The CIA's Death Squad Body Count Continues
to Pile Up
By Wayne Madsen
29 March 2002
How about the news media reporting on the real
victims of this so-called "War on Terrorism?" The
body count continues to pile up. On March 18, 2002, the Archbishop
of
Cali, Colombia Isaias Duarte was shot and killed in front
of a church on March 17. He had previously claimed legislative
candidates were receiving drug money.
However, the only "recognized" candidates
are those who support the Colombian oligarchy, supported
by the right-wing
paramilitaries (also involved in cocaine), the US-trained
military, the CIA, and CIA front companies like Dyncorp,
MPRI, and East, Inc. So Archbishop Duarte became a "target
of opportunity" (or a "terrorist" to use the
language of our mentally-impaired President Bush).
Apparently, intelligence agencies allied to the United States,
like those of India (a new "strategic partner" of
the United States in the "War on Terrorism" and
the "War to Protect Regional U.S. Oil and Natural Gas
Interests"), have decided to take a cue from President
Bush's "shoot to kill" order against activists
and independence leaders. On February 11, a senior separatist
leader of the Tripura (northeast India) independence movement
was shot and killed by Indian security forces. The assassinated
leader was Benjamin Hrangkhawl, a senior leader of the National
Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), a Christian-dominated
separatist group. Hrangkhawl had arrived in Tripura from
neighboring Bangladesh.
According to the BBC, the state Police
Intelligence Chief Kishore Jha, said the killing of Mr Hrangkhawl
was "a
major success." Indian intelligence is now pressing
Bhutan and Bangladesh to arrest and extradite separatist
refugees in those countries. The King of Bhutan and Prime
Minister of Bangladesh might want to look at what happened
to the entire Royal Family of Nepal last June when the late
King decided to negotiate with leftist guerrillas rather
than fight them. According to unblemished sources in Kathmandu,
the king and his family were quickly dispatched by a Nepali
army commando unit trained at the time by US Special Operations
forces sent by US Pacific Commander in Chief Adm. Dennis
Blair (he's the same guy who propped up Gen. Wiranto with
special training while the good general was committing genocide
in East Timor). What was to become the Pentagon's Office
of Strategic Influence (PSYOPs division) prepared a story,
with the assistance of India's Research and Analysis Wing
(RAW) intelligence agency, that the King and his family were
murdered as a result of the Crown Prince going nuts with
automatic weapons after being forlorn over his mother's refusal
to allow him to marry a commoner. The entire Western media
bought that story faster than George Bush nosediving after
choking on a pretzel. The media also bought that one.
The Colombian government, of course, blamed "leftist
guerrillas" for Duarte's death. The right-wing death
squads in El Salvador tried the same line in the 1980s when
they, in fact, had killed the Archbishop of El Salvador.
Those death squads were aided and abetted at the time by
State Department operative Elliott Abrams, now the human
rights coordinator for the National Security Council in the
American unconstitutional regime of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld.
The
same day that the Archbishop was assassinated, Jorge Rosal
Zea, the head of operations for Guatemala's Patriot
Party in Suchitepequez Province was gunned down by several
men waiting in a parked car. The assassination came a few
days after Rosal Zea led a 3,000-person demonstration and
called for the resignations of President Alfonso Portillo
and Vice President Juan Francisco Reyes, both stooges of
the CIA and its minions who now control US Latin American
policy in the State Department and National Security Council.
Portillo, his personal secretary, and Reyes have been accused
by opponents of opening secret bank accounts in Panama
to embezzle millions of dollars in public funds. It is a
familiar
pattern for CIA surrogates who have done similar things
in the past (Marcos in the Philippines, Noriega in Panama,
and
Somoza in Nicaragua).
March 10, Sao Paulo, Brazil - Mikael "Mike" Nassar
and his wife Marie Noel Nassar were shot to death at a gas
station after one their car's tires was punctured. Nassar
is a former Lebanese Phalangist leader and associate of Elie
Hobeika, who was assassinated on January 24 in Lebanon. Hobeika
and Nassar were preparing to testify against Israeli Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon in a Belgian war crimes tribunal for
his role in the 1982 massacres at the Palestinian refugee
camps in Sabra and Shatila in Beirut.
Angola - Just like the
CIA-Mossad team of convenience takes out a second threat
to Sharon, the oil oligarchy of Angola
removed a second threat to it. Antonio Dembo, the moderate
successor to UNITA chief Jonas Savimbi, was reported killed
on March 7. Dembo was considered the best choice to lead
UNITA into peace talks with the government. The CIA disinformation
machine claimed Dembo died from complications of diabetes.
And Patrice Lumumba died from lead poisoning!
In Bush's "New
World Order of "if you're not with
us, you're against us," social activists and progressive
political leaders everywhere are now within the crosshairs
of the CIA and its local notorious surrogates and warlords.
America's traditional concepts of human rights have been
relegated to the dustbin of history in post-constitutional
corporate statist America. In fact, the National Security
Council's point man for human rights is none other than the
infamous Reagan era State Department official Elliott Abrams,
the mollycoddler of the death squads in El Salvador and the
contras in Nicaragua during the 1980s. He is assisted by
terrorist supporter Otto Reich, in charge of the Latin American
Bureau at the State Department. Reich is the vilest of right-wing
Cubans who were brought into the United States by the CIA
after Castro took power. Reich supported the release from
a Venezuelan jail of Orlando Bosch, a Cuban terrorist who
planted a bomb on an Air Cubana plane in 1976. That Boeing
passenger jet, owned by Air Canada and leased to Cubana,
exploded and crashed in 1976 off the west coast of Barbados.
Many of my US Navy colleagues at the US Naval Facility on
Barbados, where I arrived for duty in 1977, often recounted
the horrible stories of their helping Barbadian police and
fishermen haul body parts and the bodies of young children
and babies out of the Caribbean that awful October day. And
let us not forget U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte,
the former US Ambassador to Honduras who had his own dealings
with the local death squads.
Today, a former U.S. intelligence
asset, Dr. Jonas Savimbi, was killed by Angolan Army units
in eastern Angola. His is
the sixth major assassination of a political leader since
Bush unleashed his CIA death squads. If one includes the
late Royal Family of Nepal and the late Congolese President
Laurent Desire Kabila (assassinated just 4 days before
Bush was sworn in as President), the number of those dispatched
climbs even higher.
Savimbi's continued presence in Angola
did not suit the interests of U.S. oil companies that are
increasing their operations
in the country. For that reason, the United States has
permitted a number of CIA and Pentagon fronts, like Air Scan,
MPRI,
and Dyncorp, to provide military assistance to the Angolan
Army. It seems that the training and logistics finally
paid off with the killing of Savimbi.
For similar reasons, the
Colombian oligarchy, armed with US provided aircraft and
intelligence, launched a blitzkrieg
at the exclusion zone of the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC). The Colombian Army is supported by some
of the same CIA and Pentagon fronts operating in Angola.
This attack on the FARC occured as Angola's US-backed Army
launched its attack on Savimbi's UNITA forces. The US military
offensive in Colombia is also tied to oil. The Bush oil
clique
wants nothing to pose a threat to the oil pipelines in
the area, including the Cao Limon pipeline in the north and
the
Amazon-Esmerldas pipeline in Ecuador. It was not the phony
drug war that pushed the Bush regime to declare war on
Colombia's opposition -God knows, the Bushes have been both
suppliers
and demanders for various drugs- but their revivalist fervor
in making the developing world safe for oil industry exploitation.
Copyright © 2002
by the News Insider and Wayne Madsen
Wayne
Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist
who writes and comments frequently on civil liberties and
human rights issues.
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