EMPIRE OF CHAOS

COUNTRIES

PAGE 6

LAOS

"The CIA flew opium and heroin all over Indochina to serve the personal and entrepreneurial needs of the CIA's various military and political allies, ultimately turning numerous GIs into addicts. The operation was not a paragon of discretion. Heroin was refined in a laboratory located on the site of CIA headquarters in northern Laos. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world's illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America's booming heroin market."

William Blum

"It seemed that everyone knew what was going on in Laos, except for the American public. And Americans didn't know about it because the media were willingly keeping it secret."

Walter J. Smith, a U.S. Air Force non-commissioned officer in Laos

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

Christopher Hitchins

"The U.S. military released 297 million cluster bomblets over Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Thirty years later these bomblets continue to kill farmers in their fields and children unfortunate enough to find a 'plaything'."

Robert Weitzel

"Between 1964 and 1973, the US Air Force dropped 260 million cluster bombs on Laos, or the equivalent of a fully-loaded B-52 bomber's payload dropped every eight minutes for nine years."

rawstory.com

"The Laos operation is something of which we can be proud as Americans. It has involved virtually no American casualties. What we are getting for our money there is, I think, to use the old phrase, very cost effective."

U. Alexis Johnson, US Under Secretary of State in 1971
about American carpet-bombing of Laos which killed hundreds-of-thousands of civilians

"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."

F. William Engdahl

"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 causes congenital disorders and birth defects, and contributes to diseases like cancer and diabetes.
In 1970, U.S, Operation Tailwind used sarin nerve gas in Laos."

Stephen Lendman

"Air America re-supplied the CIA-created Meo [Hmong] Army in Laos, which fought a proxy war for the US against the communist Pathet Lao, who had overrun the Plain of Jars region in 1964. Air America ferried weapons into remote Meo villages, then returned to its base at Long Tieng loaded with opium grown by the villagers."

Dean Henderson

"A blueprint for American strategy in the War on Terror was the 1959-1975 secret war in Laos, where the CIA worked with hundreds of civilian contractors who flew spotter aircraft, ran ground bases and operated radar stations in civilian clothes while raising its own private army among the Hmong to fight the pro-communist Pathet Lao."

Jeremy Kuzmarov

"From 1964 to 1973, the United States flew 580,000 bombing missions over Laos. The ostensible targets were Vietnamese communist troops and Pathet Lao forces. In practice, however, the targets were anything that moved.
A third of the bombs dropped on Laos failed to explode on impact, thus becoming UXO. Some of the most harmful munitions were cluster bombs, which were dropped inside casings meant to open in mid-air and spread the "bomblets" over a wide area. About 80 million cluster bombs didn't detonate; less than one percent of all UXO has been cleared.
Unexploded ordnance is just one legacy of intensive American bombing of Laos when the United States dropped two million tons of bombs on the country - more than twelve times the amount of bombs dropped on Japan during World War II. Laos is, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on Earth.
Is the United States doing anything to help clean up the bombs it dropped and assist the victims of its atrocities? Hardly. To date, the US has allocated $85 million to help get rid of the UXO - nowhere near the amount required and a pathetic figure compared to the $18 million (inflation-adjusted) the United States spent per day bombing Laos."

Brett S. Morris

"The CIA was running the Golden Triangle narcotics business during the Vietnam War. The heroin being sold to American soldiers in Vietnam was coming from the CIA's clients in Laos. The CIA was protecting the major opium producers in the Golden Triangle, just like they've been protecting the major drug dealers in Afghanistan for the last fifteen years."

Douglas Valentine

"John Foster and Allen Dulles backed a series of covert operations against two of East Asia's most prominent neutralists, Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia and Prince Souvanna Phouma of Laos."

Stephen Kinzer

LATIN AMERICA

"Coups do not happen in Latin America without the support of those with power in the US."

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond, 2010

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

Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's Workshop"

"The 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."

John Pilger

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

J. Patrice McSherry in the book "Predatory States"

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

Naomi Klein

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.

Howard Zinn

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

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

"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."

F. William Engdahl

"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."

William Blum

"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."

Edward S. Herman

"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."

Marine General Smedley Butler

" It was under Johnson that Washington began either to organize or patronize a cycle of coups starting in Brazil in 1964, continuing through Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile, and ending in Argentina in 1976."

Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's Workshop"

"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."

John Pilger

"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."

John Perkins

"The 1980s became known as the "lost decade" in Latin America, something many have attributed in part to the Reagan Administration's policies toward the region. During this period, structural adjustment loans plunged regional economies and living standards into a downward spiral from which many countries have yet to recover. The 1980s were plagued by violence; US funded government security forces in Guatemala and El Salvador prosecuted dirty wars which resulted in the disappearance, torture, and massacre of thousands of the countries' own citizens."

Sarah Hamburger

"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."

Noam Chomsky

"In Paraguay, 2 percent of the population owns 70 percent of the land."

[the quotes below are from
Penny Lernoux's book "Cry of the People"]

"Most of the techniques of counterinsurgency, such as intelligence gathering, police work, [and] propaganda have been turned against the civilian population of Latin America.
... Many of the victims of this repression charge, with good reason, that the nation that led the fight against fascism in Europe has contributed to its resurrection in Latin America.
That this could happen is due in large part to the United States' historically contemptuous attitude toward Latin America, which it has always looked upon as a purely business venture. Whereas the atrocities committed by Hitler and Mussolini outraged the American people, similar repression in Latin America elicits little more than a yawn."

"All the Latin-American Presidents overthrown with U.S. help in recent years represented constituted governments: Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Goulart in Brazil (1964), Allende in Chile (1973). It mattered not whether the perceived threat was a democratically elected government or a guerrilla group; it was a dangerous precedent to be eliminated by military force."

"After reading case after nauseating case of the atrocities committed in the name of national security, and after recognizing the United States' involvement in the creation of military, police, and paramilitary agencies responsible for these horrors in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia-seventeen Latin-American countries in all - one comes to the conclusion either that the Americans who helped to establish and run these military and police training programs were deranged or that they never considered the predictable results of their work-possibly didn't want to consider them."

"Whether the country is Brazil or Guatemala, more or less industrialized, in South or Central America, the statistics are always the same: a tiny minority, usually 1 to 4 percent of the population, owns the majority of the arable land and takes an overwhelming share of the nation's agricultural and industrial wealth. The great majority, in the slums or impoverished rural villages, owns little or no land, is undernourished, illiterate or semiliterate, and unemployed or underemployed."

"The Argentina dictatorship, unlike Brazil, was dressed up with military doctrines and economic miracles, Argentina in the late 1970s was a land of sheer, open terror. Nothing in Latin America, not even Pinochet's Chile, could equal the levels of violence that followed the military coup of March 1976. Indeed, the only regime to create a state of fear approximating that in Argentina was Hitler's Germany."

"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."

"The more industrially advanced the country, the more sophisticated the form of torture and death: in Ecuador, a horse bridle, in Honduras, a bread oven; in Brazil, computerized terror, truth serum, and electric shock. So systematized is torture that it has become a way of life in many Latin-American countries."

"A latent force in several of the most important South-American countries, fascism - particularly Mussolini's corporate state-had long attracted certain military and civilian sectors. During the 1930s it was also popular within an influential wing of the Catholic Church because of its virulent anti-communism and emphasis on "God, Fatherland, and Family." Called "integralism" in South America, this creole brand of European fascism made its greatest impact on Argentina, although the Brazilian populist dictator Getulio Vargas (president 1930-45, 1951-S4) also flirted with integralism, especially after 1937, when he seized total power and established his Estado Novo. Chile and Paraguay were also influenced by fascism."

"Because of Peron's lasting influence, fascism never died in Argentina and could be revived with little or no outside prompting. In Brazil it was reborn thanks largely to Brazil's "greatest friend," the United States.

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

"3 percent of the landowners in Brazil control 80 percent of the arable land, and the multinational corporations are establishing ranches of 500,000 acres and more in the Amazon."

"The "institutionalization" of violence in Brazil was rationalized by both Washington and corporate industry as an unpleasant but necessary corollary of development, the theory being that only a strong government could drag Brazil into the twentieth century. As long as Brazil's gross national product could show a reasonable growth, and as long as the regime's representatives spoke piously about human rights and democracy in international forums, the rest of the world would look the other way."

LIBYA

"The Libyan revolution was portrayed as an extension of the Arab Spring, and NATO involvement was framed in humanitarian terms.
The fact that the CIA was actively working to help the Libyan rebels topple Gaddafi was no secret, nor were the airstrikes that Obama ordered against the Libyan government. However, little was said about the identity or the ideological leanings of these Libyan rebels. Not surprising, considering the fact that the leader of the Libyan rebels later admitted that his fighters included Al-Qaeda linked jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq.
... After Gaddafi was overthrown, the Libyan armories were looted, and massive quantities of weapons were sent by the Libyan rebels to Syria. The weapons, which included anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles were smuggled into Syria through Turkey, a NATO ally."

scgnews.com, 2014

"Libya was once one of the most prosperous nations in Africa, former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi made the "mistake" of challenging the U.S. petrodollar system by creating a gold-backed pan-African currency known as the dinar. Following his ouster, Libya was transformed into a failed state where there is still no clear government, terrorism runs rampant and slaves are now openly traded in public."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

"As of 2006, Libya had the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, some 35%, larger even than Nigeria."

F. William Engdahl, 2014

 
"The rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) did not happen overnight, nor by accident. It was the logical result of the United States continuing its strategy of proxy warfare it had carried out against Libya."

Tony Cartalucci

"It is estimated that 250,000 Libyans were killed in the war, violence and subsequent chaos that the U.S. and its allies unleashed in Libya in February 2011, and which continues to the present day. The maximum estimate of all deaths is 360,000."

Nicolas JS Davies, 2018

MIDDLE EAST

"The use of social media to control a targeted nation's information space, and use it as a means of carrying out sociopolitical subversion and even regime change reached its pinnacle in 2011 during the US-engineered "Arab Spring."
Portrayed at first as spontaneous demonstrations organized organically over Facebook and other social media platforms, it is now revealed in articles like the New York Times', "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," that the US government had trained activists years ahead of the protests, with Google and Facebook participating directly in making preparations.
Opposition fronts funded and supported by the US State Department's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its subsidiaries Freedom House, International Republican Institute (IRI), and National Democratic Institute (NDI) were invited to several summits where executives and technical support teams from Google and Facebook provided them with the game plans they would execute in 2011 in coordination with US and European media who also attended the summits.
The end result was the virtual weaponization of social media, serving as cover for what was a long-planned, regional series of coups including heavily armed militants who eventually overthrew the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, with Syria now locked in 6 years of war as a result."

Tony Cartalucci, 2017

"In the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria, America has destroyed any significant progress those nations had made in education, healthcare, infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity, postal services, courts. By degrading the standards of living for people in perceived "hostile" nations, America's ruling elite empowers itself, while claiming that it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are "humanitarian" and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

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

Andre Vltchek, 2015

"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."

F. William Engdahl

"Each of Barack Obama's relentless military interventions, including Libya , Somalia , Yemen , Iraq , Afghanistan and especially Syria, were characterized by the deliberate and total destruction of the means of normal civilized social existence for defenseless civilians - the bombing of homes, factories, markets, weddings, funerals, schools, hospitals - leading to the deaths of many thousands and the uprooting of millions into desperate flight. In each case, Obama would proclaim that he was saving the victims from imminent genocide by an abusive ruler or ethnic group."

James Petras

"Since 9/11, the United States has used cluster bombs in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen. The US has also exported cluster bombs to numerous countries, including Saudi Arabia, which used them to attack Yemen in 2015."

Brett S. Morris , 2015

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

Philip Giraldi, 2015

"The 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."

Noam Chomsky

"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."

Howard Zinn

"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."

Peter Dale Scott

"The goal of the American elite is to make Syria, and then Iran, and then Russia join the ranks of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. The plan is to smash it into ethnic and religious lines, and to fuel fighting between these groups for many years."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"The "war on terror" was a hoax. Americans were deceived by policymakers, who are pursuing a hegemonic agenda.
... The consequences for peoples in Somalia, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Ukraine have been massive deaths and dislocations, infrastructure destruction, internal conflicts, birth defects, invasions, bombings, drones. Millions of peoples have been murdered by Washington's pursuit of hegemony, and millions have been turned into refugees."

Paul Craig Roberts , 2015

"While Barack Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, can be properly credited with the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq, Obama managed to contribute significantly to the destruction of Libya, Yemen, and Syria, while attacking the people of Somalia as well."

Laurie Calhoun, 2017

"In 2016, Obama ordered his military to drop at least 26,171 bombs.
They rained relentlessly down on seven majority-Muslim countries - Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan."

Piers Morgan, 2017

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