"Democracy Now!" is the secret CIA codeword for "Coup Now!"

[William Gigantus]

Coup or Democracy?

Amy Goodman doesn't have a clue.

Only our CIA pigs know for sure.

*oink*oink*

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ukraine: how America's coup machine has destroyed democracy worldwide
since 1953
http://stopwar.org.uk/videos/ukraine-is-the-latest-of-over-80-us-coups-or-failed-coups-in-foreign-countries-since-1953#.U1pRH1cSGuI
Nicholas Davies 18 April 2014. Posted in News

Most US coups have led to severe repression, disappearances,
extrajudicial executions, torture, corruption, extreme poverty and
inequality, and prolonged setbacks for democracy.

Ukraine revolution or coup

Soon after the 2004 US coup to depose President Jean-Bertrand Aristide
of Haiti, I heard Aristide's lawyer Ira Kurzban speaking in Miami. He
began his talk with a riddle: "Why has there never been a coup in
Washington D.C.?" The answer: "Because there is no US Embassy in
Washington D.C." This introduction was greeted with wild applause by
a mostly Haitian-American audience who understood it only too well.

Ukraine's former security chief, Aleksandr Yakimenko, has reported
that the coup-plotters who overthrew the elected government in
Ukraine, "basically lived in the (US) Embassy. They were there every
day." We also know from a leaked Russian intercept that they were in
close contact with Ambassador Pyatt and the senior US official in
charge of the coup, former Dick Cheney aide Victoria Nuland,
officially the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs. And we can assume that many of their days in the
Embassy were spent in strategy and training sessions with their
individual CIA case officers.

To place the coup in Ukraine in historical context, this is at least
the 80th time the United States has organized a coup or a failed coup
in a foreign country since 1953. That was when President Eisenhower
discovered in Iran that the CIA could overthrow elected governments
who refused to sacrifice the future of their people to Western
commercial and geopolitical interests. Most US coups have led to
severe repression, disappearances, extrajudicial executions, torture,
corruption, extreme poverty and inequality, and prolonged setbacks for
the democratic aspirations of people in the countries affected. The
plutocratic and ultra-conservative nature of the forces the US has
brought to power in Ukraine make it unlikely to be an exception.

Noam Chomsky calls William Blum's classic, Killing Hope: US Military
and CIA Interventions since World War II, "Far and away the best book
on the topic." If you're looking for historical context for what you
are reading or watching on TV about the coup in Ukraine, Killing Hope
will provide it. The title has never been more apt as we watch the
hopes of people from all regions of Ukraine being sacrificed on the
same altar as those of people in Iran (1953); Guatemala(1954);
Thailand (1957); Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971
& 1980); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964);
the Dominican Republic (1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 &
2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003); Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia
(1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967); Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia
(1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975); Pakistan (1977); Grenada
(1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso (1987);
Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda (1996);and
Libya (2011). This list does not include a roughly equal number of
failed coups, nor coups in Africa and elsewhere in which a US role is
suspected but unproven.

The disquieting reality of the world we live in is that American
efforts to destroy democracy, even as it pretends to champion it, have
left the world less peaceful, less just and less hopeful. When Harold
Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, at the height of
the genocidal American war on Iraq, he devoted much of his acceptance
speech to an analysis of this dichotomy. He said of the US, "It has
exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while
masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even
witty, highly successful act of hypnosis� Brutal, indifferent,
scornful and ruthless it may be, but it is also very clever."

The basic framework of US coups has hardly evolved since 1953. The
main variables between coups in different places and times have been
the scale and openness of the US role and the level of violence used.
There is a strong correlation between the extent of US involvement and
the level of violence. At one extreme, the US war on Iraq was a form
of regime change that involved hundreds of thousands of US troops and
killed hundreds of thousands of people. On the other hand, the US
role in General Suharto's coup in Indonesia in 1965 remained covert
even as he killed almost as many people. Only long after the fact
didUS officials take credit for their role in Suharto's campaign of
mass murder, and it will be some time before they brag publicly about
their roles in Ukraine.

But as Harold Pinter explained, the US has always preferred
"low-intensity conflict" to full-scale invasions and occupations. The
CIA and US special forces use proxies and covert operations to
overthrow governments and suppress movements that challenge America's
insatiable quest for global power. A coup is the climax of such
operations, and it is usually only when these "low-intensity" methods
fail that a country becomes a target for direct US military
aggression.

Iraq only became a target for US invasion and occupation after a
failed CIA coup in June 1996. The US attacked Panama in 1989 only
after five CIA coup attempts failed to remove General Noriega from
power. After long careers as CIA agents, both Hussein and Noriega had
exceptional knowledge of US operations and methods that enabled them
to resist regime change by anything less than overwhelming US military
force.

But most US coups follow a model that has hardly changed between 1953
and the latest coup in Ukraine in 2014. This model has three stages:

1) Creating and strengthening opposition forces

In the early stages of a US plan for regime change, there is little
difference between the methods used to achieve it at the ballot box or
by an anti-constitutional coup. Many of these tools and methods were
developed to install right-wing governments in occupied countries in
Europe and Asia after World War II. They include forming and funding
conservative political parties, student groups, trade unions and media
outlets, and running well-oiled propaganda campaigns both in the
country being targeted and in regional, international and US media.

Post-WWII Italy is a case in point. At the end of the war, the US
used the American Federation of Labor's agents in France and Italy to
funnel money through non-communist trade unions to conservative
candidates and political parties. But socialists and communists won a
plurality of votes in the 1946 election in Italy, and then joined
forces to form the Popular Democratic Front for the next election in
1948. The US worked with the Catholic Church, conducted a massive
propaganda campaign using Italian-American celebrities like Frank
Sinatra, and printed 10 million letters for Italian-Americans to mail
to their relatives in Italy. The US threatened a total cut-off of aid
to the war-ravaged country, where allied bombing had killed 50,000
civilians and left much of the country in ruins.

The FDP was reduced from a combined 40% of the votes in 1946 to 31% in
1948, leaving Italy in the hands of increasingly corrupt US-backed
coalitions led by the Christian Democrats for the next 46 years. Italy
was saved from an imaginary communist dictatorship, but more
importantly from an independent democratic socialist program committed
to workers' rights and to protecting small and medium-sized Italian
businesses against competition from US multinationals.

The US employed similar tactics in Chile in the 1960s to prevent the
election of Salvador Allende. He came within 3% of winning the
presidency in 1958, so the Kennedy administration sent a team of 100
State Department and CIA officers to Chile in what one of them later
called a "blatant and almost obscene" effort to subvert the next
election in 1964. The CIA provided more than half the Christian
Democrats' campaign funds and launched a multimedia propaganda
campaign on film, TV, radio, newspapers, posters and flyers. This
classic "red scare" campaign, dominated by images of firing squads and
Soviet tanks, was designed mainly to terrify women. The CIA produced
20 radio spots per day that were broadcast on at least 45 stations, as
well as dozens of fabricated daily "news" broadcasts. Thousands of
posters depicted children with hammers and sickles stamped on their
foreheads. The Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei defeated Allende by
17%, with a huge majority among women.

But despite the US propaganda campaign, Allende was finally elected in
1970. When he consolidated his position in Congressional elections in
1973 despite a virtual US economic embargo and an ever-escalating
destabilization campaign, his fate was sealed, at the hands of the CIA
and the US-backed military, led by General Pinochet.

In Ukraine, the US has worked since independence in 1991 to promote
pro-Western parties and candidates, climaxing in the "Orange
Revolution" in 2004. But the Western-backed governments of Viktor
Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko became just as corrupt and unpopular
as previous ones, and former Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich was
elected President in 2010.

The US employed all its traditional tactics leading up to the coup in
2014. The US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) has partially
taken over the CIA's role in grooming opposition candidates, parties
and political movements, with an annual budget of $100 million to
spend in countries around the world. The NED made no secret of
targeting Ukraine as a top priority, funding 65 projects there, more
than in any other country. The NED's neoconservative president, Carl
Gershman, called Ukraine "the biggest prize" in a Washington Post
op-ed in September 2013, as the US operation there prepared to move
into its next phase.

2) Violent street demonstrations

In November 2013, the European Union presented President Yanukovich
with a 1,500 page "free trade agreement," similar to NAFTA or the TPP,
but which withheld actual EU membership from Ukraine. The agreement
would have opened Ukraine's borders to Western exports and investment
without a reciprocal opening of the EU's borders. Ukraine, a major
producer of cheese and poultry, would have been allowed to export only
5% of its cheese and 1% of its poultry to the EU. Meanwhile Western
firms could have used Ukraine as a gateway to flood Russia with cheap
products from Asia. This would have forced Russia to close its borders
to Ukraine, shattering the industrial economy of Eastern Ukraine.

Understandably, and for perfectly sound reasons as a Ukrainian
president, Viktor Yanukovich rejected the EU agreement. This was the
signal for pro-Western and right-wing groups in Kiev to take to the
street. In the West, we tend to interpret street demonstrations as
representing surges of populism and democracy. But we should
distinguish left-wing demonstrations against right-wing governments
from the kind of violent right-wing demonstrations that have always
been part of US regime change strategy.

In Tehran in 1953, the CIA spent a million dollars to hire gangsters
and "extremely competent professional organizers", as the CIA's Kermit
Roosevelt called them, to stage increasingly violent demonstrations,
until loyal and rebel army units were fighting in the streets of
Tehran and at least 300 people were killed. The CIA spent millions
more to bribe members of parliament and other influential Iranians.
Mossadegh was forced to resign, and the Shah restored Western
ownership of the oil industry. BP divided the spoils with American
firms, until the Shah was overthrown 26 years later by the Iranian
Revolution and the oil industry was re-nationalized. This pattern of
short-term success followed by eventual independence from US interests
is a common result of CIA coups, most notably in Latin America, where
they have led many of our closest neighbors to become increasingly
committed to political and economic independence from the United
States.

In Haiti in 2004, 200 US special forces trained 600 FRAPH militiamen
and other anti-Lavalas forces at a training camp across the border in
the Dominican Republic. These forces then invaded northern Haiti and
gradually spread violence and chaos across the country to set the
stage for the overthrow of President Aristide.

In Ukraine, street protests turned violent in January 2014 as the
neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and the Right Sector militia took charge of the
crowds in the streets. The Right Sector militia only appeared in
Ukraine in the past 6 months, although it incorporated existing
extreme-right groups and gangs. It is partly funded by Ukrainian
exiles in the US and Europe, and may be a creation of the CIA. After
Right Sector seized government buildings, parliament outlawed the
protests and the police reoccupied part of Independence Square,
killing two protesters.

On February 7th, the Russians published an intercepted phone call
betweenAssistant Secretary of State Nuland and US Ambassador Geoffrey
Pyatt. The intercept revealed that US officials were preparing to
seize the moment for a coup in Ukraine. The transcript reads like a
page from a John Le Carre novel: "I think we're in play� we could land
jelly-side up on this one if we move fast." Their main concern was to
marginalize heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko, who had
become the popular face of the "revolution" and was favored by the
European Union, and to ensure that US favorite Arseniy Yatsenyuk ended
up in the Prime Minister's office.

On the night of February 17th, Right Sector announced a march from
Independence Square to the parliament building on the 18th. This
ignited several days of escalating violence in which the death toll
rose to 110 people killed, including protesters, government supporters
and 16 police officers. More than a thousand people were wounded.
Vyacheslav Veremyi, a well-known reporter for a pro-government
newspaper, was dragged out of a taxi near Independence Square and shot
to death in front of a crowd of onlookers. Right Sector broke into an
armory near Lviv and seized military weapons, and there is evidence of
both sides using snipers to fire from buildings in Kiev at protesters
and police in the streets and the square below. Former security chief
Yakimenko believes that snipers firing from the Philharmonic building
were US-paid foreign mercenaries, like the snipers from the former
Yugoslavia who earn up to $2,000 per day shooting soldiers in Syria.

As violence raged in the streets, the government and opposition
parties held emergency meetings and reached two truce agreements, one
on the night of February 19th and another on the 21st, brokered by the
foreign ministers of France, Germany and Poland. But Right Sector
rejected both truces and called for the "people's revolution" to
continue until Yanukovich resigned and the government was completely
removed from power.

3) The coup d'etat.

The creation and grooming of opposition forces and the spread of
violence in the streets are deliberate strategies to create a state of
emergency as a pretext for removing an elected or constitutional
government and seizing power. Once the coup leaders have been trained
and prepared by their CIA case officers, US officials have laid their
plans and street violence has broken down law and order and the
functioning of state institutions, all that remains is to strike
decisively at the right moment to remove the government and install
the coup leaders in its place. In Iran, faced with hundreds of people
being killed in the streets, Mohammad Mosaddegh resigned to end the
bloodshed. In Chile, General Pinochet launched air strikes on the
presidential palace. In Haiti in 2004, US forces landed to remove
President Aristide and occupy the country.

In Ukraine, Vitaly Klitschko announced that parliament would open
impeachment proceedings against Yanukovich, but, later that day,
lacking the 338 votes required for impeachment, a smaller number of
members simply approved a declaration that Yanukovich "withdrew from
his duties in an unconstitutional manner," and appointed Oleksandr
Turchynov of the opposition Fatherland Party as Acting President.
Right Sector seized control of government buildings and patrolled the
streets. Yanukovich refused to resign, calling this an illegal coup
d'etat. The coup leaders vowed to prosecute him for the deaths of
protesters, but he escaped to Russia. Arseniy Yatsenyuk was appointed
Prime Minister on February 27th, exactly as Nuland and Pyatt had
planned.

The main thing that distinguishes the US coup in Ukraine from the
majority of previous US coups was the minimal role played by the
Ukrainian military. Since 1953, most US coups have involved using
local senior military officers to deliver the final blow to remove the
elected or ruling leader. The officers have then been rewarded with
presidencies, dictatorships or other senior positions in new US-backed
regimes. The US military cultivates military-to-military relationships
to identify and groom future coup leaders, and President Obama's
expansion of US special forces operations to 134 countries around the
world suggests that this process is ongoing and expanding, not
contracting.

But the neutral or pro-Russian position of the Ukrainian military
since it was separated from the Soviet Red Army in 1991 made it an
impractical tool for an anti-Russian coup. So Nuland and Pyatt's
signal innovation in Ukraine was to use the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party and
Right Sector as a strike force to unleash escalating violence and
seize power. This also required managing Svoboda and Right Sector's
uneasy alliance with Fatherland and UDAR, the two pro-Western
opposition parties who won 40% between them in the 2012 parliamentary
election.

Historically, about half of all US coups have failed, and success is
never guaranteed. But few Americans have ended up dead or destitute
in the wake of a failed coup. It is always the people of the target
country who pay the price in violence, chaos, poverty and instability,
while US coup leaders like Nuland and Pyatt often get a second - or
3rd or 4th or 5th - bite at the apple, and will keep rising through
the ranks of the State Department and the CIA.

Direct US military intervention in Ukraine was not an option before
the coup, but now the coup itself may destabilize the country and
plunge it into economic collapse, regional disintegration or conflict
with Russia, creating new and unpredictable conditions in which NATO
intervention could become feasible.

Source: AlterNet

[Shoe-Chucker 2]

In article <lakkl91ku512s93og...@4ax.com>,

What we have now is an Oligarchy.
--
Karma ; what a concept!