CIA Death Squads
Erica Fein sent this to me on Nov 6, 2019, 3:00 PM
Don, first they blew up the door. When a father of the family came out of the house, they shot him. His sons followed to check on him, and they shot them.
Then, their moms pleaded “please don’t kill us” — but they still shot an older woman and a younger girl.
Reports last week confirmed that across Afghanistan, secret CIA-funded death squads — sometimes accompanied by U.S. special forces — are killing civilians with impunity; some attacks so egregious that they rise to war crimes. [1]
(Interjection: With all references on this article [1] pulled from the internet, I can only point to a similar situation in ‘Nam, where the CIA-directed Operation Phoenix used US troops to literally murder whole villages of Vietnamese, women and children included. 50 years afterward, US veteran participants would still break down and cry about what they participated in without daring to say specifically what it was.~ Don Chapin)
Decades of failed foreign policy allow atrocities like this to occur. And Trump is doing everything he can to obfuscate these secret wars even more.
The human cost is too high. And right now Win Without War is working to end endless war and ensure the CIA can’t commit war crimes in secret.
As the year draws to a close and time runs out on the Congressional calendar, our team is pushing with everything we’ve got to break this cycle of impunity — and you can help.
The CIA’s death squads raid hospitals and kill medical staff. They disappear those in their custody, they kill elderly men they capture, and they call in U.S. airstrikes that eliminate entire families.
It’s a disgusting metastasized outgrowth of an endless war that has no clear direction, almost no oversight, and no end in sight — but it should NOT come as a surprise.
For YEARS in the 80s the CIA supplied the Mujahideen in Afghanistan with billions of dollars worth of weapons in one of the longest and most expensive covert operations in its history — an operation that infamously also supplied arms to Osama bin Laden. [2]
There’s something we remind ourselves of ALL the time at Win Without War: this isn’t just the way things are — they’re the way things were made.
We don’t have to accept reckless impunity and unnecessary loss of life as an unchallenged reality for U.S. foreign policy: we have and we can unmake it, together.
Thank you for working for peace,
Erica, Kate, Stephen, and the Win Without War team
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[1] Human Rights Watch, ““They’ve Shot Many Like This” Abusive Night Raids by CIA-Backed Afghan Strike Forces” (all editions seem to have been pulled from the internet. ~ Don Chapin)
[2] Time, “The Oily Americans” (below)
The Oily Americans
By Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele Tuesday, May 13, 2003
Iran’s oil industry sank in the early 1950s after Iran nationalized it
But all this was merely the overture to the next U.S. foreign-policy decision rooted in oil. This time the players were the Soviet Union and Afghanistan. In 1977 the CIA sounded an alarm on the Soviets’ faltering energy prospects in a secret 14-page memo titled “The Impending Soviet Oil Crisis.” The agency concluded that the Soviet Union, which had been self-sufficient in oil, was running out and would soon become a major importer. “During the next decade,” the report said, “the U.S.S.R. may well find itself not only unable to supply oil to Eastern Europe and the West on the present scale, but also having to compete for OPEC oil for its own use.” Two years later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. President Jimmy Carter, concluding that the Soviet army was passing through Afghanistan to seize the Middle East oil fields, sounded a warning: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
When Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in the White House a year later, he turned up the heat. Administration officials insisted that the Soviet Union’s interest in Afghanistan was a prelude to a communist takeover of the Middle East oil fields. The CIA report on the Soviets’ running out of oil gave the Reagan Administration the ammunition to secure more money from Congress to arm Afghan insurgents and establish a permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf. Soon after Reagan took office, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger announced that it was essential for the U.S. to establish bases in the Persian Gulf region “to act as a deterrent to any Soviet hopes of seizing the oil fields.” The Reagan Administration began building those bases, sold sophisticated AWACS planes to Saudi Arabia, and conducted joint military exercises with Egypt and other countries. And the CIA began one of its longest and most expensive covert operations, supplying billions of dollars in arms to a collection of Afghan guerrillas fighting the Soviets. The arms shipments included Stinger missiles, the shoulder-fired, antiaircraft weapons that were used with deadly accuracy against Soviet helicopters and that are now in circulation among terrorists who have fired such weapons at commercial airliners. Among the rebel recipients of U.S. arms: Osama bin Laden.
At the same time the U.S. was moving into the Persian Gulf militarily and supplying Afghan rebels, all based on a faulty CIA oil assessment, it was also secretly supporting Saddam Hussein. The Reagan Administration remained neutral after Iraq’s invasion of Iran in September 1980, but as the war progressed and it appeared that Iran might emerge victorious, the U.S. secretly backed Iraq, according to declassified government documents. That began in 1982, when the State Department removed Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism. According to a General Accounting Office report, this “made Iraq eligible to purchase aircraft, helicopters, and national security controlled items for military end use.” Yet another declassified State Department document makes clear that the Reagan Administration intended to implement regulations that would lift restrictions on exports “to both Iran and Iraq of five chemicals that could be used in chemical weapons production.” This made sense, as the U.S. was peddling arms to Iran as well via the Iran-contra conduit.
The root of all this folly was the U.S. government’s officially sanctioned version of faltering Soviet oil production, which was at odds with reality. To be sure, Soviet oil production was trailing off. But the Soviets were not running out of oil. Nor would they become dependent on imports. Rather, they were using primitive technology and needed to make investments in their infrastructure. In fact, Russia today is the world’s second largest producer, after Saudi Arabia. Instead of becoming a major buyer of Middle East oil, as the CIA had warned, Russia ships 3 million bbl. a day to other countries, including the U.S.
As all this makes clear, the former Soviet Union was not running out of oil. Neither is the world. The one exception: the U.S., which was the Saudi Arabia of the first half of the 20th century, is finally running out. As a result, thanks in part to American policy that put an emphasis on foreign intervention rather than domestic conservation, Americans are more dependent than ever on imported oil.
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