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JOHN STOCKWELL Describes CIA's Naziistic Torture Chambers



    Thanks to Kerry Miller, [e-mail], we can now learn a
    bit more about the CIA's naziistic atrocities. Kerry made the
    following transcript from a tape recording that I sent him of a
    broadcast by Pacifica Radio Network station:

        WBAI-FM Radio (99.5)
        505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl.
        New York, NY 10018       [phone]

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

NARRATOR:

    John Stockwell spent 13 years with the CIA, including serving as a
    case officer in Africa and Viet Nam. He was commander of the CIA's
    secret war in Angola in 1975 and 1976.

JOHN STOCKWELL:

    In that job I sat on the subcommittee of the National Security
    Council, so I was like the Chief of Staff, with GS-18s like three
    star generals, Henry Kissinger, [CIA Director] Bill Colby, the
    GS-18s in the CIA, making important decisions. My job was to put it
    all together, make it happen, and run it. It was an interesting
    place from which to watch a covert action being done.

NARRATOR:

    Stockwell began his CIA career in Africa.

JOHN STOCKWELL:

    We were doing things that seemed [?] because we were there, because
    it was our function. We were bribing people, corrupting people, and
    not protecting the US in any visible way. I had a chance to go
    drinking with Larry Devlin, the famous CIA case officer who had
    overthrown Patrice Lumumba, and had him killed back in 1960, in the
    Congo.

    He was moving into Africa Division Chief. I talked with him at
    length one night, and he was giving me an explanation. I was
    telling him:  "Frankly, sir, you know this stuff doesn't make any
    sense. We're not saving anybody from anything, and we are
    corrupting people. And everybody knows we're doing it, and that
    makes the US look bad."

    He said I was getting too big for my britches. He said I was
    "trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington, who
    have the big picture, who know what is going on in the world, who
    have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it.
    If they decide we should have somebody in Bujumbura, Burundi, and
    that person should be you, then you should do your job.  Wait till
    you have more experience, and work your way up to that point, and
    then you'll understand national secuirity, and you can make the big
    decisions.  Now, get to work, and stop this philosophizing."  And I
    said, "Aye, aye, sir.  Sorry, sir.  Bit out of line, sir."

    It's a powerful argument. Our presidents use it on us. President
    Reagan has used it on the American people saying, "If you knew what
    I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand
    why it's necessary for us to intervene."

NARRATOR:

    In Viet Nam, Stockwell ran a CIA intelligence gathering post.

JOHN STOCKWELL:

    I had to work with a sadistic police chief. He liked to carve
    people with knives in the CIA safe house. When I reported this to
    my bosses, they said, One: the post is too important to close down.
    Two: they weren't going to get the man transferred or fired because
    that would make problems politically.  He was very good at working
    with us in the operations he worked on. Three:  therefore, if I
    didn't have the stomach for it, they could transfer me, but they
    hastened to point out that if I did demonstrate a lack of moral
    fiber, to handle working with this sadistic police chief, I
    wouldn't get another good job with the CIA. It would be a mark
    against my career.

    So I kept the job. I closed the safe house down. I told my staff
    that I didn't approve of that kind of activity, and proceeded to
    work with him for the next two years, pretending that I had
    reformed him and that he didn't do this sort of thing anymore.

    The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the
    State Department, works with the death squads.

NARRATOR:

    In this second part of our special presentation, John Stockwell
    brings us up to date with his experiences after leaving the CIA in
    1977. He discusses CIA covert operations in Central America, CIA
    manipulation of the press, and CIA experiments conducted on the US
    public. John Stockwell: The Secret Wars of the CIA, brought to you
    by the Other Americas Radio and your local public radio station.

JOHN STOCKWELL:

    "What we're going to talk about tonight are the CIA's secret wars.
    But the subject is much broader than merely little CIA dirty tricks
    and shenanigans. We're talking about a situation -- we're living in
    a world which has grievous problems. Our planet is terminally ill,
    and it's not a long term disease. We're talking about the nuclear
    arms race.

    This is something. These 52,000, soon to be 70,000, nuclear weapons
    are going to be going off sooner rather than later. At the same
    time, the world is facing serious economic problems, of the sort
    that triggered world wars in the past. Leaders of countries,
    leaders of banks, for purposes basically of greed, have never been
    able to balance their checkbooks. They always overspend. They run
    countries into bankruptcy.

    When the world has gotten blocked up before, like a Monopoly game
    where everything is owned and nobody can make any progress, the way
    they erase the board and start over has been to have big world
    wars. Erase countries, bomb cities, and bomb banks, and then start
    from scratch again. This is not an option to us now, because of all
    these 52,000 nuclear weapons.

    The Center for Defense Information counts 60 wars that are being
    fought in the world today, in which they estimate 5 million people
    will die.  The US is on the brink of its next war: the Central
    American War. In this situation of a volatile world, about as
    troubled as it can get, the U.S. CIA is running fifty covert
    actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in
    the world today.

    Now these things inter-relate. The nuclear arms race, conventional
    wars, the world debt, CIA covert actions; they're all viewed from
    our point of view, they're all part of our national security.
    They're supervised by the National Security Council. The National
    Security Advisor advises the President, and we respond to them in
    terms of our own national security compulsions.

    By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the
    public record. The fifty covert actions are secret, but that
    [information] has been leaked to us by members of the Oversight
    Committee of Congress. I urge you not to take my word for anything.
    I'm going to stand here and tell you and give you examples of how
    our leaders lie. Obviously, I could be lying. The only way you can
    figure it out for yourselves is to educate yourselves. The French
    have a saying, "Them that don't do politics will be done."  If you
    don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, dig out the records,
    go and see for yourself, then your mind remains blank, and your
    adrenalin pumps, and you can be excited and mobilized to do things
    that are not in your interest to do.

    Approaching this subject from my own point of view, my own
    experience, my special expertise, the CIA covert actions, let's
    look at Nicaragua.  This is the most famous covert action of the 50
    that are going on today. They say there are 13 "major" ones. This
    is not the biggest one.  Afghanistan is. We've spent several
    hundred million dollars in Afghanistan. We've spent somewhat less
    than that, but close, in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the most famous
    one, and there's a reason. Part of it is it's closer, but a big
    part of it is the fact that the Administration is using Nicaragua
    for a very special purpose, so they have made it public from the
    outset.

    What this is is a technique of destabilization. In covert action,
    you call it destabilization. You have a target: a government that
    you don't like.  You pick a country you're going to go after. The
    reasons are quite whimsical.  We go after a country for a while,
    and if it doesn't work, sometimes we wind up big friends with them.
    They pick a government. They target them. They send the CIA in with
    its resources and its activists: hiring people, hiring agents to
    tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country.  [It's] a
    technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping they can
    make the government come to the US's terms, or that the government
    will collapse altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and
    have the thing wind up with their own choice of people in power.

    Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric is fairly
    textbookish.  What we're talking about is going in and deliberately
    creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to
    market; where children can't go to school; where women are
    terrified, inside their homes as well as outside; where government
    administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals
    are treating wounded people, instead of sick people; where
    international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.

    If you ask the State Department today what is their official
    explanation of the purpose of the Contras, they say, it is to
    attack economic targets, meaning, break up the economy of the
    country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.

    To destabilize Nicaragua, beginning in 1981, we began funding this
    force of Somoza's ex-National Guardsmen, calling them the Contras,
    the counter- revolutionaries. We created this force, which did not
    exist until we allocated money. We armed them. We put uniforms on
    their backs and boots on their feet, gave them camps in Honduras to
    live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction
    as we sent them in to destabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction,
    they have been systematically blowing up bridges, sawmills,
    grainaries, government offices, schools, health centers. They
    ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms
    and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow,
    if he can plow at all.

    If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in
    this and their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that
    they were circulating throughout Nicaragua. [It was] a comic-book
    type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to
    bring a society to a halt; how you can gum up typewriters, what you
    can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you can stuff in a
    sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work; things you can do to
    make a society simply cease to function.

    Systematically, the Contras have been assassinating religious
    workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government
    administrators.  Remember the "Assassination Manual" that surfaced
    in 1984? It caused such a stir that President Reagan had to address
    it himself in the presidential debates with Walter Mondale. They
    used terror to traumatize society so that it cannot function. I
    don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to
    understand what your Government and its agents are doing.

    They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children
    forced to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off
    his face.  They put a grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With
    the children forced to watch, they gang-rape the mother, and slash
    her breasts off.  And sometimes for variety, they make the parents
    watch while they do these things to the children. This is nobody's
    propaganda! There have been over 100,000 American Witnesses for
    Peace who've gone down there, and they have filmed and photographed
    and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened,
    and documented 13,000 people killed this way -- mostly women and
    children.

    These are the activites done by the Contras. The Contras are the
    people President Reagan called "freedom fighters." He said: "They
    are the moral equivalent of our founding fathers." [*]

    In 1960, we came up with a new term, a policy of trying to correct
    the problems of Central and Latin America, the economic imbalances,
    by addressing them directly. President Kennedy's famous program: He
    said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make
    violent revolution inevitable." However, the millions and millions
    of dollars that we put into this program, inevitably went to the
    rich, and not to the [ordinary] people of the countries involved.
    While we were doing this, or trying -- saying we were trying to
    correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the CIA was
    doing its thing too. The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units
    that are, today, the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders
    [were] on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA in the United
    States.

    We had the public safety program going, throughout Central and
    Latin America for twenty-six years, in which we taught them to
    break up subversion by interrogating people -- interrogation,
    including torture, the way the CIA taught it.

    Dan Mitrione, the exponent of these things, spent seven years in
    Brazil and three in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching
    torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business: how to
    apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order
    to get the response you want from the individual.  They gave them
    crank generators -- with U.S.AID written on the side, so the people
    even knew where these things came from -- and developed a wire that
    was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit
    between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth, and
    the other in or around the genitals. You could crank, and submit
    the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the
    human body can register.

    Now, how do you teach torture?   Dan Mitrione, I can teach you
    about torture, but sooner or later you have to get involved. You
    have to lay on your hands and try it yourself. They would pick up
    guinea pigs off the streets: beggars, and take them in to use in
    these torture training classes.  Of course, the horror of that is,
    these people wouldn't know why they were being tortured. They
    couldn't give up. They couldn't say, "I'm sorry. Stop the pain.
    I'll tell you the names of everybody involved." All they could do
    was lie there and scream.

    When they would collapse, they would bring in doctors who would
    shoot them up with Vitamin B and rest them up for the next class.
    And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw
    them out on the streets to terrify the population, so that
    everybody would be afraid of the police and the government. This is
    what the CIA was teaching them to do.

    One of the women who was in this program for two years -- tortured
    in Brazil for two years -- testified internationally when she
    eventually got out.  She said the most horrible thing about it, in
    fact, was that the people doing it were not raving psychopaths. She
    couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they
    were psychopaths.  They were very ordinary people.  She told about
    being tortured one day.  She's on this table, naked in a room full
    of six men, and they're doing these incredibly painful degrading
    things to her body. And there's an interruption. The American is
    called to the telephone, and he's in the next room, and the others
    take a smoke break.  She's lying on this table, and he's saying:
    "Oh, hi Honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour or so,
    and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador's on the way home."

    There's a lesson in all this. The lesson is: It isn't just the
    Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, who do inhuman things to other
    people. It's PEOPLE who do inhuman things to other people. And we
    are responsible for doing these things on a massive basis, to
    people of the world today. We do it in a way that gives us
    plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a secret
    police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs
    in our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though
    the information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's
    okay because we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just
    as responsible for these one to three million people we've
    slaughtered, and for all the people we've tortured and made
    miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that they slaughtered
    and killed.  Genocide is genocide !!

AMY GOODMAN:

    That is John Stockwell, with excerpts from two of his talks on "The
    Secret Wars of the CIA."  I'm Amy Goodman.

--------------

[* A recent article from Propaganda Review commented:  "Interestingly,
when Reagan said that the contras were 'the moral equivalent of our
Founding Fathers' he was correct in ways he would not have wanted to
acknowledge.  Specifically, in the first Red Scare in this country's
history, the 'threat' posed by Native Americans, 18th and 19th century
US forces, like the contras, made extensive and systematic use of
murder, torture, and other forms of terrorism against Indian
noncombatants.  Mr. Reagan's unconsciously ironic comment reminds us
that the history of American political demonology has been a long one,
and its consequences have been far more than ideological."]

Kerry Miller   <[e-mail]>

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

This is one of countless stories unveiling the deeply corrupted and
subverted state of our theoretically democratic Government.  This story
makes disgustingly obvious the fact that patriotism is not the waving
of flags, the tying of yellow ribbons and the mindless support of the
Government, just because it happens to be ours.  You don't support
cancer just because you happen to have it.  Patriotism is telling the
truth to the people of our country in order that they may unite to
conquer the anti-democratic cancer that is gradually destroying ours
and our children's freedom. So please post the installments of this
series to other bulletin boards, and post hardcopies in public places,
both on and off campus.  That would be a truly patriotic deed.

John DiNardo

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