In 1961 the CIA decided to overthrow a government in the heart of Africa: in the Congo. 200 years before, the Congo had been at the centre of the slave trade. Millions of Africans had been forcibly taken down the river and shipped to America where their forced labour fuelled America’s rise to economic power. Now, the country had been given independence by its old colonial rulers, the Belgiums. But it was completely unprepared and had collapsed into violence. The CIA were frightened that the new prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, was about to turn for help to the Soviet Union … and they helped install a dictator in his place: he was called Colonel Mobutu whose brutal regime the Americans would support for the next 30 years. ibid.
In Greece the British army toppled the popular leftist national liberation front and restored the monarchy and right-wing dictatorship sparking a communist-led uprising. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States IV: The Cold War 1945-50, Showtime 2012
The CIA had now come into its own and in the next year organised the overthrow of Guatemala’s popular leader Jacobo Arbenz. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States V: The 50s: Eisenhower, The Bomb & The Third World, Showtime 2012
1954: US overthrows democratically elected President Arbenz of Guatemala. 200,000 civilians killed. Michael Moore, Bowling for Columbine, 2002
1953: US overthrows Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran. US installs Shah as dictator. ibid.
1954: US overthrows democratically elected President Arbenz of Guatemala. 200,000 civilians killed. ibid.
1963: US backs assassination of South Vietnamese President Diem. ibid.
1963-1975: US military kills 4 million people in South East Asia. ibid.
11th September 1973: US stages coup in Chile. Democratically elected President Salvador Allende assassinated. Dictator Augusto Pinochet installed. 5,000 Chileans murdered. ibid.
1977: US backs military leaders of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadoreans and 4 American nuns killed. ibid.
1980s: US trains Osama bin Laden and fellow terrorists to kill Soviets. CIA gives them $3 billion. ibid.
1981: Reagan administration trains and funds Contras. 30,000 Nicaraguans die. ibid.
1982: US provides billions in aid to Saddam Hussein for weapons to kill Iranians. ibid.
1983: White House secretly gives Iran weapons to kill Iraqis. ibid.
1989: CIA agent Manuel Noriega (also serving as President of Panama) disobeys orders from Washington. US invades Panama and removes Noriega. 3,000 Panamanian civilian casualties. ibid.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait with weapons from the US. ibid.
1991: US enters Iraq. Bush reinstates dictator of Kuwait. ibid.
1998: Clinton bombs ‘weapons factories’ in Sudan. Factory turns out to be making Aspirin. ibid.
1991 to present: US planes bomb Iraq on a weekly basis. UN estimates 500,000 Iraqi children die from bombing and sanctions. ibid.
2000-2001: US gives Taliban-ruled Afghanistan $245 million in ‘aid’. ibid.
11th September 1991: Osama bin Laden uses his expert CIA training to murder 3,000 people. ibid.
Brazil: The new regime tortured 50,000 people. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States VII: Johnson, Nixon and Vietnam: Reversal of Fortune
Chile had survived as a model democracy since 1932; they would not survive Nixon and Kissinger. ibid.
In December 1989 Bush and his administration launched its invasion of Panama [Operation Just Cause] ... On the CIA payroll since the 1960s – [Manuel] Noriega – assisting the Medellin drug cartel. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States IX: Bush and Clinton – American Triumphalism – New World Order
The US would act unilaterally and pre-emptively to overthrow any government deemed a threat to US security. Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States X: Bush and Obama: Age of Terror
1898 President McKinley orders US troops to invade Cuba; 1905 President Theodore Roosevelt orders the invasion of Honduras; 1912 President Taft orders the invasion of Nicaragua; 1914-1918 President Wilson invades Haiti, Cuba and Panama; 1924-26 President Coolidge invades Nicaragua and Honduras; 1954 Eisenhower approves the overthrow of the elected government of Guatemala; 1961 Kennedy approves the CIA invasion of Cuba; 1965 Johnson invades the Dominican Republic; 1973 Nixon approves the overthrow of the elected government of Chile; 1981 President Reagan approves the CIA secret war against Nicaragua; 1983 President Reagan orders the invasion of Granada. John Pilger, Nicaragua – A Nation’s Right to Survive, ITV 1983
During the 1980s, the years of Ronald Reagan in the White House, a trail of carnage and grief was blazed across Central America. John Pilger, The War on Democracy, 2007
President Bush has promised to rid the world of evil and to lead the great mission to build free societies on every continent. To understand such an epic lie is to understand history – hidden history, suppressed history, history that explains why we in the west know a lot about the crimes of others, but almost nothing about our own. The missing word is empire. The existence of an America Empire is rarely acknowledged, or it’s smothered in displays of jingoism that celebrate war. And an arrogance that says no country has a right to go its own way unless that way coincides with the interests of the United States. For empires have nothing to do with freedom. They’re vicious. They’re about conquest and theft and control and secrets. Since 1945 the United States has attempted to overthrow fifty governments, many of them democracies. In the process thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, causing the loss of countless lives. ibid.
This is Santiago, the capital of Chile. In 1973 the national stadium was turned into a concentration camp, as a military coup backed by the United States overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. The leader of the coup was a fascist, General Augusto Pinochet, who rounded up Allende’s supporters. ibid.
One of the first to be attacked was Guatemala ... They are indigenous Mayan people and very poor. In the 1950s, 2% of the population of Guatemala controlled the natural wealth in collusion with the giant US corporations like the United Fruit Company, which dominated banana growing. On the board of United Fruit was John Foster Dulles who happened to be US Secretary of State. His brother Allen happened to run the CIA. Both were Christian fundamentalists, who regarded any opposition as the work of communism and the devil. In 1950 this man Jacobo Arbenz became the first Guatemalan leader to be democratically elected by a majority of his people, who saw in him the hope of social justice. He was the Hugo Chavez of his day ... His land reform policies were modest. Washington was having none of it. ibid.
General Rios Montt was to be one of Washington’s faces of liberty. During his time as president in the 1980s thousands of people were murdered by death squads, most of them indigenous men, women and children. His guns and helicopters came from the United States. President Reagan flew in to endorse the general, who he described as ‘a man of great personal integrity’. The crushing of Guatemala became America’s blueprint. ibid.
In Guatemala, the United Nations described the Washington-backed campaign against the Mayan People as genocide. ibid.
Oil was found in Haiti’s waters decades ago and the US has kept it in reserve until the Middle East begins to run dry. More urgently, an occupied Haiti has a strategic importance in Washington's ‘rollback’ plans for Latin America. The goal is the overthrow of the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, control of Venezuela’s abundant petroleum reserves, and sabotage of the growing regional co-operation long denied by US-sponsored regimes. John Pilger, article January 2010, ‘The Kidnapping of Haiti’
In the last half century United States administrations have overthrown fifty governments, many of them democracies. In the process thirty countries have been attacked and bombed with the loss of countless lives. John Pilger, author Freedom Next Time
This is Diego Garcia, the main Island of the Chagos Group in the Indian Ocean. It was once a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. A paradise. Today, it is one of America’s biggest military bases in the world. There are more than 2,000 troops, two bomber runways, thirty warships and a satellite spy station. From here the United States has attacked Afghanistan and Iraq. The Pentagon calls it an indispensable platform for policing the world. Diego Garcia is a British colony. It lies midway between Africa and Asia. One of a group of coral islands ... 2,000 lived in the Chagos Islands ... A benign undisturbed way of life. John Pilger, Stealing a Nation, ITV 2004
The secret of the Marshall Islands: they’ve long been America’s strategic secret … The United States took over the Marshall Islands as a trust territory … A nightmare began: the islands were turned into a laboratory for the testing of nuclear weapons and the people into guinea pigs. John Pilger ***** The Coming War on China, ITV 2016
An armada of warships was assembled in Bikini lagoon in order to blow them to bits. ibid.
12 August 1953 Washington DC: a top secret meeting is convened at the White House. Its task: to deal with a brand-new security threat – a small country in South America – Guatemala. CIA Declassified: The Deadly Phantom Coup, Yesterday 2014
The decision is made – Arbenz must be removed. ibid.
The United Fruit brings in Bernays and he basically understood that what the United Fruit Company had to do was change this from being a popularly elected government that was doing some things that were good for the people there into this being very close to the American shore, a threat to American democracy. Being at a time in the Cold War when Americans responded to issues of the red scare and what communism might do. He was trying to transform this and brilliantly transform it into an issue of a communist threat close to our shores. Larry Tye, journalist Boston Globe