EMPIRE OF CHAOS

COUNTRIES

PAGE 2

CAMBODIA

"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."

John Pilger

"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."

William Blum

"Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"

Henry Kissinger

"What the United States has done to Cambodia is greater evil than we have done to any country in the world."

Pete McClosky, California Congressman

"I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. I encouraged the Thai to help the Khmer Rouge."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1981

"Neither the United States nor its friends nor those who are caught helplessly in its embrace are well served when its leaders act, as Nixon and Kissinger acted, without care. Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime."

William Shawcross

"Does one American in 1,000 or in 100,000, realize that, whereas the Germans dropped 80,000 tons of bombs on Britain in more than five years of war (and we thought it was barbaric), we dropped 100,000 tons on Indochina in the single month of last November, when Nixon restricted the bombing because of the Paris "peace" talks; and that under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon we have dropped a total of 7 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos- vastly more than we and the British let loose on Germany and Japan together in World War II? It was done in the name of "a just peace," of course. Has not Nixon said it dozens of times, his face on the TV screen frozen in unctuousness, as he sent his troops to invade Cambodia/Laos or as he ordered his bombers to resume unloading tens of thousands of tons of lethal bombs on a country which had no Air Force with which to defend itself?"

William Shirer

"The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, butchered more than a million people in Cambodia. The Communist Khmer Rouge were eventually ousted by Vietnamese troops, whereupon the Reagan administration quietly shifted its support to Pol Pot's army-a cynical and outrageous foreign policy maneuver that provoked little comment in the U.S. media at the time."

Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon

"The Cambodian Communist Party or Khmer Rouge, a revolutionary movement led by Pol Pot, gained power in Cambodia after the terrible destruction and disorganization brought about by the US destabilization campaign in Cambodia from 1969 to 1973 with its intensive, secret and illegal bombing. Between 1975 and 1978 the Pol Pot regime turned all its efforts to constructing a purified Khmer rural society. It forced the urban population to move to the countryside and executed at least 200,000 people, many of them deemed to be contaminated with imperialism or Vietnamese blood or culture. Intellectuals, professionals, civil servants and cultural leaders were systematically eliminated. Forced labor on construction and agricultural schemes, starvation and disease killed another 1.5 million Cambodians. About one Cambodian in five was exterminated. The Government's ruthless hold on power continued until it was driven from office by the Vietnamese invasion of 1979."

Terrorism: No-Nonsense guide

"As a result of the expanded and intensified bombing campaigns, it has been estimated that as many as 350,000 civilians in Laos, and 600,000 in Cambodia, lost their lives."

Christopher Hitchins

"New evidence from US government documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that the 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."

John Pilger

"If the United States had refused to help Lon Nol after the coup in 1970, he would have collapsed. I would have returned and stopped the war. It didn't happen because Nixon and Kissinger didn't want Sihanouk back. There are only two men responsible for the tragedy in Cambodia today, Mr. Nixon and Dr. Kissinger.
Lon Nol was nothing without them and the Khmer Rouge were nothing without Lon Nol. But the results were the opposite of what they wanted. They demoralized America, they lost all of Indochina to the Communists, and they created the Khmer Rouge."

William Shawcross

"In 1970, the Khmer Rouge's numbers were in the 100s; in the ensuing social chaos accompanying the heavy U.S. bombing and Sihanouk's removal, traditional Cambodian society simply dissolved and the Khmer Rouge's numbers multiplied. As covertly as possible the USA supported the Khmer Rouge throughout its devastating rule over Cambodia."

Douglas. F. Dowd

"US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger supervised the carpet bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s which killed more than half-a-million civilians and paved the way for the Khmer Rouge victory two years later. Margaret Thatcher, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan all supported the regime after it was driven from power. And China supplied Pol Pot with weapons throughout the 1980s. Because of this the genocide was buried for nearly 20 years. The Khmer Rouge survived until 1992."

Wayne Ellwood

"In 1969, President Richard Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry A. Kissinger, unleashed B-52 carpet bombing for over fourteen months against a people who still tilled the soil with water buffalo. The 3,500 bombing sorties resulted in 600,000 deaths. The American bombing of Cambodia was a closely guarded secret primarily because the U.S. was not at war with Cambodia.
Not only did Nixon and Kissinger not seek the necessary approval from Congress to bomb Cambodia, they tried to conceal the bombing not only from the American public but Congress as well.
Dozens of towns, villages, and hamlets were destroyed and burnt to ensure that they could no longer serve as a base or sanctuary for communist forces. There was no attempt to discriminate between innocent Cambodians and the enemy during these assaults.
Cambodia was being systematically demolished, and the Khmer Rouge, hitherto a marginal element, were becoming a significant force with substantial peasant support in inner Cambodia, increasingly victimized by U. S. terror.
Following the bombing, many peasants were so outraged at the United States and their puppet leader in Cambodia that they chose to join the Khmer Rouge, a marginal revolutionary communist group whose ranks swelled to a major force. After taking power, the Khmer Rouge unleashed a reign of terror killing over one million people."

David Model

"From 1961-1971, dioxin-containing defoliant Agent Orange was used, mainly in the South Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Millions of gallons were sprayed with devastating consequences because dioxin is one of the most toxic known substances, a potent carcinogenic human immune system suppressant. It accumulates in adipose tissue and the liver, alters living cell genetic structures, causes congenital disorders and birth defects."

Stephen Lendman

"Although the Khmer Rouge are fully responsible for the atrocities which they committed in Cambodia, the United States must at least accept some responsibility for creating the conditions that provided the Khmer Rouge with the opportunity to rise to power. Before the American-South Vietnamese bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge were a marginal force of about 3,000. The death and destruction resulting from the actions of the United States and South Vietnam drove hundreds of thousands of peasants into the arms of the Khmer Rouge giving them the strength to eventually take over the government."

David Model

"In 1975 Cambodia fell to the Khmer Rouge whose leader Pol Pot launched a genocide that rivaled the earlier purges of Hitler and Stalin. The Khmer Rouge, with vigorous support from the CIA, killed 1.5 million Cambodians."

Dean Henderson

"The word "hypocrisy" barely begins to cover the Carter administration's support for Pol Pot's insurgents as they fought the Vietnamese invasion in 1979, followed by support for the Khmer Rouge's retention of Cambodia's UN seat - even as the US denounced Khmer Rouge genocide.
... It was easy enough for human rights leaders to denounce the crimes of the Khmer Rouge. What was far harder was acknowledging American responsibility for what had happened. And yet already at the time of the American invasion and bombing of Cambodia in 1970, witnesses of the flight of peasants to Phnom Penh to escape the B-52s and the shattering of their traditional livelihoods were warning of the horrors such brutalization might bring in its wake. In the end, this was another awful chapter in the very old story of how savage warfare not only destroys a society but also opens the way for the rise of a small, fanatical, brutal leadership capable of horrific atrocities rationalized by ideology."

James Peck

"U.S. bombing of Cambodia had already been underway for several years in secret under the Johnson and Nixon administrations, but President Nixon openly began bombing in preparation for a land assault on Cambodia.
... Immense damage was done to the villages and cities of Cambodia, causing refugees and internal displacement of the population. This unstable situation enabled the Khmer Rouge, a small political party led by Pol Pot, to assume power.
... The Khmer Rouge's role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death, injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people.
... So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge - a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge."

James A. Lucas

"You should tell the Khmer Rouge that we will be friends with them. They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in the way. We are prepared to improve relations with them. Tell them the latter part, but don't tell them what I said before."

Henry Kissinger speaking to a Thai Foreign Minister, 1975

"When the bombing began Cambodia was a neutral nation, therefore, to bomb it would be illegal in U.S. law. For that reason, it was kept secret even from the pilots doing the bombing.
The bombing began on March 17, 1969. By the time it ended, 14 months later, 3,630 bombing raids-raids not flights-had been carried out by flights of 50 or so 8-engined B-52s flying mostly from Guam or Okinawa.
When the planes took off the pilots had been given "legitimate" targets in Vietnam; as they reached Vietnam, they were given coordinates by radio - in Cambodia. We know that from the sworn testimony of one of the pilots."

William Shawcross

"Between 1975 and 1979, 2,035,000 "educated" people in Cambodia were rounded up and shot. During the short four years of its rule in Cambodia, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge government murdered over 31 percent of the entire Cambodian population."

Charlie Robinson

"I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive Secretaries of State in the modern history of this country. Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, was one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. "

Senator Bernie Sanders

"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."

John Pilger

CHILE

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

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"Not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty."

U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry in 1970 - three years before the U.S.-backed coup against Chile's elected President Allende in 1973

"They tell how the Chilean military - trained and financed by the United States - tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vaginas and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death."

reports from victims and survivors of Allende's coup in Chile in 1973

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State under Richard Nixon - about Chile prior to the CIA overthrow of the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende in 1973

"A reign of terror has converted South America into a giant concentration camp with some thirty thousand political prisoners, and thousands more murdered or exiled.
In previous times of military dictatorship, there was at least somewhere to hide. Argentines could find safety in Uruguay; Bolivians and Brazilians could flee to Chile. But now, when all these countries are marching in step, with a central pool of computerized data on political exiles and open collaboration among the region's secret police, repression is standardized and ubiquitous.
Brazilian military officers taught Chile's secret police the techniques of modern torture in the weeks following the 1973 coup."

Penny Lernoux in her book Cry of the People

"Save Chile. Not concerned with risks involved. $10,000,000 available, more if necessary. Make the economy scream."

CIA Director Richard Helms - discussing plan to destabilize government of Chile under democractically-elected President Salvador Allende

"The CIA had nothing to do with the coup in Chile, to the best of my knowledge, and I only put in that qualification in case some mad man appears down there, who, without instructions, talked to somebody."

Henry Kissinger testified in 1973, under oath

"A brutally repressive regime was essential to America's interests because there was no civilian political option for it to turn to, and Washington had no hesitation in immediately endorsing the new order and aiding it, revealing again its two-decades-long preference for dictators and repressive regimes in the hemisphere.
Chile also proved once more that the United States could never gracefully accept the verdict of democratic politics in any nation, where anti-Yankee sentiment was overwhelming for fear of seeing not only its local investments lost but also encouraging anti-United States economic legislation elsewhere in the hemisphere."

Gabriel Kolko in his book Confronting the Third World

"The CIA revealed that as early as 1964 American businessmen with interests in Chile offered the agency money to prevent Allende from being elected... The agency refused the money, but advised the businessmen how they could funnel the funds to opposition candidates."

Frederick H. Gareau in his book State Terrorism and United States

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

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

"There is compelling evidence that in Chile Nixon's tough stance against Allende in 1970 was principally shaped by his concern for the future of the American corporations whose assets, he believed, would be seized by an Allende government."

"Our economy could no longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more than eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies that have always put their interests ahead of those of the countries where they make their profits ....
These same firms exploited Chilean copper for many years, made more than four billion dollars in profit in the last forty-two years alone, while their initial investments were less than thirty million .... My country, Chile, would have been totally transformed by that four billion dollars...
We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, from positions of great influence. We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system."

Chilean President Salvador Allende, December 4,1972

"The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on -- and even precedent value for -- other parts of the worldThe imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it."

Henry Kissinger in a 1970 memo to Richard Nixon

"When Salvador Allende, a Popular Unity candidate dedicated to democratic egalitarian reforms, was elected president of Chile in 1971, he took over the reins of government and was able to initiate some popular policies. But he could never gain control of the state apparatus, that is, the military, the police, the intelligence services, the courts, and the fundamental organic law that rigged the whole system in favor of wealth and corporate property. When Allende began to develop a reform program for the benefit of the common populace and against class privilege, the Chilean military, abetted by the White House and the CIA, seized power and murdered thousands of his supporters, destroying not only Allende's government but the democracy that produced it."

Michael Parenti, 2007

"The CIA sought to instigate a coup to prevent Allende from taking office after he won a plurality in the 4 September election ... Numerous contacts were made with key military and national police officers to persuade them to carry out a coup. The U.S. Army's attaché was placed under the operational control of the agency, and he relayed similar messages to his military contacts. Four CIA officers were sent under non-official cover to meet with the most sensitive of the Chilean military officers who were plotting the coup. The agency worked with three groups of plotters. All three conspiring groups agreed that any successful coup would require the kidnapping of General Rene Schneider, a staunch defender of constitutional government."

Frederick H. Gareau in his book State Terrorism and United States

"The 'Chicago boys,' as they are known in Chile, convinced the Chilean generals that they were prepared to supplement the brutality, which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets it lacked.
The economic plan has had to be enforced, and in the Chilean context that could be done only by the killing of thousands, the establishment of concentration camps all over the country, the jailing of more than 100,000 persons in three years .... Regression for the majorities and 'economic freedom' for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin."

Orlando Letelier - with the Institute for Policy Studies - and formerly Chile's Ambassador to Washington under Salvador Allende - was assassinated in Washington DC on September 21, 1976

"Chile under Augusto Pinochet and the Chicago Boys was not a capitalist state featuring a liberated market but a corporatist one. Corporatism, or "corporativism," originally referred to Mussolini's model of a police state run as an alliance of the three major power sources in society-government, businesses and trade unions-all collaborating to guarantee order in the name of nationalism. What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector-the workers-thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth.
It was the Chicago Boys in Chile, fittingly, who pioneered the process of democracy-proofing capitalism, or building what they called "new democracy." In Chile, before handing over power to an elected government after seventeen years of junta rule, the Chicago Boys rigged the constitution and the courts so it was legally next to impossible to reverse their revolutionary laws.
The entire thirty-year history of he Chicago School experiment has been one of mass corruption and corporatist collusion between security states and large corporations, from Chile's piranhas, to Argentina's crony privatizations, to Russia's oligarchs, to Enron's energy shell game, to Iraq's "free fraud zone." The point of shock therapy is to open up a window for enormous profits to be made very quickly-not despite the lawlessness but precisely because of it."

Naomi Klein - Shock Doctrine

"On September 11, 1973, a military coup ended a century of democratic tradition in Chile and started the long reign of General Augusto Pinochet. Similar coups followed in other countries, and soon half the continent's population was living in terror. This was a strategy designed in Washington and imposed upon the Latin American people by the economic and political forces of the right. In every instance the military acted as mercenaries to the privileged groups in power. Repression was organized on a large scale; torture, concentration camps, censorship, imprisonment without trial, and summary executions became common practices. Thousands of people "disappeared," masses of exiles and refugees left their countries running for their lives."

Isabel Allende, author and niece of Chilean President Salvador Allende

"Neoliberalism as an economic policy agenda which began in Chile in 1973. Its inauguration consisted of a U.S.-organized coup against a democratically elected socialist president and the installment of a bloody military dictatorship notorious for systematic torture. This was the only way to turn the neoliberal model of the so-called "Chicago Boys" under the leadership of Milton Friedman - a student of Friedrich von Hayek - into reality."

Claudia von Werlhof

"The CIA intervened in Chile's 1958 and 1964 elections. In 1970 a socialist candidate, Salvador Allende, was elected president. The CIA wanted to incite a military coup to prevent his inauguration, but the Chilean army's chief of staff, General Rene Schneider, opposed this action. The CIA then planned, along with some people in the Chilean military, to assassinate Schneider. This plot failed and Allende took office.
President Nixon was not to be dissuaded and he ordered the CIA to create a coup climate: "Make the economy scream," he said. What followed were guerilla warfare, arson, bombing, sabotage and terror. ITT and other U.S. corporations with Chilean holdings sponsored demonstrations and strikes.
Finally, on September 11, 1973 Allende died either by suicide or by assassination. At that time Henry Kissinger, U.S. Secretary of State, said the following regarding Chile: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people."
During 17 years of terror under Allende's successor, General Augusto Pinochet, an estimated thousands of Chileans were killed and many others were tortured or 'disappeared'."

James A. Lucas

CHINA

"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'."

F. William Engdahl

"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."

Chalmers Johnson

"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."

F. William Engdahl

COLOMBIA

"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."

John Perkins

"A pact between Colombia and NATO, a so-called "Security Cooperation Agreement" was first signed in June 2013. Today, NATO troops are gradually occupying all seven American military bases in Colombia. They are just simply converting from US to NATO bases."

Peter Koenig

"Most criminal finance runs through Western banks, especially in London. The 97% of profits from the Colombian drug trade are laundered for criminal syndicates through banks in First-World countries."

Nafeez Ahmed

"Plan Colombia's proponents originally projected a "successful" campaign on the model of El Salvador - a dirty war in which Washington delegated the killing of insurgents to U.S.-trained local forces. Today more and more observers are seeing analogies with America's failed adventure in Vietnam. The tactics are eerily similar: from military advisers, high-tech listening posts, defoliation programs, river boats, and helicopters, to assaults on the countryside that displace hundreds of thousands of civilians.
... The true purpose of most CIA campaigns, like Plan Colombia, has not been the ideal of eradication. It has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the Colombian state security apparatus and/or the CIA."

Peter Dale Scott

"Pablo Escobar and other leading Colombian drug lords were encouraged by the CIA to deposit their earnings in eight firms that had been set up by the Vatican as money laundries. By 1978, when John Paul II ascended to the papal throne, the money coming in to these firms from the Medellin Cartel alone was enormous, since Escobar, at the height of his power, was smuggling fifteen tons of cocaine into the United States every day.
... The money the money-laundering firms received was wired or transported by courier, often a cleric, to the central headquarters of Banco Ambrosiano in Milan. From Milan, the money was re-routed to the IOR (Vatican Bank) which charged a processing fee of 15 to 20 percent. From Vatican City, the funds were transferred to numbered bank accounts in Switzerland.
... The CIA was an active participant in the arrangement since the Agency was deeply involved with Escobar and the drug cartels.
... The CIA set up Air America North America. The planes made regular three thousand mile runs to Colombia to pick up the bundles of cocaine that were distributed to dealers throughout the east coast. The funds generated from the cocaine sales were used to sponsor black operations in South and Central America. A substantial amount of this cash was funneled into the IOR's (Vatican Bank) offshore shells."

Paul L. Williams

"The Bush family was deeply entangled in both Colombian cocaine and Afghan opium and heroin operations. As Reagan's Vice President during the time of the Afghan Mujahideen war, Bush headed a Presidential Task Force on International Drug Smuggling. According to European anti-narcotics officials, Bush used his post to facilitate the inflow of Colombian cocaine via Florida, where his old CIA Cuban buddies controlled organized crime."

F. William Engdahl

"On October 30th, 2009, the US formally entered into an agreement with the Colombian government to allow US access to seven military bases in Colombia and unlimited use of Colombian territory for military operations. The agreement itself is purported to be directed at counter-narcotics operations and counter-terrorism. But a US Air Force document released earlier this year discussing the need for a stronger US military presence in Colombia revealed the true intentions behind the military agreement. The document stated that the US military presence was necessary to combat the "constant threat from anti-US governments in the region". Clearly, that is a reference to Venezuela, and probably Bolivia, maybe Ecuador. It's no secret that Washington considers the Venezuelan government anti-US, though it's not true. Venezuela is anti-imperialist, but not anti-US."

Eva Golinger

"In Colombia, we are fighting a war - supposedly on drugs but in fact financed in part by drugs - with a drug proxy - the corrupt Colombian army and its even more corrupt paramilitary auxiliaries. In 2001 Colombian government sources estimated that 40 percent of Colombian cocaine exports were controlled by right-wing paramilitary warlords and their trafficking allies. Meanwhile the amount controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the target of the U.S. "war on drugs," was estimated by the Colombian government to be 2.5 percent.

Peter Dale Scott

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