policies that benefited U.S. investors and international corporations, that generally ended in failure for local economies - recessions, inflation, unemployment, and negative economic growth. Despite mounting opposition, Washington praised the corrupt leaders who were bankrupting their nations while amassing personal fortunes. To make matters worse, the United States supported right-wing dictators and their death squads in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua."

"Colombia has maintained its position as Washington's surrogate. Shored up by massive U.S. taxpayer assistance and armies of corporate-sponsored mercenaries, as well as formal U.S. military support, it has become the keystone in Washington's attempt's to regain regional domination. Although official justification for U. S. involvement centers on drug wars, this is a subterfuge for protecting oil interests against grassroots opposition to foreign exploitation."

"The United States turned the World Bank, the IMF, and other "multinational" institutions into colonizing tools. We negotiated lucrative deals for U.S. corporations, established "free" trade agreements that blatantly served our exporters at the expense of those in the Third World, and burdened other countries with unmanageable debts. In effect, we created surrogate governments that appeared to represent their people but in reality were our servants."

'With the Mossadegh overthrow in Iran (1953), 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.

"The corporatocracy thrives on an economy that depends on manufacturing military equipment. Our arms companies rank among the world's most profitable businesses."

"Congo's first elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was killed by Belgian- and U.S.-backed forces because of his growing ties to the Soviet Union."

"Economic Hit Men (EHM) are an elite group of men and women who utilize international financial organizations to foment conditions that make other nations subservient to the corporatocracy running our biggest corporations, our government, and our banks.
... Despite the fact that the money is returned almost immediately to corporations that are members of the corporatocracy (the creditor), the recipient country is required to pay it all back, principal plus interest. If an EHM is completely successful, the loans are so large that the debtor is forced to default on its payments after a few years. When this happens, then like the Mafia we demand our pound of flesh. This often includes one or more of the following: control over United Nations votes, the installation of military bases, or access to precious resources such as oil or the Panama Canal. Of course, the debtor still owes us the money - and another country is added to our global empire."

"At the heart of Africa's suffering, is the West's, and most notably the United States', desire to access Africa's diamonds, oil, natural gas, and other precious resources. The West has set in motion a policy of oppression, destabilization and a ruthless desire to enrich itself on Africa's fabulous wealth. Western countries have incited rebellion against stable African governments, and have even actively participated in the assassination of duly elected and legitimate African Heads of State and replaced them with corrupted and malleable officials."

"The democratically elected president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya, had called for a new constitution to replace the old one that was really set up by the oligarchy in favor of the very wealthy and the international companies. He also called for a 60 percent increase in the bottom wage rate, which had a huge impact on Dole and Chiquita, two of the biggest employers in that company. They, along with a number of companies that have sweatshops in Honduras, strongly objected, very much the same way that they had objected to Aristide in Haiti, when he did something similar, and called in the military. The general in charge of the military was a graduate of our School of the Americas, this school that's famous for creating dictators, and they overthrew Zelaya. It was a classic CIA-sponsored type of coup, very similar to what United Fruit had done in Guatemala in the early '50s. And, of course, United Fruit became Chiquita."

"Since NAFTA came into effect in 1994, U.S. exports to Mexico have almost doubled in 2002. NAFTA eliminated quotas limiting corn imports, but allowed U.S. subsidy programs to remain in place-promoting dumping of corn into Mexico by U.S. agribusiness at below the cost of production. The price paid to farmers in Mexico for corn fell by over 70 percent."

"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."

"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 Countries] 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 PILGER

"The U.S. has been the undeclared enemy of social progress in Latin America for two centuries. It doesn't matter who has been in the White House. The US will not tolerate countries with governments and cultures that put the needs of their own people first and refuse to promote or succumb to U.S. demands and pressures."

"If development was measured not by gross national product, but a society's success in meeting the basic needs of its people, Vietnam would have been a model. That was its real "threat." From the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 to 1972, primary and secondary school enrollment in the North increased sevenfold, from 700,000 to almost five million. In 1980, UNESCO estimated a literacy rate of 90 percent and school enrollment among the highest in Asia and throughout the Third World."

"Washington is ruled by true extremists, - the neocons. A few are outright fascists. Asserting US dominance is their undisguised game and, as the events in Ukraine demonstrate, they are prepared to risk a nuclear war with Russia. These people should be the common enemy of all sane human beings."

"The Israelis have long advised the Americans in both the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures. Ethnic-cleansing, wall-building, checkpoints, collective punishment and constant surveillance - these are claimed as Israeli innovations that have succeeded in stealing most of Palestine from its native people."

"Washington wants to get rid of the Venezuelan government because it is independent of US designs for the region and because Venezuela has the greatest proven oil reserves in the world and uses its oil revenue to improve the quality of ordinary lives. Venezuela remains a source of inspiration for social reform in a continent ravaged by an historically rapacious U.S.."

"More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. However, in the mainstream media, Kissinger is described as a key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his "statecraft". Only when we recognise the war criminals in our midst will the blood begin to dry."

"In Iraq, Americans destroyed a multi-ethnic society. They bribed and built walls between communities who had once inter-married, ethnically cleansing the Sunni and driving millions out of the country. The embedded media reported this as "peace", and American academics bought by Washington and "security experts" briefed by the Pentagon appeared on the BBC to spread the good news. The opposite was true."

"The United States has no intention of getting out of Afghanistan. It is building one of its fortress embassies in Kabul, Afghanistan, just as it is building a $1 billion embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. Just as it has built an enormous fortress in Baghdad, Iraq. Whatever happens to American ground troops who eventually will be withdrawn, will make no difference to the significance of the violent American presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and in Iraq. These are seen as places where the United States will have a permanent presence - a strategic position - where it will be able to monitor, and perhaps influence, and perhaps control the influences of its imperial rivals."

"The United States' bombing of Cambodia caused such widespread death and devastation that it was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed."

"The United States is waging a largely unreported war on Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America's impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia."

"During the 1990s Bill Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the 'no fly zones'. At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media."

"During the 1980s, the Third World sent to the West $220 billion more than was sent to them in any form. At the current rates of interest, it is a mathematical impossibility for most countries to pay off their debt. Many had to agree to 'structural adjustment' by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This has often meant the end of protection for the old, young and sick and 'wage restraint' in countries where the difference between wage and peonage is slight."

"Vietnam was a war of rampant technology directed against a Third World people. It was a war in which the United States dispatched its greatest ever land army, dropped the greatest tonnage of bombs in the history of warfare, pursued a military strategy deliberately aimed at forcing millions of people to abandon their homes and used chemicals in a manner that profoundly changed the environment and genetic order. Some two-and-a-half million people were killed, and many more maimed and otherwise ruined."

"Cluster bombs are landmines. The crucial difference from those banned under international treaty is that they are dropped from aircraft. At the time of writing, an estimated 70,000 American cluster 'bomblets' lie unexploded in Afghanistan, already the most landmined country in the world. This is the nature of the 'war against terrorism'."

"In Vietnam, Anti-personnel' technology was deployed with impunity; the bombs which sprayed needles into flesh and organs and were difficult to detect in X-rays created little fuss. Although millions of gallons of Agent Orange were dumped on Vietnam during the 1960s, the outcry about its genetic and environmental effects came only as the war was ending.
Death squads, which were expertly organised in Vietnam. An estimated 50,000 South Vietnamese were systematically murdered by assassins working for the CIA's 'Phoenix Programme'."

"The United States and its 'coalition' allies attacked Iraq in 1991. Up to a quarter of a million people were killed or died during and immediately after the attack. As a direct result, child mortality in Iraq doubled.
More than 1.8 million people have been forced from their homes, and Iraq's electricity, water, sewage, communications, health, agriculture and industrial infrastructure have been 'substantially destroyed', producing 'conditions for famine and epidemics'."

"Thanks mostly to an invasion by murderous 'Contra' squads, who were paid, armed and directed by the CIA, Nicaragua has been returned to its status under the Washington-sponsored Somoza dictatorship: that of the poorest, most indebted country in Latin America. Gone are the literacy programmes, the child mortality figures, the 'barefoot doctors', the improving community schools, the agricultural co-operatives."

"Far from being the terrorists of the world, the Islamic peoples have been its victims, principally the victims of U.S. fundamentalism, whose power, in all its forms - military, strategic, and economic - is the greatest source of terrorism on Earth. People are neither still nor stupid. They see their independence compromised, their resources and land and the lives of their children taken away, and their accusing fingers increasingly point north: to the great enclaves of plunder and privilege. Inevitably, terror breeds terror and more fanaticism. But how patient the oppressed have been. Their distant voices of rage are now heard; the daily horrors in faraway brutalized places have at last come home."

PETER DALE SCOTT

"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."

"Over the long haul, since World War II, oil interests have dictated the general disposition of U.S. foreign policy."

"The United States, for generations, has sustained two parallel but opposed states of mind about military atrocities and human rights: one of U.S. benevolence, generally held by the public, and the other of ends-justify-the-means brutality sponsored by counterinsurgency specialists. Normally the specialists carry out their actions in remote locations with little notice in the national press. That allows the public to sustain its faith in a just America, while hard-nosed security and economic interests are still protected in secret."

"The long and sordid history of CIA involvement with the Sicilian Mafia, the French Corsican underworld, the heroin producers of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle, the marijuana- and cocaine-trafficking Cuban exiles of Miami, and the opium smuggling mujaheddin of Afghanistan simply reinforces the lesson of the Contra period: far from considering drug networks their enemy, U.S. intelligence organizations have made them an essential ally in the covert expansion of American influence abroad."

"From Iran in 1953 to Indonesia in 1965 and Ghana in 1966 the CIA was involved in the covert overthrow of governments around the world that had threatened to nationalize their oil industries."

"Since the Korean War the United States has been involved in four major wars in the Third World: in Vietnam, in the Persian Gulf, in Colombia, and in Afghanistan. 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."

"Eighty percent of the profits from drug trafficking ends up in the banks of the wealthy countries or their branches in the underdeveloped countries where there is weaker legal control."

"With the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan, opium production, which the Taliban had nearly eliminated for the single year of 2001, reached a new high of five thousand six hundred tons in 2006."

"The U.S. overthrew the democratically elected premier Mohammed Mossadeq and his government in Iran in 1953. In doing so, the United States intervened to rescue the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a British company."

"In 1954, the United States intervened in Guatemala against Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz on behalf of United Fruit. Both of these interventions, in Iran and Guatemala, were initially advocated within the Council on Foreign Relations."

"Once in power Ronald Reagan, his CIA director William Casey, and vice president George H. W. Bush initiated emergency planning for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency], emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law. The plan also gave FEMA, which had been involved in drafting it, sweeping new powers, including the power 'to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the detention of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens in case of an unspecified national emergency'."

"There is an underlying triangle - U.S. purchases of Arab oil, U.S. sales of weapons to Arab countries, and Arab investments in the United States, particularly in Texas."

"In the 1970s, senior CIA officers and ex-officers who were dissatisfied with the CIA cutbacks instituted under Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Stansfield Turner, organized an alternative network, the so-called "Safari Club." Subordinated to intelligence chiefs from France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran (under the Shah), the Safari Club is said to have been supplemented in Washington by a "private intelligence network" consisting of CIA officers like Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines, who had been marginalized or fired by CIA Director Turner. The purpose of the Safari Club was not just to exchange information, but to conduct covert operations that the CIA could no longer carry out directly in the wake of the Watergate scandal and subsequent reforms."

"The Pinay Circle is an international right-wing propaganda group which brings together serving or retired intelligence officers and politicians with links to right-wing intelligence factions from most of the countries in Europe."

"Since World War II the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence - first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan. With America's expansion overseas, we have seen more and more covert programs and agencies, all using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends."

JOHN STOCKWELL
former CIA case officer

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."

"Coming to grips with U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed (and this is a minimum figure). Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies."

"It isn't only Gestapo maniacs who do inhuman things to people. The CIA is responsible for doing inhuman things on a massive scale to people all over the world."

"At the end of World War II, we were militarily dominant, economically dominant, and we enjoyed a remarkable international credibility. With a modicum of restraint and self-confidence we could have laid the foundations of lasting world peace. Instead, we exaggerated the challenge of a Soviet Union which had just lost 70,000 villages, 1,710 towns, 4.7 million houses, and 20 million people in the war."

"The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States. They are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves."

"The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing."

"The United States is cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World."

"The CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations... all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations."

"The U.S. has over 200 incidents in which it have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will."

"The Third World War is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World It began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II."

"Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths."

"Mounting numbers of victims, the millions of people whose lives have been trampled or splattered by CIA operations are increasingly cynical of America. Because of the CIA the world is a more dangerous place. Americans have reduced credibility. Worst of all, by retaining the CIA we are accepting ourselves as a harsh and ruthless people."

"History is the history of war, of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young people off to fight."

"Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn."

HOWARD ZINN

"America is today the leader of a worldwide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests - supporting the rich against the poor."

"Today, U.S. soldiers who are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan are not dying for their country; they are dying for Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld. They are dying for the greed of the oil cartels, for the expansion of the American empire, for the political ambitions of the president. They are dying to cover up the theft of the nation's wealth to pay for the machines of death."

"In a civil war in Greece, 1947-49, the U.S. intervened on the side of the neofascists to defeat the Greek left, who had fought the Germans in WWII."

"In Vietnam, we terrorized peasant villages with bombing attacks using napalm and cluster bombs. We supported dictators and death squads in Chile and El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti. In Iraq, more than 500,000 Children died as a result of economic sanctions the United States insisted on."

"Throughout U.S. history, our military has been used not for moral purposes but to expand economic, political, and military power."

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

"We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud."

"Henry Kissinger wrote that the proposal to create an international court is a bad idea. Well, naturally it's a bad idea, because he would be one of the first people who would be up there on the witness stand trying to explain his support for death squads and repressive governments in Latin America, war crimes in Southeast Asia, and the apartheid South African government."

"The United States has consistently opposed the creation of an international war crimes tribunal because it could be used against people in the U.S. government and military. The United States wants to find other people who have committed war crimes, but an American by definition cannot commit a war crime."

"Here in the United States the 'School of the Americas' at Fort Benning, Georgia, has trained people who have engaged in terrorism, trained people who then became organizers of death squads in Central America.

"The advantage of the strategy of expanding and winning the war on terrorism, is that it gives the government a perpetual war and a perpetual atmosphere of repression. And it generates perpetual profits for corporations."

"There is a precise division between who we bomb and who we don't bomb. The division has nothing to do with which countries may be harboring terrorists. The division has only to do with which countries we don't control yet. The countries that we control, like Saudi Arabia, can harbor as many terrorists as they want. We will look elsewhere."

"I don't think it's hard to figure out why the United States is so concerned with the Middle East. You can answer that question with one word: oil. At the time of World War II, the U.S. government made the decision that it was going to be the major power controlling the oil resources of the Middle East."

"Fundamental change in U.S. foreign policy is hardly to be expected. It would threaten too many interests: the power of political leaders, the ambitions of the military, the corporations that profit from the nation's enormous military commitments."

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