Truth Commissions page
General
United States
Haiti
Africa
" Coming to grips with
these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how
many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills
of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we
can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and
this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in
the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000
killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in
Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would
not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA
to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities
and destabilize societies.
Certainly, there are other
local, regional, national and international factors in many of
these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court,
under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot,
and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire
someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately
the same as that of the murderer himself.
Who are these six million people
we have killed in the interest of American national security?
Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies
have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say,
"I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept
this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and
insure our way of life."
Since 1954, however, we have
not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy
- to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent
operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland.
Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World
countries where governments do not have the power to force the
United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.
One might call this the "Third
World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United
States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and
focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the
dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might
also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year
Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in
1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people
died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third
most destructive of human life in all of history, after World
War I and World War II.
The six million people the
CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of
the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern
Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies,
incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000
killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not
Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas.
A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women
and children.
Communists? Hardly, since the
dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of
the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because
the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages
with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the
warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people
from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why
our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed
to murder people and wreck the country."
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
Justice
watch
Reforming the System
International War Crimes
Home Page
Virtual
Truth Commission site