CIA dealt with dictators to prepare Bay of Pigs

[Judi Lynn]

CIA dealt with dictators to prepare Bay of Pigs
Cuban-exile force helped to defeat Guatemalan coup
By Carol Rosenberg
McClatchy Newspapers Thursday September 1, 2011 6:08 AM

MIAMI — A once-secret CIA history of the Bay of Pigs invasion lays out how the U.S. spy agency came to the rescue of and cut deals with authoritarian governments in Central America, largely to hide the U.S. role in organizing and controlling the hapless Cuban-exile invasion force.

The report provides important evidence of the truth of the adage that the most-powerful people in Central American embassies were the CIA station chiefs.

A newly released part of the CIA’s Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation says ambassadors stepped aside and allowed the CIA to negotiate deals for covert paramilitary bases, CIA pilots and Cuban foot soldiers. They then helped suppress a coup attempt by the Guatemalan army that threatened their foothold in the country.

Nicaraguan Gen. Anastasio Somoza hit up the CIA for a $10 million payoff — development loans — as the price for letting the Americans launch the Cuban-exile invasion from his country.

More:
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/national_world/2011/09/01/cia-dealt-with-dictators-to-prepare-bay-of-pigs.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. These kind of disclosures may be flak cover for something far worse

that has never been dealt with.

When the CIA lied to JFK about the Bay of Pigs invasion, and tried to blackmail him into involving the U.S. military, he fired the CIA Director and vowed to "smash the CIA into a thousand pieces" after the 1964 election.

He didn't live to run in that election, and the shooter was not some patsy "communist" who had been sent to Russia to establish a false trail. The shooter was a CIA agent or hired expert marksman.

The CIA assassinated the President to prevent him from "smashing the CIA into a thousand pieces" --and to foil his intention to stop their on-going creation of wars around the world and end the Cold War.

After the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the continued lies and disobedience of the CIA in Vietnam, JFK was ready to abandon the "Cold War" and seek world peace--co-existence of the capitalist and communist economic systems in peaceful competition without nuclear weapons. He was working on this peace platform for the 1964 election using his own back-channels to Krushchev and Castro. Krushchev was horrified by the prospect of nuclear war and was having troubles with his own "military-industrial complex" who wanted to nuke the U.S. as badly as our U.S. MIC wanted to nuke Russia. As James Douglass lays out in his superb book, "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters," JFK went into the presidency a typical "Cold Warrior" but when faced with the unleashing of Armageddon during the Cuban Missile Crisis, he changed, and he was in the process of that change when he was assassinated.

By November 1963, JFK had forged the "Nuclear Test Ban Treaty" with Krushchev, and rescued Russia from a wheat harvest failure with the U.S./Russia Wheat Deal--both unprecedented acts--and he had earlier, during the Crisis itself, resolved it and prevented Armageddon (which his Joint Chiefs were all in favor of--they thought they could "win" it) by agreeing to withdraw U.S. missiles from Turkey (right on Russia's border). Castro had welcomed Russian missiles in Cuba because of the Bay of Pigs invasion--the CIA trigger of this series of events. The missiles were intended as a deterrent. Once JFK guaranteed no more invasions and a reduced nuke threat against Russia, Krushchev withdrew the missiles from Cuba--and it was the backchannels that JFK forged during that Crisis--to get around the CIA and the MIC--that he was using to create this new world based on peace, which he articulated in his speech to the United Nations only 2 months before his assassination. Here is some of what he said:

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Excerpts from JFK's speech to the UN in September 1963:

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Peace is a daily, a weekly, a monthly process, gradually changing opinions, slowly eroding old barriers, quietly building new structures. And however un-dramatic the pursuit of peace, that pursuit must go on.

Today we may have reached a pause in the cold war - but that is not a lasting peace. A test ban treaty is a milestone - but it is not the millennium. We have not been released from our obligations - we have been given an opportunity. And if we fail to make the most of this moment and this momentum - if we convert our new-found hopes and understandings into new walls and weapons of hostility - if this pause in the cold war merely leads to its renewal and not to its end - then the indictment of posterity will rightly point its finger at us all. But if we can stretch this pause into a period of cooperation - if both sides can now gain new confidence and experience in concrete collaborations for peace - if we can now be as bold and farsighted in the control of deadly weapons as we have been in their creation - then surely this first small step can be the start of a long and fruitful journey.

(SNIP)

The reduction of global tension must not be an excuse for the narrow pursuit of self-interest. b]If the Soviet Union and the United States, with all of their global interests and clashing commitments of ideology, and with nuclear weapons still aimed at each other today, can find areas of common interest and agreement, then surely other nations can do the same - nations caught in regional conflicts, in racial issues, or in the death throes of old colonialism. Chronic disputes which divert precious resources from the needs of the people or drain the energies of both sides serve the interests of no one - and the badge of responsibility in the modern world is a willingness to seek peaceful solutions.

It is never too early to try; and it's never too late to talk; and it's high time that many disputes on the agenda of this Assembly were taken off the debating schedule and placed on the negotiating table.

The fact remains that the United States, as a major nuclear power, does have a special responsibility in the world. It is, in fact, a threefold responsibility - a responsibility to our own citizens; a responsibility to the people of the whole world who are affected by our decisions; and to the next generation of humanity. We believe the Soviet Union also has these special responsibilities - and that those responsibilities require our two nations to concentrate less on our differences and more on the means of resolving them peacefully. For too long both of us have increased our military budgets, our nuclear stockpiles, and our capacity to destroy all life on this hemisphere - human, animal, vegetable--without any corresponding increase in our security.

(SNIP) (He enumerates U.S. differences with the Soviet Union very briefly--basically the right of all peoples' to self-determination--in itself an interesting way to put it, but he says this is a goal of the American people and implies that it isn't a Soviet goal. In truth, it was not the goal of either imperial power--as evidenced, for instance, by the U.S. nixing of UN-sponsored elections in Vietnam, in 1954, because a communist clearly would have been elected. Nevertheless, he downplays differences and goes on...)

...We must continue to seek agreements on measures which prevent war by accident or miscalculation. We must continue to seek agreements on safeguards against surprise attack, including observation posts at key points. We must continue to seek agreement on further measures to curb the nuclear arms race, by controlling the transfer of nuclear weapons, converting fissionable materials to peaceful purposes, and banning underground testing, with adequate inspection and enforcement. We must continue to seek agreement on a freer flow of information and people from East to West and West to East.

...let us move up the steep and difficult path toward comprehensive disarmament, securing mutual confidence through mutual verification, and building the institutions of peace as we dismantle the engines of war. We must not let failure to agree on all points delay agreements where agreement is possible. And we must not put forward proposals for propaganda purposes.

(He then makes an extraordinary proposal for joint U.S. and Soviet space exploration in a de-militarized context...)

Finally, in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity in the field of space there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon. Space offers no problems of sovereignty; by resolution of this Assembly, the members of the United Nations have foresworn any claim to territorial rights in outer space or on celestial bodies, and declared that international law and the United Nations Charter will apply. Why, therefore, should man's first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? Why should the United States and the Soviet Union, in preparing for such expeditions, become involved in immense duplications of research, construction, and expenditure? Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries--indeed of all the world - cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending someday in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but the representatives of all of our countries.

(MORE)

http://www.famousquotes.me.uk/speeches/John_F_Kennedy/9.htm
(my emphasis)

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These were the words and actions that, two months later, resulted in the CIA assassinating President Kennedy on behalf of the "military-industrial conplex"--a mystery that James Douglass solves comprehensively by laying out all previous research and explaining the tangled web of misdirection that the CIA had initially created and that was further snarled up and obscured by the coverup. He then explains LBJ's remark, three days after the assassination, that, "Now they can have their war." He was speaking of the CIA/MIC and Vietnam. They had wanted to nuke Russia, had insisted on it during the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK would not go along and they therefore laid the trail of his assassination to Russia, to force his successor's hand--LBJ--to nuke Russia in retaliation. LBJ had been informed by J. Edgar Hoover (FBI) that the CIA had assassinated Kennedy and had laid the trail to Russia (which the FBI had picked up in Mexico) and LBJ didn't want to nuke Russia for something they hadn't done. Douglass says that LBJ participated in the coverup for this reason (and had not been part of the assassination plot)--but he nevertheless had to give them "their war." Vietnam. Their purely war profiteering war. Their war that made no sense. Their genocidal war in which TWO MILLION Southeast Asians were killed and more than 55,000 U.S. soldiers died. Their war against democratic elections in Vietnam. Their CIA-instigated war.

Perhaps you had to have lived through those times to understand how revolutionary JFK's proposals in this speech were, and what a threat they were to our war profiteers. Douglass says that some involved in the assassination plot sincerely believed Kennedy to be treasonous, and, though it is hard for me to say this, I can understand how that might be true. Some. But not all. The main perps--Douglass gets as high as Richard Helms, CIA operations chief, as to direct finger-pointing, but the fired Allen Dulles was probably the chief decider--were, in truth, preventing the democratic re-election of Kennedy as president. THEY were the traitors. It was not treason to propose peace.

Kennedy had correctly judged that the American people were ready for world peace. How do I know this? Because that's what I voted for, in my first vote for president, in 1964, with LBJ proclaiming himself the candidate of peace! That was his platform--peace! And I was not alone. LBJ won that election by one of the biggest landslides in the history of presidential elections. The American people voted for peace just as JFK expected them to. LBJ was lying, of course. And the tragedy is that JFK would NOT have been lying. Douglass is utterly convincing on this point. JFK intended to END the Cold War--to achieve mutual, real disarmament--and to end all the "little wars" that it was spawning, including Vietnam. (He was in the process of de-escalating in Vietnam when he was assassinated.)

The thrust of the assassins was NOT to protect the United States. It was to CONTINUE their war profiteering, their covert ops and their secret power and to END democracy in the U.S., which they very effectively put in motion--until the Bush Junta put the final touches on, in the last decade, with out-of-control war and 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, to once again deny the will of the American people to be peaceful.

And THAT is "Why It Matters"--as Douglass states in his title.

Revealing the CIA machinations in Latin America, to perpetrate their attack on Cuba in the Bay of Pigs, is only part of the story. And no corporate news organization is ever going to tell the whole story, because, if we face what our secret government did then, then we must face what our secret government is doing now--turning every tax dollar to the purposes of war, war profiteering and imperial domination of the world, controlling presidents, controlling our vote with 'TRADE SECRET' code in all the voting machines, and putting utter scumbags in Congress, to take even more of our resources--our schools, our pensions, our parks, our emergency services, our medical care for the elderly and every last bit of "the commons" that we have created together to try to make a decent society.

We were, at one time, a society that was capable of changing for the better--as JFK's transformation from a Cold Warrior into a man of peace, and his rightful belief that the American people wanted peace, attests. Soon, millions were in the streets protesting the unjust and crazy war on Vietnam but the war machine just went on and on and on and on, to this day, with these latest controls--the 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines--attesting to how difficult we are to control and how contrary to our interests and our will as a people these current war profiteer wars are--the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Afghanistan, the war on Iraq, the war on Libya and others being planned. The worse the war machine gets, the more control do they need. CURRENTLY, the CIA is sending drone aircraft to bomb hundreds of places and people that we know not of. They bomb anybody they damn please. We have no say whatever. It is no wonder they need to fiddle our votes. They are completely out of control, in a long and terrible arc of war from Nov. 22, 1963, to today.

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(Edited to fix the boldface.)