This article briefly examines the close resemblance of ‘The Secret Team’ to the Doug Coe “Family” Christian millennial cult, sponsors of the USA’s ‘National Prayer Breakfast.’ We begin with a look at ‘The Secret Team.’
Colonel L. Fletcher Prouty was one of the top Pentagon liaison officers for CIA special operations during the Vietnam war era. A highly ethical and intelligent man, Prouty more than came to have grave doubts about the endeavors he was involved in. He studied what was happening in his line of work closely and subsequently revealed what he had seen. He was, and is, no doubt the most important whistle-blower of the post World War Two era; arguably his revelations have been the most suppressed of any whistle-blower.
Here, I have taken a few key paragraphs from his seminal work, ‘The Secret Team’, to demonstrate what he had written about is as relevant today as when written nearly 45 years ago.
Prouty’s paragraphs are in italics, my clarifications and other observations are NOT in italics and are bracketed [ ]
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It was the CIA, with help from a few other agencies, that put together the Inter-American Police Academy during the early Kennedy years, which played such an important part in emphasizing national police power in the nations of Latin America. The CIA brought in police instructors from all over the United States and from the military for this school. The success of this school, operating covertly from an Army base in the Canal of Panama, led to other schools in the United States that have carried on this type of work for police forces in this country. Part of the impetus behind the great buildup in the strength of police force all over the country dates back to this CIA police academy work and to the other schools it spawned. This police work not only involved training but it integrated new weapons, new procedures, and new techniques into American police work, some of which has been good and much of which has been quite ominous.
Anyone who doubts that this nation building and police activity has not become real and very effective right here in the United States need only visit the area around Fort Bragg to find one of these early paramilitary CIA-oriented specialists, General Tolson, sending his American soldiers out into the countryside with nation-building programs for the citizens of the United States. If such tactics continue, it is possible that an enlargement of such a program could lead to a pacification program of areas of the United States, such as the CIA and the U.S. Army have carried out in Indochina
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By the end of 1962 this nation had gone so far down the line following the Agency, the new Special Forces doctrine, the MAP [Military Assistance Plan, for civilian government], and the new U.S. philosophy as outlined in the President’s Committee report, that it was saying openly it was well on its way to carrying out as top national policy a major clandestine operation so big in fact that the entire government would be involved. Obviously, it could not be really clandestine in the sense that it would be kept secret from our enemies; on the contrary, it was a new kind of “clandestine”, so it would be kept secret from all Americans
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The important thing to understand is that the [Pentagon’s] much-heralded office of SACSA [Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities] had very few military responsibilities. It was almost entirely CIA oriented. Most of its dealings with the services were in areas in which the CIA was most active. For example, the great proportion of its dealing with the Army was strictly limited to Special Forces activity. With the Air Force it was for the most part limited to Special Air Warfare activity, and with the Navy it was active in the Sea, Air, Land (SEAL) teams. There were other duties of course; but most of them gave the office something it could say it was doing while it performed its primary task of supporting the CIA, the ST [Secret Team], and of breathing life into the massive Frankenstein called counterinsurgency
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All the pieces were coming together, and during this formative period a new special group was formed. This was the Special Group (of the NSC) [National Security Council], Counterinsurgency, better known as the Special Group CI, or CI. This group presided over the CIA, State and Defense Departments, and others, who hastily put together a host of counterinsurgency nations. It was a watch list, which varied from time to time as intelligence inputs rose and fell with the tides of international events. The Special Group CI list usually ran to about sixteen or seventeen countries, in the order of how deep they were along the path to insurgency and decay. It is worth noting that although the automatic target of CI was Communism, not a single “Communist” country, including Cuba, was on the list. It was characteristic of the new ST focus that the United States was to intervene in the affairs of its friends and not in the affairs of Russia’s friends or of China’s friends [this list is about 130 countries today]
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As countries were added to the list their military aid programs were hastily escalated, and literally hundreds and sometimes thousands of American military personnel of all types descended upon them. Sometimes they arrived in uniform and sometimes in civilian disguise. They went to work immediately in support of the new political-social-economic doctrine, and before long new schools were being built — by the army; new hospitals were being built — by the army; new farming techniques were under way — by the army; irrigation and water purification projects were under way, — again by the army. Underlying all of the paramilitary and sometimes real military work was the CIA, working with the host government to weed out, to identify, and to categorize all of the subversive insurgents. In countries where the word Communism had never been applied to bandits, beggars, and rebels before, all of a sudden all opposition was given the name “Communist”. All the problems were attributed to Communists, and the counterinsurgency action was under way [in today’s world, one sees a greatly enhanced version of this phenomenon, inclusive of World Bank, IMF and related USAID programs, as well as less ‘benign’ or overtly militarized involving the western powers armed forces in circumstance where the term ‘terrorist’ supplants ‘communist’, excepting those cases where the actual terrorists are given cover, for instance the ‘moderate opposition’ in Syria because they serve a means to an end; such as the overthrow of Assad. In less overt circumstance, the example could be Ethiopia where the USA has a low key counter-insugency presence and the Ethiopian military has been forcibly relocating populations to turn fertile farming land over to World Bank associated programs where the actual beneficiaries are western corporations. These dislocated communities risk becoming radicalized and new insurgencies born. In the case of Ethiopia, the counter-insurgency program is already in place, essentially a USA funded police directorate protecting the affluent western stockholder’s bottom line. If, or more likely, when, an Ethiopian insurgency develops, because Ethiopia is a Christian nation, the insurgency will be characterized along the lines of ‘The Lord’s Resistance Army’ or Joseph Kony]
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For all its fabrication and apparent unreality, especially in this open society, the ST machine does have a central soul or brain… or perhaps… holy spirit. It is the evidence of a form of new religion. It has its secrets. It has its divine and unquestioned rights and obligations. It has self-righteous power over life and death. It does not believe in anything. It does not value anything. It is utterly ruthless [this preceding precisely describes today’s Doug Coe “Family” cult, the sponsor of the National Prayer Breakfast, featuring a membership entirely made up of Christian ‘millennial’ personalities of which many populate the apex of American corporate boardrooms and government institutions; including numerous congressmen, senators and serving generals throughout the USA military structures. ] Its greatest motivating force and drive is entirely undefined, because it moves by pressure. It reacts. It is therefore blind, meaningless, senseless. It will do anything in the name of anti-Communism. Yet in its greatest anti-Communist war it sees no inconsistency in the killing of one of its most anti-Communist creations — Ngo Dinh Diem. In its zeal to rid the Caribbean of Communism, it leaps at the chance to rid the Dominican Republic of Latin America’s strongest non-Communist, Rafael Trujillo. Any person or groups that know how to get to this infrastructure, who have the clearances, who have the need-to-know, can make an input into this ST, and as long as the desired action is anti-Communist, the system will operate [if today you substitute ‘terrorist’ for communist, you see essentially the same behaviors and inconsistencies. Saddam, Gaddafi and Assad all kept a clampdown on al-Qaida until the the USA intervened and Islamic State was born]
The idea “The Secret Team” in fact so closely matches the Doug Coe “Family” cult, they must be identified as one and the same, is not far fetched at all:
“One needn’t be a Marxist to find fault with the Family’s mash-up of New Testament and unfettered capitalism — Adam Smith himself would have recognized that theology as a disingenuous form of self-interest by proxy. Such interests have led the Family into some strange alliances over the years. Seduced by the Indonesian dictator Suharto’s militant anti-communism, they described the murder of hundreds of thousands that brought him to power as a “spiritual revolution,” and sent delegations of congressmen and oil executives to pray to Jesus with the Muslim leader. In Africa, they anointed the Somali killer Siad Barre as God’s man and sent Sen. Grassley and a defense contractor as emissaries. Barre described himself as a “Koranic Marxist,” but he agreed to pray to Grassley’s American Christ in return for American military aid, which he then used to wreak a biblical terror on his nation. It has not yet recovered. More recently, the Family has paid for congressional Christian junkets to bastions of democracy such as Serbia, Sudan, Belarus, Albania, Macedonia and Musharraf’s Pakistan…
“Counseling Rep. Tiahrt, Doug Coe offered Pol Pot and Osama bin Laden as men whose commitment to their causes is to be emulated. Preaching on the meaning of Christ’s words, he says, “You know Jesus said ‘You got to put Him before mother-father-brother sister? Hitler, Lenin, Mao, that’s what they taught the kids. Mao even had the kids killing their own mother and father. But it wasn’t murder. It was for building the new nation. The new kingdom” -from investigative journalist Jeff Sharlet’s “C Street”
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They insist they are just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they are not Christians, but simply believers.
Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is “Jesus plus nothing.” Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world -Jeff Sharlet’s “The Family”
A retrospective note would be, a certainty the Doug Coe cult (Secret Team) would have spread throughout NATO and be responsible for both: GLADIO and GLADIO B
Former FBI Coleen Rowley on Counterfeit Coin: “Wow, very well put and comprehensive. I tend to agree with your assessments“
Deep State series, part five of eight
COUNTERFEIT COIN
(The alliance of economics & counter-insurgency)
“If the Soviet Union were to disappear off the face of the map, the United States would quickly seek out new enemies to justify its own military-industrial complex” -CIA officer John Stockwell, 1980
What I had learned based on studying my special forces operations assignment is, counter-insurgency does not work. Insurgency is largely sustained by social inequities, and counter-insurgency, more often than not, props up the status quo. The result? Prolonged civil war with attending process of radicalization in the populace. So it should come as no surprise the U.S. military’s counter-insurgency [COIN] manual’s ‘don’t create more enemies than you eliminate’ is factually unobtainable. Consequently, when the manual states…
“The conclusion of any counterinsurgency effort is primarily dependent on the host nation and the people who reside in that nation. Ultimately, every society has to provide solutions to its own problems. As such, one of the Army and Marine Corps’ primary roles in counterinsurgency is to enable the host nation.”
…is a classic case of what George Orwell aptly called ‘doublethink.’ USA supported counter-insurgency is the farthest possible thing from allowing societies solve its own problems, particularly when a society’s grassroots insurgency has determined the incumbent powers cannot be otherwise influenced to social equity. The resultant counter-insurgency effect of radicalizing of social elements with the propping up of corrupt regimes, metastasizes and leads to events such as ‘global jihad’, example given.
In my day, our Special Operations Forces had not yet become pervasively criminalized but we did see the beginning of this process when Special Forces elements coordinated with the CIA and PHOENIX. Apart from this initial perversion, we saw ourselves more along the lines of an elite Peace Corps working the most hazardous territories of a Cold War world. Critical to our mission was pacification of populace in the areas we worked, and pacification is and was a straightforward word. We worked to bring peace to neighborhoods in conflicts. John Wayne stereotype aside, the military aspects were honest endeavor to provide self-defense training to remote villages with an objective the populace could not be easily exploited by irregular militia, but that was never going to be accomplished in any case, except that we understood and respected and even integrated to the local customs and culture. Our primary work was focused on action anthropology, providing health care and education in an indigenous social context.
That we had elite, lethal training, was primarily survival oriented, yes, there were the occasional ‘special operation’ to perhaps decapitate the leadership of a particular guerrilla group or undertake sabotage behind enemy lines in the course of our work, examples given, but this was the exception, not the rule.
Primarily our superior skills were required to operate small teams in areas where we might meet with considerably stronger numerical force. The highly honed and elite skills of the 1960s and 1970s Green Berets teams were more often than not, more than equal to a larger irregular force. If vastly out numbered, we knew how to inflict savage and costly casualties on our pursuers in the course of evasion. In our pacification work, Action Anthropology …
“committed to collaborative work, social justice, and a pragmatic view of social scientific knowledge … envisioned the possibility of simultaneously advancing such knowledge and helping the subjects of ethnographic fieldwork articulate and accomplish their own goals”
… was the norm of the day. We integrated to our human and social environment. We were armed educators, medical providers and social workers. We were not primarily meant to be offensive, to the contrary, restraint was a big piece of our discipline and training. Cowboy mentalities were not tolerated.
It is quite clear things have changed away from this ideal (and somewhat self-propagandized) focus, dramatically, for the military applications of special operations forces, in the approximately four decades since Vietnam. Firstly, one must consider a flipped circumstance; the Cold War world, or one might say the previous ‘bi-polar’ world, was a world where the rug had since been pulled out from numerous societies stability. Into the vacuum created by the dismantling of the Soviet Union and its many aligned satellite states political structures around the world, greed is stepping in as the western democracies ‘capitalize’ on this circumstance. Consequently, as opposed to a primary focus on the ‘liberation’ of oppressed peoples (recalling the Special Forces motto ‘De Opresso Liber’ or ‘liberate the oppressed’) from totalitarian rule, the actuality has become the reverse- openly propping up corrupt regimes whose relationship to us is one of inter-exploitation. Example would be mining Corporations and the Toronto Stock Exchange:
The corrupt regimes handing us (in the western democracies) raw resources on the cheap are no less dependent on us than we are dependent on corrupt regimes to keep the value of our stocks competitive. It is a trap, where if the western democracies allow for social equity to be realized, and must pay a fair market value for resources consequently, the value of stocks will drop in the market ‘adjustment’ to the new circumstance. In a situation of many cases of exploitation, concerning many nations and hundreds of stocks at the exchanges in Frankfurt, London, Toronto and Wall Street (among other exchanges), a drop in these values reflecting a fair market value wealth redistribution necessary to achieve social stability in the developing nations, would also see a dramatic drop in the stocks of the military-industrial sector which is inter-dependent with the corruption and associated expenditures on counter-insurgency necessary to prop up the corrupt regimes providing resources on the cheap.
As this process accelerates and widens, recently the example is Ukraine with Western democracies intelligence agencies laundering operations with professional mercenaries assisting the new regime in Kiev with COIN tactics employed in the ethnic Russian areas of the south and east, this raises a question; at what point has the corruption become so endemic to the cycle, that to break the cycle of corruption would collapse the economic engines of the western democracies, which have become dependent on arms sales feeding associated aggression required to prop up the (profitable to us) necessarily unstable, corrupt regimes?
Another critical consideration is, now that ‘liberty’ is become an increasingly obvious, patent lie (no longer a ‘half truth’ of previous era), what will be the end result of a power grab by corporate elites dedicated to maintaining the status quo?
“Mr. Snowden has brought home to us that, while we Americans do not yet live in a police state or tyranny, we are well along in building the infrastructure on which either could be instantly erected if our leaders decided to do so. No longer protected by the law, our freedoms now depend on the self-restraint of men and women in authority, many of them in uniform. History protests that if one builds a turnkey totalitarian state, those who hold the keys will eventually turn them” -former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman
With the Soviet Union no longer a justifiable geopolitical boogeyman to frighten us into vast arms and ‘security’ expenditures, ‘terror’ has replaced our past Cold War world’s enemies. But nearly everywhere you see a relationship to terror, you will also find a history of corrupt, authoritarian regimes propped up by the western democracies.
1) Authoritarian regime x resultant civil unrest x resultant hyper regime repression = insurgency
2) Insurgency x counter-insurgency = long term civil war
3) Long term civil war x resultant radicalized population metastasizes into terror and spreads
4) Western societies, bled by taxes and political lies propping up the status quo for what amounts to the sole benefit of western corporate oligarchs, become destabilized.
This returns us to the lie of COIN. The factual deceit in counter insurgency is, it must propagate, or be part and parcel of a larger web of lies (or self-deceits) in any case. Whether consciously or unconsciously, it cannot be admitted the wealth of the western democracies depends on exploitations, effective enslavement of entire societies, to prop up our so-called ‘liberties’ and associated economic freedoms which must be severely curtailed in the event of the actual fair, equitable and lawful redistribution of wealth required to cease the oppression of peoples around the world. People with eyes open call our system ’empire.’ People who live in illusion call our system ‘democracy’, however it is necessary to build a police state to maintain our so-called ‘democracy’ because of the raw hatred or ‘terror’ the system generates. And at the end of the day, the only meaningful vote is in the corporate boardroom and that does not bode well for our future because:
“In any democracy, ethics, self restraint, tolerance and honesty will always take a second seat to narcissism, avarice, bigotry & persecution, if only because people who play by the rules in any democracy are at a disadvantage to those who easily subvert the rules to their own advantage” –Ronald’s Maxim
Our poster child for this militarized society is General Petraeus. It is common political knowledge in Washington DC, that President Obama had appointed General Petraeus to head the CIA as a means of sidelining the General’s political ambitions over serious concerns Petraeus would hook up with the likes of Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman in a run against Obama for the presidency in 2012. Either way you have it, a commander-in-chief, whether a military veteran or not, is a sword that can cut two ways. Obama’s naiveté in military affairs, having never served, is the 2nd worst possible circumstance in an America where naked fundamentalist ambition has overtaken the leadership of American military command structures, outside an out and out fundamentalist president. That Obama would, as a matter of political expediency, appoint Petraeus to head up the CIA with its historically out of control Operational Division working in close concert with the radicalized and criminalized Christian extremist special operations forces of today’s American military…
…was simply asking for disaster. General Petraeus was key [together with Robert Gates] in convincing Obama to radically beef up the USA’s special operations forces, at a time it was already decided the overall troop numbers would have to be reduced.
General Petraeus has had a close association with special operations forces throughout his career. When Petraeus had been appointed to DCI [Director of Central Intelligence or CIA] Admiral William H McRaven, overall boss of the special operations forces which these days are routinely assigned to CIA operational missions, had requested his forces be allowed to operate outside the traditional Department of Defense channels. This was, no doubt, a sleight-of-hand grab for these elite forces away from normal supervision via established Department of Defense structures, and away from any significant oversight by Congress, by Admiral McRaven and his close professional associate, then CIA Director Petraeus.
The myth of General Petraeus in the public purview is a demonstrable tactical lie. In fact the ‘surge that turned around the war in Iraq’ for which he became famous, was at best a deceit along the lines of a shell game or bait and switch. General Petraeus beefed up the American force, momentarily disrupted the insurgency with an all out push that could not be sustained in any case, and then pulled the bulk of the American forces back to their bases and took the Americans, for the first time, largely out of public circulation before the insurgents in Iraq could regroup. It is this removing the American soldiers from the everyday Iraqi life which had dramatically dropped the violence in Iraq, nothing more. The same could have been accomplished in 2004, and honestly at that, were it not for literally crusading extremist neo-con commanders and secular officers afraid to speak out and challenge the status quo at the CIA and Pentagon, to call a spade a spade, a career ending move. It is truly Faustian, if you speak out your career is over and you have been weeded from the ranks which only become more Christian extremist with the favored or ‘blessed’ replacements, if you keep your mouth shut, it all evolves towards fascism regardless.
Moving over to Afghanistan, notoriously there have been many special operations forces crimes, inclusive of attacking weddings and other incidents where fleeing women and kids had been shot in their backs, cold blooded murders. We pay the Afghans compensation but the root problem of anti-Islam fundamentalism in the American military is never effectively addressed and the hate for the Americans only spreads. General Petraeus had a large hand in keeping these American special operations independent of NATO, effectively exercising impunity and generating a strengthened Taliban when the Americans are seen as a worse curse. This is today’s COIN in action.
General Petraeus had been the hand that guided today’s COIN manual creation, one of the most, perhaps THE most influential military publication in modern American military strategy. When testifying to Congress, where it is essential the success of a counter-insurgency strategy lie be maintained, the COIN manual stating…
“The general rule for the use of force for the counterinsurgents is ‘do not create more enemies than you eliminate with your action’”
…cannot be squared with General Petraeus ties to CIA dirty wars…
…and bringing in veteran professional killers to oversee secret torture centers and and running death squads in Iraq as established by the (above linked) Guardian/BBC Arabic exposé. But that is the real nature of the militarized beast that would rule our society.
“perhaps the severest criticism of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine derives from actual record of counterinsurgency programs. The continuing violence and instability in Iraq and Afghanistan would seem to indicate that existing counterinsurgency doctrine is either misconceived or that, for whatever reason, it cannot be effectively implemented”
Aftergood sets out two premise in his conclusion, ‘misconceived’ and ‘cannot be effectively implemented.’ Based on my own Special Forces operations assignment, and related studies in social psychology, I can make the case it is not one or the other, but is both. Counter-insurgency in any case, creates more enemies than it eliminates for the very fact of its inter-dependence with propping up western corporate capitalism’s profit line with necessary support for corrupt and authoritarian regimes. The idea of countering ‘terror’ with COIN is a lie.
Similar to Gladio, the American COIN doctrine is a virus that has escaped the lab. Essentially, COIN generates the terror it self-justifies for its existence, practically speaking, a military-industrial employment insurance package that means you will never be out of a job. A practical application of this is, COIN provides the very skills used to fight insurgency, to the insurgents themselves.
Shia death squads set up under Petreaus command in Iraq, followed on with General Petraeus responsible for training and arming the so-called Sunni ‘awakening councils‘, strengthened al-Qaida in Iraq & Levant (now operating in Syria and Iraq under the banner of ISIS since breaking with al-Qaida) empowering both parties to the civil war that followed the USA’s exit from Iraq:
“Crazy as it may seem, to an [American military trained but now unemployed] Iraqi who’s been left high and dry to fend for himself by his “liberators,” killing his fellow citizens to feed his family is a viable option. Al Qaeda knows this, and is taking full advantage of the situation”
Reiterating the fact General Petraeus ‘surge’ in Iraq appeared to work on paper for the reason the U.S withdrew to its bases after, and violence dropped because the Americans were out of public exposure for the first time since invasion (and why the Iranian aligned Iraqi Shia cleric al-Sadr declared his ceasefire, relating to the Americans) points to the insurgency having had national roots in a society where all sides wanted the Americans out, first and primarily. In the mix of this, the so-called ‘awakening councils’ put into practice by the Petraeus written COIN doctrine (no matter if it were initiated by subordinate generals on location in Iraq during Petraeus interim assignment at the Pentagon) is what eventually empowered today’s ISIS at the apex of Iraq’s widening civil war, a civil war initiated by Petraeus earlier (1st Iraq tour), when setting up the Shia death squads, he had trained al-Sadr’s militia (as documented in the the above linked Guardian/BBC Arabic exposé “Searching for Steele”.) COIN training, consequently, had been responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq from both Shia and Sunni elements. Both had sent numerous members to be trained in the two programs. The same COIN model has been taken advantage of by radicalized insurgents in Syria, where special operations training has been offered to the ‘opposition’ and now you see the fruits of this spilled back into Iraq (again.)
The Petraeus COIN doctrine presently, enthusiastically, embraced by Obama (not only by Bush and too many other neo-conservatives and neo-liberals to count) is the tool of choice with side effect responsible for what you see coming apart at the seams (blow-back) from Ukraine to Iraq to Africa, and ultimately is policy of military-industrial corporate boards and used for propping up stock values from Frankfurt to London to Toronto to Wall Street. Also, it would appear the several western democracies military and intelligence agencies have elements answering to corporate boards as opposed to executive or legislative oversight with strong evidence this has gone on for a very long time.
Destabilized nations are ripe for rip-off, and the recipe is, desperate for cash related to ‘security’, corrupt regimes propped up by the western democracies are inclined to sell their resources on the cheap and use the proceeds to buy military equipment necessary to beat back insurgency and stay in power, so the money they received from selling their resources to the western democracies are returned to the western democracies military-industrial coffers (noting it is not only the USA in this game.) This model has been initiated in Ukraine and if there were successful regime change accomplished in Syria, you would see it happen there, all a criminal enterprise heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer (not to mention soldiers deaths in the thousands) to the benefit of the stockholder bottom line (profit.)
If you wonder whether the western democracies corporate body might learn its lesson from having trained al-Qaida and other Salafist militia (preceding notes on the ‘awakening councils’), the answer is obviously NO. Previous to this, the CIA had employed American special operations forces for provision of advanced training to Mexican military officers who’d ultimately defected to the drug cartels and it was not long before they’d formed a cartel of their own, Los Zetas:
“Los Zetas’ training as a local version of the Green Berets constitutes their foremost asset. In cooperation with their U.S. counterparts, the Mexican military created the Gafes in mid-1990s. Foreign specialists, including Americans, French, and Israelis, instructed members of this elite unit in rapid deployment, aerial assaults, marksmanship, ambushes, intelligence collection, counter-surveillance techniques, prisoner rescues, sophisticated communications, and the art of intimidation”
And now, following on having trained al-Qaida in Iraq & Los Zetas in Mexico as special operations commandos who in turn can train their own future generations of recruits, the USA is repeating the same behavior in Africa:
“The secretive program, financed in part with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali”
Epilogue
Restated in the simplest possible terms, the USA’s ‘vital national interests’ (and western democracies generally) is euphemism for corporate welfare, corporate welfare is all about the bottom line (profit) and profit historically has happened when we take raw material at gunpoint from disadvantaged nations. Modern corporate neo-colonialism creates social unrest and consequent fighting back which has evolved to ‘terror’, which in turn strengthens the market place in the ‘security’ or arms industry. The overthrow of Gaddafi (for reasons including he wasn’t buying high end weapons from France, following his ‘rehabilitation’) started brush fires (e.g. Mali) with his now unemployed mercenaries, ‘lost’ weapons flow and western trained guerrillas/insurgents moved on to instances of ‘jihad’ the western powers feel must be in turn stamped out. This strengthens the cycle of spreading ‘terror’ which again strengthens the outlay for security, propping up western economies in what has become a war of civilizations.
In the case of Djibouti and a one billion dollar USA drones base built there, there is yet a French Foreign Legion presence hanging on from colonial era with the region surrounding nearby Somalia in process of destabilizing since Charles Grassley’s efforts provided a vast arsenal of American weapons to the regime of Mohammed Said Barre nearly 30 years ago. Barre in turn employed those weapons to wreak a biblical terror on his own nation. This has impacted from Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond.
The result at home? ‘Terror’ propaganda leading to the loss of civil liberties and increasing consolidation of the corporate-power corrupt over the vast and spreading malignancy of the entire cycle. This fact can only lead to our national demise when you factor in the western democracies own ‘jihadis’, i.e. extreme ‘Christian Taliban’ personalities attracted to the ‘security’ business. Now days the Pentagon is fundamentalist Christian crusader central and has moved from ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’ to ‘the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim’ as a matter of policy in a pursuit of world-wide “manifest destiny.” And so reality is created for us and reality is pointed to literal Armageddon, the consequence of living beyond our means.
The other side of this coin is, if the arms and related ‘security’ expenditures were halted, the resulting jobs loss would finish collapsing the western democracies economic engines, where the armaments industries are a critical component of the dynamic propping up our infrastructure.
What are the chances the western democratic leaders will surrender ego to reality and begin dismantling this hydra? Not good when reality is we should be moving towards construction of changed climate Hobbit burrows to survive.
What’s happening isn’t rocket science, but it is a trap
If you want stronger evidence for the criminal insanity of the western democracies counter-insurgency policies (a core component of what’s known as ‘humanitarian violence‘) you likely need psychiatric help-
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The USA’s criminal military-industrial complex policies are certainly consistent; judging by the 1935 speech of General Smedley Butler (‘war is a racket’ that has gone on for a very long time.)
A former Special Forces Sergeant of Operations and Intelligence, Ronald Thomas West is a retired paralegal/investigator (living in exile) whose work focus had been anti-corruption and human rights. Ronald is published in International Law as a layman (The Mueller-Wilson Report, co-authored with Dr Mark D Cole) and has been adjunct professor of American Constitutional Law at Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz, Germany (for English credit, summer semester 2008.) Ronald’s formal educational background is primarily social psychology.