Written 247 am Feb 28, 1991 by freezecruz in cdpmideast.gulf +quot;The CIA and the Gulf Wa

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 Written 2:47 am Feb 28, 1991 by freezecruz in cdp:mideast.gulf 


                       "The CIA and the Gulf War" 
                       A Speech by John Stockwell 
                                 2/20/91 
                     Louden Nelson Community Center 
                             Santa Cruz, CA 



  [INTRO: John Stockwell is a 13-year veteran of the CIA and a former U.S.  
Marine Corps. Major. He was hired by the CIA in 1964, spent six years 
working for the CIA in Africa, and was later transferred to Vietnam. In 1973 
he received the CIA's Medal of Merit (the agency's 2nd-highest award). In 
1975 Stockwell was promoted to the CIA's Chief of Station and National 
Security Council coordinator, managing covert activities during the first 
years of Angola's bloody civil war. After two years he resigned, determined 
to reveal the truth about the agency's role in the Third World. Since that 
time he has worked tirelessly to expose the criminal activities of the CIA. 
He is the Author of In Search of Enemies, an expose on the CIA's covert 
action in Angola.  Stockwell is a founding member of Peaceways and ARDIS 
(the Association for Responsible Dissent), an organization of former CIA and 
government officials who are openly critical of the CIA's activities. His 
latest book is entitled The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World 
Order.  

   This is a raw, unedited transcript of his speech, transcribed by Rosemary 
Balsley, a volunteer for The Monthly Planet, and Kiakima Simon, an intern 
with The Monthly Planet.] 

  John Stockwell: 

   Thank you from the bottom of my heart for inviting me back. This is one 
of my favorite places in the nation. My growth as I have come out of the CIA 
quite a few years ago now and learned to speak, and learned confidence -- 
some of my early appearances were right here, in fact -- and the response 
that I got and the support that I got helped me to grow as I continued to 
travel and lecture and debate and read and read and read, and write things, 
some of them successfully published. We've got a book coming out right now 
called The Praetorian Guard: The U.S. Role in the New World Order. And it's 
in the trucks across the nation right now. It'll be in the bookstores they 
say in about three weeks -- that's apparently how long it takes.  

   I want to commend you for your energy and your interest in the world. And 
I apologize for having my back to you, I'm just glad you could get in. We 
just turned away about 500 people. And that's a tragedy, when communication 
is so important on such important issues. And so of course, I went out to 
tell them, that if anyone wants to organize it and the energy is still 
there, I'll come back in three days or two weeks, or whatever is viable. 
What's so important about your being here and this kind of interest is the 
basic principle that I realized a long time ago and many of you long before 
I did is that we are in fact programmable creatures. We can be taught from 
childhood, and we are, in this country, in such a way that we're 
conditioned, that we'll respond when someone else reaches inside our breast 
to poke buttons and make us march off to war and kill people or cheer when 
others go off to kill people. And the only way to defend yourself and your 
loved ones against that is to program yourself. And you do that by reading 
books and by sharing conversations with serious people and by lectures and 
events like this one and all the other ones that you've been doing. And 
certainly this great engine of information and energy is just awesome, for 
example.  

   Now what we're going to talk about here tonight is what I call The Good 
War Number Two. I'm sure you remember Studs Terkel's book, The Good War, 
about World War II, where the rationales were so solid that the nation was 
pretty well behind it and even the Communist party -- and Karl Marx had 
challenged to boycott, people to boycott the big capitalist war -- the 
Communist party got behind it as well. Everybody got behind it, just about, 
except a very few hard-core pacifists, and the New World Order. This is 
being fought in the name of the New World Order. George Bush being the chief 
thereof. I would first before I get into this, and I'm going to have to move 
pretty fast tonight because the subject is dense, what we want to cover. And 
I will plow through it and then we'll get into questions. And again, feel 
free if you're shy or something to write down the question, but it's more 
fun if we have to energy, people standing up and making short statements so 
that others can speak as well, questioning, challenging, we have the energy 
going back and forth between us.  

   But first, how many people have read -- last time I was here I asked you 
to -- how many people actually read Howard Zinn's book The Peoples' History 
of the United States? That's better. Everybody else, tomorrow call in sick, 
don't go to class. Read this book. Quite simply , you will never understand 
the U.S.  system as completely until you read it, and once you read it you 
will be able to understand what's happening broadly for the rest of your 
life. It's extremely well-written, extremely well- documented, tremendously 
moving with quotes on every page, and every phase of our history as viewed 
as not from the interests of the country and big business as our high school 
textbooks are and our college textbooks are, but from the viewpoint of the 
people who died in the wars, who fought in the wars, who paid for the wars, 
and who profited from the wars, of course.  

   This war we're going to talk about tonight is called the Persian Gulf 
War; the Superbowl War; the Made for Television War; the Pentagon-Edited 
War; the Women Have a Right to Kill, Die and Be Captured, Too War; the 
Censored War; the Saddam Hussein is So Evil We Have to Do It War; and the 
I've Got to Support Our Troops Right or Wrong War. Now this thing was 
thoroughly prepared for six months advertently by the United States 
government, the Pentagon, and the media, CNN getting into it many many weeks 
ago with heavy coverage. We covered it so thoroughly that on January 14th -- 
and I've been writing screenplays and things trying to make a living with 
CNN on -- on the 14th, waiting for the kickoff, they had an Emory University 
professor on who gave us advice on how to play Wall Street to profit from 
the war before it happened. His advice is very simple in case you're sitting 
on a bundle of money and you don't want to give it to Christic or to me: He 
said, he said, jump now -- that was on the 14th -- he said don't wait a few 
days because then other people will be jumping, go in right now. And then he 
said the U.S. dollar will go up temporarily, so buy Japanese yen. Wait till 
it goes up, buy Japanese yen because by the end of the year the dollar will 
be back down and the yen will have doubled in value again and you can make a 
bundle on that. Every obscene coverage that we could possibly do.  

   And then the whole world waited, on the 15th and 16th, for the kickoff, 
of this great modern war. Now some people waited, or had been waiting, 
longer than others. I found myself in the position, albeit a country boy 
from Texas who grew up in Africa, but you know, reading books and having 
seen a little bit of this stuff from a National Security Council level, that 
I was able to predict nine months ahead of time that the U.S. would invade 
Panama. And this was not a shot in the dark, this was an analysis of the 
United States and George Bush, for whom I worked, at the end of the Angola 
secret war where I was the task force commander for a subcommittee of the 
National Security Council and he was the CIA director responsible for 
fending off the Congress.  

   Let me hasten to say that this is a very nice man to be around. He's 
considerate, he's personable, he has high positive energy. If your child 
gets sick, even if you're way down on his staff, you'll get a postcard in 
the mail very promptly, saying "Very sorry about Johnny," shaking hands with 
people, smiling and remembering names, a considerate decent person at the 
human level.  And then of course he has rationales for what he does, and 
we're going to be talking about these things. But I gave speeches at 
American University in November and then at the House of Commons in England 
in early December, again CSPAN managed to get a film of this, a video, and 
they played it on national television eight times when the invasion 
occurred, because in those speeches I predicted the invasion and analyzed 
why. Then about a year ago, I predicted this war. And again, this was not a 
shot in the dark. This was a cold, sober, careful analysis of the United 
States where it was, why it would need a war, and George Bush, and why he 
would take the nation into war.  

   Now that's what I want to go through tonight if I possibly can, is to 
give you all the essential elements and understanding of how I was able to 
make those predictions so that you will be able to predict the next war. 
Because there certainly will be another one after this one, unless we can 
intervene and break the cycles and make a profound change in the United 
States system. My point is that we know how these things work. It isn't 
magic, it isn't classified, it isn't secret. Since the Vietnam War, the 
establishment, the military establishment as I call it -- Eisenhower called 
it the military-industrial complex -- the military establishment, which is 
the very powerful central engine in our society, in our permanent war 
complex, it has been working to erase the stigma of the Vietnam War and 
telling us that it was doing that.  

   President Reagan came into office saying that he would teach the nation 
how to fight war again, to make us stand tall. And then of course pouring 
huge resources into the military, glamorizing the military, bombing Libya 
and invading Grenada, and low-intensity warfare against Nicaragua, but 
rehearsing for the invasion of Nicaragua. Interestingly enough, they were 
prohibited by the military, by the Pentagon, by the Defense Department, from 
invading, actually, Nicaragua, because the people were solidly against it. 
And so the Secretary of Defense in public speeches said "no, not with my 
Defense Department, unless you can persuade the people to support it." They 
couldn't make their sale, and we were spared the horror of our doing this 
thing on Nicaragua.  

   Now at the same time, through these years, people like Harry Summers, a 
colonel, teaching at the war college, writing his book on strategy, 
analyzing the Vietnam War for the failures of the Vietnam War, not 
apologetic, not that it was a wrong war, not at all. He was saying that what 
we'd done wrong was we had failed to orchestrate the war and organize and 
motivate the American people to support it. And it went on too long and we 
didn't win, and we didn't go in decisively enough with a major military 
strike. The military's always maintained that if they could go in all out 
they would have won in Vietnam very efficiently, and that they were 
hamstrung by the politicians and prevented from fighting a good war. Dean 
Rusk, when he came out of office and retired, he said the next war cannot be 
fought in the eye of the television camera with the public second-guessing 
the generals as they're making decisions on the battlefields. Now you notice 
the interesting thing about that is, one, that he was wrong. That he didn't 
understand that they could so captivate the nation that they could fight the 
war in the eye of the television camera, but a censored television camera, 
with the media playing along in the censorship. But perhaps the most 
significant thing about his statement was the fact that he was absolutely 
blithely confident that there would be another war.  

   Most of us were presuming that the cause of the trauma of the Vietnam 
War, that we had learned that these things are not cool, that they don't 
work, that we should never do them again. They maintained, the military, 
that if the United States had gone in massively in Vietnam, with nukes if 
they had to, and won in a few months time, that the American people would 
have supported it, and there would have been no trauma.  

   General Gadlick [sp.?], in the south command in Panama, he, when they 
were trying to invade Nicaragua, he was saying the American people love a 
good bash, but you'd better get it over with in about six weeks time or 
it'll go sour, and you can't afford to have the war still going on while the 
body bags start coming home.  

   Now since then as part of this preparation for this war, this enormously 
successful preparation for this war, and leading the nation into war and 
restoring the military complex, they've been preparing for greater control 
of our society. Now this is where it gets a little creepy. They've been 
laying on a series of laws -- I don't have time in the lecture to go through 
them, but as a matter of fact I do list all of them that I was aware of in 
one chapter of this book [The Praetorian Guard] -- the national security 
laws, which work to give them control of the press, control of passports; 
they can stop Jane Fondas and Seymour Hershes from traveling and reporting 
from places like Hanoi, or My Lai scandals, and such. Seventy percent of the 
federal judges have been or will be appointed by President Reagan or 
President Bush to enforce their national security laws. FEMA was created 
here in California, California's Special Training Institute, under Governor 
Reagan, with his support, then converted into FEMA, the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency with all of its plans to suspend the Constitution, declare 
martial law and incarcerate however many people they have to to establish 
rigid control of this country.  

   Meanwhile they've been working on an utterly phony drug war, and the 
truth is coming out now. So preposterous that William F. Buckley has joined 
with Anthony Lewis in publishing a book together to protest the drug war 
with its phony rationales. But the point of this drug war is they have 
obliterated the Bill of Rights. Under the drug war they now have the right 
to pick up people off the street based on the signature of a DEA officer 
saying they're a drug distributor, with a judge rubberstamping the thing, 
without trial, and take your house, car, whatever you've got, and the money 
with which you would hire an attorney to defend yourself. Blow off the 
protections under the laws and innocent until proven guilty and all these 
basic American traditions, as they work to establish their national security 
state, with what is evolving into a world security state, instead of just a 
national system.  

   You've got to understand that the United States is and has always been a 
war-loving nation, a warring nation, but one with a smile. We've learned how 
to put a twist on it so we can feel good about doing what other nations have 
done that we consider to be evil. This is part of my analysis. And the CIA, 
in the training, when we were novices, people from the analytical side came 
to talk to us and they said if you're trying to figure out what a nation is 
going to do, you don't take the circumstances on the table in front of you 
and say the logical thing is they'll do this. What you do is you look at the 
history of the country, its cycles of war or whatever. If it's a country 
that's gone to war frequently in its past, you expect it to go to war again. 
If it's a country that never goes to war, you expect it to find a peaceful 
solution. And with that analysis, about ten years ago -- although most of my 
growth intellectually has been since then -- I began to just sit down and 
doodle how many wars the United States has been into. And I noticed there 
are a whole bunch of them.  We've done a lot of this thing. Very warring 
nation. Very deep in our history.  Fifteen wars as I count them, and this 
gets semantical -- they didn't call Korea a war, they tried not to call 
Vietnam a war, but major military actions, I count about 15, give or take 
two if you want to call them minor, but nevertheless, let's say 15 wars. 
We've spent 50 years or so at war. We've had 200-plus military actions about 
once a year in which we put our troops into other countries to force them to 
our will. The longest period between wars was between World War I and World 
War II. The second longest period was between the Vietnam War and the 
Persian Gulf War.  

   Now during the first period, the longest period, we put 12,000 troops 
with an Allied Force to invade Russia and we put our Marines repeatedly into 
Latin and Central American countries, again to force them to our will. And 
then of course we've had low- intensity conflicts, almost uncountable, 
hundreds and hundreds of them, in between, for example, Vietnam and the 
Persian Gulf War. As you begin to read these things -- and Howard Zinn's 
Peoples' History of the United States is extremely good on this kind of 
detail, to give you really the punch lines of how the leadership 
orchestrated the nation into other wars -- in each war there was a trigger. 
If you look at page 290 of that book, Harry Truman wrote a friend, quote, 
"In strict confidence I should welcome almost any war, for I think the 
country needs one." 

   You have the Battleship Maine sunk under mysterious circumstances in the 
Spanish-Cuba-American War and the press caught onto it and roared down there 
-- Teddy Roosevelt and all of that. The Lusitania in World War I. 1915, Kate 
Richards O'Hara, remember, she said "The women of the United States are 
nothing but brood sows producing sons to be put into the Army to be turned 
into fertilizer." And she was sentenced to five years in jail for anti-war 
talk. And then there was Pearl Harbor, which set off the good war, with the 
rationale so strong. And now we have the absolute historical proof that our 
leadership did know where the Japanese fleet was, where it was headed and 
what its plans were -- that it was going to sink our fleet in Pearl Harbor. 
And they did not warn the admiral to get the ships out to sea, they let the 
ships be sunk and 2,300 soldiers, sailors die so that it would galvanize the 
nation into the war that they wanted to go into.  

   And then you have of course the Gulf of Tonkin incident in the Vietnam 
War.  In the Mexican War -- we relate to that in Texas, I am sure you do 
here, because it is very much a part of your heritage -- they offered $2 a 
head to every soldier who would enlist. They didn't get enough takers, so 
they offered 100 acres of land to anyone who would be a veteran of that war. 
They didn't get enough takers, so Zachary Taylor was sent down to parade up 
and down the border -- the disputed border -- until the Mexicans fired on 
him and the headline said "Mexicans Killing Our Boys in Texas," and the 
nation rose up and we fought the war and we took away from Mexico: Texas, 
New Mexico, Arizona, California, and part of Colorado. And then of course 
you have the Persian Gulf War. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. This 
bald aggression, this very evil thing, this very evil man, who is the 
incarnation of Hitler himself, did give George Bush the vehicle he needed 
for this war that I had predicted that he was shopping around for. We'll get 
into that in more detail in just a minute, but first you have to proceed to 
understand our system and how the conditioning works in a little bit more 
detail.  

   Now, I don't know how many of you have heard my lectures in years past, 
or videos, or what not, but I want to use some of the material that I was 
using back then because it's so terribly important to understand. So this 
will be a review for some people and for others I think, an important new 
concept. In any case it is quite graphic and quite impressive.  

   The conditioning to war in this country begins at the age of two, when we 
put our children in front of the one-eyed baby- sitter and we turn it on and 
we go wash dishes or sweep the floor or clean the carpet, and we teach them. 
 Actually little kids -- I don't know if you've done this recently -- 
they're bored with TV at first, you have to get them hooked on it. We teach 
them actually to watch television, and very quickly they learn, and then 
they get to where they're watching 10 to 15 to 20 shows a day, all of them 
the same show, the same story with different characters. I call it the 
American Syndrome. I'm talking about we're raising a little boy who's 12 
now, and he's heard my lectures and I have to sit down and watch some of his 
TV with him so I can understand, you know he says "Daddy, come 'ere." So we 
have watched over recent years He-Man, Sheena, the Thundercats, Scooby-Doo, 
and now it's the Ninja-Turtles, and the Raiders, I forget, always the same 
plot. Nice little people -- attractive, usually light-skinned or 
light-complected -- who are put upon by ugly, dark evil forces like 
Skelator. And they always say "please be nice, we don't want trouble," and 
the evil forces always insist and at the last minute they leap around and 
miraculously defeat the evil forces -- cut -- commercial. And we plunge back 
into the same story with other characters.  

   The American Syndrome of the nice people who loathe war, who wouldn't go 
to war ever, except it's drummed into Americans from the age of two, that 
we're a nice, peace loving nation, the good guys of the world who very 
reluctantly go to war when evil forces force it upon us.  

   Then you get into the stuff that we've treated ourselves to in the 
eighties during this cycle of warmongering: Rambo, Commando, Red Dawn, Rocky 
series, Under Siege, Delta Force, America Missing in Action, Top Gun, 
Heartbreak Bridge, Death Before Dishonor, Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Tour of 
Duty, China Beach, and the list is going on and on and on with the violent 
war movies. Now once again, to analyze one of these, to give you -- how many 
people saw the movie Red Dawn? Now this is fun. How many people when you saw 
it knew that this was intended to be a war propaganda movie? The producer 
went around the nation, going on television saying, "I wanted to make a 
movie that would make people feel positive about war." So this is an up 
front propaganda commercial, propaganda movie, so we can analyze it to see 
how did they motivate us to war when they want to make such a movie. And so, 
you take the plot -- it's science fiction, they have a scenario set up which 
you buy into in the first minute that's impossible, unreal. There is a force 
of Russians, Cubans, and Nicaraguans that has invaded the United States, and 
gotten all the way to the Rocky Mountains, blow off our nuclear weapons -- 
our army doesn't exist -- they're just there and the people are struggling 
against them. Amerika, of course, had the same plot, a little bit. Now, so 
you've asked: "Why did they pick Russia, Cuba, and Nicaragua?" A better -- I 
mean it had to be Russia of course, but a better plot would have been 
Russia, Canada and Mexico, or at least Russia, Canada and Cuba, because you 
know they could be coming across this vast border with Canada and pinning us 
up against Cuba and you could, you know, almost get into that as science 
fiction. So why Nicaragua? They had decided to fight a war in Nicaragua. It 
was essential that they begin to condition people to see Nicaragua as an 
enemy who would invade us if they could. This is science fiction -- 
Nicaragua's never indicated any desire whatsoever to invade or hurt the 
United States. So, this force gets all the way to the Rocky Mountains where 
they're eventually stopped by the high school football team, with the 
cheerleaders helping out. Drinking deer's blood in the mountains.  

   Now see this is off base. The eighties was the decade of the middle-aged 
women. You know: Dallas; Dynasty; The Golden Girls; Murder, She Wrote; Lynda 
Evans working out; Joan Collins is older than me and she's a sex symbol and 
this is wonderful. So, they should have made a movie, a modern war movie, 
where they get to the Rocky Mountains and they're stopped by high school 
football teachers. But they didn't do that, and so you ask why, and the 
answer is obvious. Because, one, they're are not going to get us, the 
50-year-olds, to fight any of their wars. Because we've seen wars of the 
past, and the cynicism, and with some exceptions there are too many of us 
who are aware of the cynicism and wouldn't do it.  

   In addition to which,societies have always reached out, and grabbed the 
18-year-olds. In some societies it's the 15-year- olds, whose minds are 
empty, their bodies are healthy and they have a high level of testosterone 
and adventure and excitement and romanticism about war, which they have been 
taught to feel and so they're ripe and ready, programmed to be sent into 
war. And this movie in fact was shown to National Guard units as they were 
going down to Honduras to rehearse the invasion of Nicaragua. And it was 
shown at the Air Force Academy. It's a basic military movie that they're 
shown in boot camp to get people motivated into war.  

   Then you get into the TV ads that we've been saturated with the past 10 
to 15 years: "Join the Army. Be all that you can be." And you have these 
tanks jumping ditches and these helicopters that go 150 miles per hour. and 
people playing with computers, and lasers, and night vision, and 
radar-guided, television-radar-guided missiles, and I watch these things as 
an old soldier who's really turned off on war. And I'm sitting up and 
saying, "Wow, that would be fun, you know," if you get in one of those 
tanks. And I mean the tanks we had back then would jump a very small ditch 
and crash and break down. And now, they jump bigger ditches at 60 miles an 
hour and crash and break down. But the point is that these things are 
tremendously motivating, as they're intended to be, but how many people 
remember seeing the ad on television in which part of the ad showed the 
young men and women with their legs blown off at their knees, and their 
intestines wrapped around their necks? How many people saw that on?  Didn't 
exist, did it? See that's what war's really all about.  

   We have a whole generation of people over there now, a lot of them didn't 
want to go to war. They wanted to enjoy all the perks, fun, and join the 
army and "be all they can be," and they weren't shown what war was really 
about. And now, gulp, swallow, they're over there, right now, tonight 
getting ready to kill people and they'll carry the karma of the dead people 
with them for the rest of their lives. Or to be killed, and that's pretty 
heavy stuff.  

   Now, there's another one fascinating ad -- by the way, did anyone see the 
ad that's massively on television that said "War is bad, work for peace, 
resist the war incentives, and the war instincts, and the war motives." How 
many people saw that one? Played on television six times a day for 10 
straight years, with the U.S. tax dollars. Nobody? Has anybody ever seen an 
ad run by our government, with our tax dollars advocating peace? Hasn't 
happened. And yet hundreds of millions of dollars spent on these ads to 
motivate us to war with our tax dollars.  

   Then there's the one about the young man whose coming home from a leave 
-- and you will have seen this one -- on the train (I don't know who rides 
trains anymore but, you know) and he is met by his younger brother, and he 
says, "You know dad never did understand why I had to join the Army." How 
many people have seen this one? And then they're in the car and he is 
saying, "Do you think dad will ever forgive me?" and then they go into the 
house and dad's standing there smoking a pipe and he turns and he melts and 
he hugs his son and all's forgiven. Now they played that thing for 10 
straight years. Superbowl, prime time, all the sports events, that the men, 
especially young men, would be watching. Mind that they spent hundreds of 
millions of dollars altogether on that particular ad with that theme. You 
see, the problem is that because of the Korean War and its cynicism, and the 
Vietnam War and its cynicism, there were too many dads who were telling 
their sons "Don't join the Army." And so they had to float the message out 
to the society that in this society it's okay to defy your father's wisdom 
and join the Army. And if you do he'll forgive you and hug you, and embrace 
you and respect you, and love you afterwards anyway.  

   Now, since the Good War One, World War II, we've had the CIA secret wars, 
we've had two serious wars, Korea and Vietnam. We've had the CIA running its 
low-intensity conflicts, its secret wars around the globe, a lot of them. 
I'll mention that kind of in passing tonight because I have so much ground 
to cover. We've been destabilizing target governments in every corner of the 
globe. We set up a system of governing by oligarchies, proxy government 
working through oligarchies in these countries who are permitted to become 
fabulously rich. This is the case in the Persian Gulf, the oil emirates who 
have a 0.5 percent of the population of billionaires and millionaires and 
the rest of the people share less or none at all of the country's wealth. In 
Latin America, Central America, this same system is working. If the people 
don't like it, you organize the police into death squads as we've done in 
many countries including conspicuously El Salvador, and you kill enough of 
them that they are emasculated, they can't do anything about it. They're 
crippled. They are repressed and suppressed and oppressed and you can get by 
with this system of milking the countries to your will and your way.  

   The Church Committee of 1975 -- again this is not a lecture about the 
secret wars of the CIA, that's a seperate lecture; I could give it again but 
it takes a full hour in its own right, but you must know how the CIA weaves 
into this war complex, this war machinery of ours. The Church Committee of 
1975 investigated CIA action and found that we had run -- they could 
extrapolate the figures at about, 13,000-plus since we've had the CIA, since 
World War II. A lot of these are fairly benign, and some of them fairly 
trivial, but a lot of them are very violent and some of them lead into wars. 
A long destabilization-propaganda campaign led into the Korean War and 
another one into the Vietnam War. Now, scholars including myself reading 
these things -- and we have so many of them in the public record that it's 
obviously very difficult to know exactly how many people died in Vietnam or 
Korea or Nicaragua or in the Congo -- but still, working with conservative 
figures we come up with a minimum figure of six million people killed in the 
secret wars of the CIA, its destabilizations over these 40 years. A million 
in the Korean War; about two million in Vietnam; one to two million in 
Cambodia; 800,000 in Indonesia; about 50,000 in Angola, and that began with 
the war that I organized as commander of the Angola Task Force, working for 
a subcommittee of the National Security Council in Washington in 1975 and 
'76. Fifty thousand is the number that the Sandinistas and The New York 
Times pretty much agreed on were killed and wounded in Nicaragua in the one 
billion dollar Contra destabilization in that country that we affected in 
the 1980s.  

   Now this is all, these six million CIA activities, are all part of the 
Cold War in which probably about 20 million people were killed. And that 
makes it the second or third bloodiest war in all of human history, which is 
saying a lot. I call it also the Third World War, you could call it the 
Forty Years War of the twentieth century. I call it the Third World War 
because when you analyze these things and read through them in the public 
record, which again is massively documented -- and by the way the last third 
of this book [The Praetorian Guard] is a bibliography of the best 120 books 
on the subject organized to make it easy to access each one with a 
mini-review, so you can decide which book will be most interesting and 
useful to you and what this theme is all about -- you find that we do not do 
these massive bloody things against the Soviet Union. Torture and death 
squads we do not run in England or Canada or Belgium or Sweden or 
Switzerland. They're virtually all of them done against countries of the 
Third World where the governments of those countries are not strong enough 
to prohibit us, to prevent us from brutalizing their people. The six million 
dead are people of the Third World: people of the Mitumbe [sp.?] Mountains 
of the Congo, and the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of Nicaragua. 
And now of course, the Middle Eastern desert's in a new wrinkle on this 
system.  

   The casualties in Nicaragua, 50,000 -- they were not Russians, they were 
not Cubans, they were not even mostly Sandinistas. They were mostly rag-poor 
peasants including a high percentage of women and children. Communists? They 
were mostly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? Nah. We had 
thousands of witnesses who went down to live with them, to see, and they 
invariably came back and told us that the Nicaraguan people are the warmest 
people on the face of the earth, they couldn't understand, they love the 
United States, the people from the United States, and they had trouble 
understanding why our government would want to hire an army to send down 
there to brutalize them, to haul them out of their homes and rape them and 
slash off their breasts and cut off their testicles while their children 
were forced to watch. Which is what the Contra program did. Hundreds and 
hundreds and hundreds of documented cases.  

   This where I came up, then, in writing about the Angola war, with my 
thesis the title of my first book, In Search of Enemies. We were taking this 
war in Angola to people who did not want to be our enemies. As we did in 
Vietnam. As we did in Cuba and other places. The point of the CIA's 
activities is they -- 10,000, 13,000 operations, 3,000 major gory bloody 
operations killing six million people -- have made the world unstable. The 
six million people each leave behind an average of perhaps five loved ones 
who are traumatically conditioned to violence, who will go on continuing 
violence and keeping the world unstable and violent for the rest of their 
lives. And in an unstable world that's brimming and teeming with violence 
you can spend trillions of dollars on the arms that you could not spend if 
the world were in fact peaceful.  

   Now again, I'm moving pretty fast. In other lectures I go into that in 
considerable detail. But getting into the 1980s, we had a constant 
conditioning militarizing and destabilizing under the Reagan revolution. We 
spent two and a half trillion dollars, according to the government, on the 
largest military buildup in any peacetime period in history. Perhaps, 
arguably, the largest military buildup in all of history. Meanwhile Ronald 
Reagan, the great orator, was selling this program to the American people by 
focusing our paranoid attention at Nicaragua. He spent more time talking 
about his Contra program in Nicaragua than any other aspect of his 
presidency. He told us that America's feeling great again. He railed at the 
evil empire. He said there's a Russian base in Nicaragua in our own back 
yard. He said the Soviets are flying airplanes in this hemisphere for the 
first time in all of history. Of course that wasn't true. Airplanes have 
been flying out since World War II. But this is rhetorical. And he hammered 
away. And the truth has nothing whatsoever to do with it.  

   He said it was a two-day drive from Managua to Carlington, Texas. He said 
it was closer from Managua to Houston than it was from Houston to Maine. He 
said it was a two-hour flight from Managua to San Diego; you could almost 
see the fighter bombers sizzling up there to bomb San Diego. He said there 
will be a million Communists coming up across our borders from the south. 
Ollie North actually volunteered, according to Pat Buchanan, to be put into 
command of the forces that would fight off the million Communists as they 
came up from Central America through Mexico to invade this country.  

   Meanwhile in 1988, President Bush, George Bush, my old boss, inherited 
the presidency. He won the election. He also inherited big political 
problems and economic problems, because he had been vice-president under 
Reagan. And he inherited a four-and- a-half trillion-dollar debt. Now in 
the'70s, we had been the richest country in the world, a creditor nation. In 
the middle of the '80s, under this policy of big spending on credit, we 
crossed the line and became a debtor nation for the first time since World 
War I. The debt was run up to four-and-a-half trillion dollars, the largest 
debt in the history of the world, and it is double compounding effectively 
with the interest and with the continuing deficit. So you can look for it to 
jump to ten trillion and twenty trillion and nobody has the faintest idea of 
what in fact will happen to this thing or can be done with this thing.  

   Bush inherited a situation -- what I'm saying by the way is very simply 
this -- President Reagan, great irony, President Reagan, and Vice President 
George Bush, and then President George Bush, sold out the United States in 
the production of arms. They rendered this country into a condition where 
other people control our economic future. And again the irony is they sold 
it through patriotism and making us feel great again.  

   George Bush inherited a situation in which the people were waking up.  
They're realizing the debt and feeling this ominous burden that we're going 
to have and pass onto our children. They were also realizing -- even Time 
magazine publishing discussions of the decade of greed, the '80s, under 
Reagan and Bush -- the people's pockets have been picked, there's been a 
massive shift of wealth from the poor and middle classes to the ultra-rich, 
in this period of time. The ultra-rich for example: their taxes cut from 70 
percent to 32 percent and President Reagan called it a tax cut, but for the 
poor, the bottom half of the society, it was a tax increase of five percent. 
This is the key to understanding the S&L crisis. The bankers encouraged 
irresponsibility and remember, 200 officials in the Reagan Administration 
were forced to resign under the threat of trial, criminal proceedings for 
their corruption, and some of them were prosecuted and, in fact, jailed. And 
this irresponsibility trickled down into the savings and loan industry, 
which the CIA was using to launder its money into Central America and to 
launder drug money into its programs. And the result, of course, is that 
they were blowing our money. We invested our money and they would blow it, 
steal it, declare bankruptcy, open up another S&L, and this became the norm 
until eventually they collapsed the industry. The bankers, the CIA, the 
Mafia and Neil Bush, George Bush's son, all involved in this great scandal, 
this massive bilking of the American people.  

   And now they're telling us, this is what George Bush inherited, the need 
to do, they are not -- the bankers, and George Bush and his cohorts -- are 
not going to pay that money back. But they say we can't afford to lose the 
public trust in the banking industry, so we have to recondition the industry 
with five hundred billion to one trillion dollars, and they're going to make 
the people pay for it, and it was the people whose money that was stolen by 
these thieves to begin with. And they're not putting them in jail.  

   You know, when I see this thing, I say, where is the scream? You know, 
huh?  How will it restore my confidence in the banking industry to take my 
money to replace what the thieves stole to begin with while they're 
proceeding to do it some more. Meanwhile, because we couldn't afford 
everything, they directly, they made a religion out of cutting every social 
service that they could.  Ronald Reagan bragged he had cut a thousand social 
services; George Bush's first statement when he took the presidency is that 
he would cut a thousand more.  

   How many people saw the movie Lean on Me? Joe Clark, the principal, you 
know with the baseball bat, holding children off the third story of the 
school building, locking the fire doors, intimidating people, berating 
people. It closes with the woman on welfare and the students are cheering 
him, the hero, for breaking the law and brutalizing them, and they're 
calling the woman on welfare who's been organizing to try to get a sane 
principle, they call her the witch, the welfare witch. And she's laughed at 
and scorned and sneaks off. The real Joe Clark was had to dinner at the 
White House. And this movie was shown in the White House, and Reagan 
advocates it, because the message it's floating out to the society is do it 
for yourself, don't depend on the government because the government won't 
give you the money. Be independent, be proud, don't ask the government to 
build schools and give you good principals and stuff like that.  

   Gutting our Social Security. We can't afford to take care of the sick, 
the old, the poor, the handicapped, the farmers or to really help students 
get through school or to build up our school system so it's truly 
competitive. In this period of time that the United States standard of 
living has dropped to 10th and 20th in the world. Twenty-five percent of the 
people in this country are functionally illiterate. We're ranked 6th in the 
percentage of children in school. We're 10th in the quality of education. 
We're 17th in life expectancy.  We're 20th in infant mortality. The poor 
island communist country of Cuba has a better infant mortality rate than our 
own nation's capital. I submit to you that the United States only looks rich 
to ourselves because we compare ourselves with refugees from Central America 

   If you go to Europe, and I challenge you to do so, before I was saying go 
to Nicaragua and see for yourself. Now I say to people, go to Germany and 
see for yourself. This is not a communist country. It's not a socialist 
country. It's one of the two most successful capitalist countries in the 
world today. They have guaranteed sick leave. They have guaranteed maternity 
leave. They have one month's vacation guaranteed each year. They have 
guaranteed medical care and hospitalization. They have higher salaries, they 
have better social services and they spend a lot more money on building up 
the infrastructure of their society. These are all things that President 
George Bush has been stubbornly, consistently vetoing, bill after bill after 
bill. To deprive us of these things, telling us that we're communists if we 
want these kind of services from our society.  

   Meanwhile, the destruction of the environment continued full speed ahead. 
 Fifty years of nuclear pollution. Just to give you one example, and you've 
all read into this, I'm sure, in Pantex, Texas, near Amarillo, I've ridden 
bicycles up there protesting. One year on a recumbent bicycle that was built 
by Pat Rogan in Freedom, California, near here, that was loaned to me for 
that purpose -- protesting in Pantex. They had this problem with liquid 
wastes. They didn't want to go to the Congress and ask for billions of 
dollars to figure out how to store it or get rid of it because that would 
draw attention to the problem. So a brilliant, cheap solution -- they took 
bulldozers and scooped what we call tanks in the prairie up there and poured 
the liquid into it, so that it could evaporate up, it could blow into 
neighboring fields, and it could drip down into the Ogallala aquifer.  

   Meanwhile we're responsible, too. We all have to have automobiles. Very 
few of us are willing to walk or ride bicycles, a great gluttony of 
consumption in this country as we all have to buy more and more and more, 
and partially feeding that is the felling of the rainforests throughout the 
world, cutting off the world's supply of oxygen. We're not just chopping 
down forests at the rate of an area the size of the state of Maine each 
year, we're burning them.  So that puts carbon up into the air, which again 
is blocking out the sun and changing substantially the environment.  

   You all know that we still have 60,000 thermonuclear weapons 
boobytrapping this planet. Just as we did in the mid- eighties, when we 
worried about it.  Now, how many of you have marched, protested, or done 
anything about the nuclear arms race in the last six months? That's good. 
Most people have just forgotten. I wrote a book about it and people racing 
on, and people who have been supporting it. I won't name them, but some very 
prominent people have been encouraging it for three years, and they said, 
well, "it's not really an issue now." And I said, huh? It hasn't gone away, 
they've just successfully distracted the world from this problem.  

   We've had six submarines sink into the bottom of the ocean. We've had 
seven nuclear weapons dropped by accident. The IPS [Institute for Policy 
Studies] counted and published about a year ago that there were 52, I 
believe it was, parts of nuclear weapons and reactors now scattered across 
the bottom of the ocean, leaking this terrible, polluting, radioactive 
material into the bottom of the oceans right now. No way on the face of the 
earth to recover it and it will be poisoning and polluting the bottoms of 
the oceans 50,000 years from now, presuming we haven't managed to do the 
whole planet in that period of time.  

   Meanwhile, great victory over war and conflict. The Cold War is over. And 
we all celebrated. And we were all happy. Actually not quite all of us 
because I studied this thing out, and I said, "eh," and some prominent 
peaceniks beat me on the head and shoulders and said, "C'mon, give peace a 
chance." But my assessment of it was that there was one cynicism, and the 
seeds -- because we had solved nothing -- the seeds of continuing conflict 
and instability. But the point is, in terms of my analysis of the Persian 
Gulf War, my prediction of it, is that communism had capitulated and the 
Soviet Union's economy was broken, and the U.S. military complex was 
desperate for new rationales. How could we justify continuing to spend a 
huge segment of our budget on continuing military buildup if the enemy was 
gone and communism no longer existed? So we had the United States war 
complex facing severe cuts. They were put in a position of nothing to lose. 
They had resisted the invasion of Nicaragua because the spigots were wide 
open and the money was flowing and they know if the body bags began to come 
back, people would get angry and they would shut off the spigots. And they 
would lose this great access to the flow of our money, this welfare program 
we have for the military- industrial complex, and the so-called defense 
corporations. Once the Cold War was over and we began to cut the budget, 
they had nothing to lose. And they had tons of new equipment to test.  And 
they needed to inspire the nation and recapture our imagination and our love 
for war.  

   Meanwhile, President George Bush, this nice man, came into the presidency 
haunted by this image of being a wimp. And it's little bit of a red herring. 
 This has never been a weak man; he's been intensely ambitious. There's a 
certain gawkiness about about him, which he's outgrowing as a matter of 
fact, but we saw it in the CIA -- there were a lot of jokes. But in fact he 
was a brilliant man, a brilliant director, and he would take our Angola 
program, where we had broken the law and lied to cover it up, and he would 
go to the Congress and say "those nice people I'm meeting out there, I just 
can't believe they would do that" and he could sell this to the Congress, 
and he got us off the hook. He did not investigate, he did not punish any of 
us for breaking the laws, instead he was building friendships and 
relationships that continue today.  

   Meanwhile this man who was strung by the wimp image, that inherited all 
the problems and all the responsibility for the wrecking of the U.S. economy 
that he and President Reagan had done -- meanwhile at the same time he's a 
confirmed internationalist. He was desperate to get the nation distracted 
from the internal problems but also his solution to any problem -- he's 
going to be happy working with all these hundreds and hundreds of contacts 
that he's built up internationally, overseas, telephoning chiefs of state 
all over the world, and saying "Hi George, hi Ahmad, how are things going? 
What can we do about this problem or that one?" He's proud of his heritage 
in the British nobility; Yale, the Skull and Bones; the Council on Foreign 
Relations; the Knights of Malta; World War II he was in the Pacific; he was 
ambassador to China; ambassador to the United Nations; CIA director; never 
having really -- and a successful Texas and international oil man -- never 
having really slaved, focusing on social problems or domestic problems in 
the United States. And there are no solutions to these problems they've 
created of the debt and the deficit.  

   How internationalist is he? I would say totally, 90 percent. He's not 
concerned about the people of the United States. Sixty Minutes did a segment 
on him during the 1988 election campaign in which they revealed that 18 
members of his campaign staff had collected six- and seven-figure honoraria 
from foreign countries and foreign companies in the 18 months before that 
election. He had surrounded himself with internationalists who were plugged 
into the international financial and business community. Meanwhile since 
he's been president, he's been consistently vetoing bills, more bills than 
any other president in history -- every bill that in any way grants a 
reprieve to the people of this country, he vetoes it. And any bill that in 
any way tries to curtail the greed of the upper 1 percent, he vetoes it.  

   Hence, adding all these things together -- the U.S. cycle; the nightmare 
of the economic situation we have; the sliding into recession; the S&L 
crisis in which his own family was involved; the malaise that was setting 
in; the recession again; and his own problem with his own masculinity -- it 
was safe to predict that he would look for an overseas solution or war. It's 
been done time and time again, as you'll see if you read Howard Zinn's book. 
Predicting that he would invade Panama -- he used to work with Noriega the 
drug-dealer, he's worked with a lot of other drug dealers, in fact, but this 
one was screaming public. Look up the Newsweek article in May, I think it 
was 23, in 1988; Noriega told Newsweek or a Newsweek interviewer that, 
quote, "I have George Bush by the balls." I'm quoting Newsweek. Because he 
had the information of George Bush's connections and ties and knowledge of 
drug smuggling. So Bush had to get rid of him. And he had to set the 
principle of the New World Financial Order -- which he calls the New World 
Order -- of it transcending national boundaries, that it would give the 
police of that order, the United States, the right to go into a country and 
pluck out their leader and put him on trial in U.S. courts for breaking, 
allegedly, U.S. laws. But of course not trying the others who were with him 
in the CIA, flying the planes and smuggling drugs, too.  

   The war was very successful in Panama. They tried out military equipment, 
got people excited, it was generally popular, but the trouble was it solved 
nothing and it was over in one week. And hence I was able to sit down and 
say he's still got his big problems, we still need a war, he's going to be 
shopping for a war. They were orchestrating, visibly, Cuba -- beating all of 
the drums, just like Gary Summers taught us they would have to do. Just like 
they had done against Nicaragua. Just like they had done against Noriega in 
Panama. So I said they're going to be going against Cuba. Of course I didn't 
know what they were doing, in fact, to create the conditions of war, a 
better war, in the Middle East. And this thing erupted on us, the war that 
George Bush was shopping for.  

   Now we are at war. Everyone knows Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait on the 
2nd of August. George Bush immediately responded with U.S. forces and he's 
had an unwavering commitment to a violent solution there. Of course this was 
no surprise to me because I was predicting that he needed a war. They needed 
to get the nation back to war. They succeeded. Vietnam is history. They've 
erased the stigma. The united nation is enamored of war again, and hanging 
to the TV set and most of the nation is cheering and applauding and waiting 
for us to engage on the ground and begin the ground war right now as we're 
talking here tonight. And he announced the exciting concept of a New World 
Order, of which he perceives himself as being the leader, the former, the 
Julius Caesar if you will, bringing together the New World Order that will 
probably dominate world activities for the next, who knows, a thousand 
years, in different forms, or 25 years, or whatever, unless other events, 
like the pollution, intervenes.  

   In January he got the U.N. of course, to approve it, and the way he was 
able to that -- the U.N. had never supported the United States, but the 
bringing together of the New World Order, the United States economy now 
subservient to the world bankers, that's where the world order would serve 
his interests, he would serve their interests. They backed him on this 
coalition and this rigged and orchestrated war in the Persian Gulf. For the 
first time massive support from the United Nations with no veto, because the 
Soviet Union who has the veto power, having been crippled itself at the end 
of the Cold War and needing cooperation from the world financial order, had 
to support the United States and George Bush in this thing. On January the 
2nd, U.S. Congress approved the use of force under the U.N. charter or 
mandate, and on the 16th, we watched the launching of The Good War, the 
Persian Gulf War. Now the rationales that make this thing so saleable of 
course is that 40 percent of the world's oil is at stake in the region.  

   Iraq's bald aggression, as Bush put it -- hoping that nobody would notice 
his bald aggression against Panama just a few months before. Saddam Hussein 
is demonstrably an evil, ugly, terrible man. I'm paraphrasing what he says. 
He's somebody who could be painted into the Hitler image. They, even as you 
know, published him on the cover of a magazine [The New Republic] trimming 
his moustache, to make him look like Hitler himself. The rape of Kuwait, 
now, Saddam Hussein claimed a historic right for Iraq to Kuwait. And you 
might or might not agree if you were a historian. I would not agree that 
legally he had any such claim whatsoever. But his personality came through. 
They did not go in and welcome their brothers and sisters and hug them and 
kiss them. There was rape and pillage and hostages and brutality. It was an 
ugly thing, which made it, again, saleable to George Bush. Just the sheer 
evil of what they'd done and how they had done it made it saleable to the 
people of the world and to the United States. And they were developing a 
nuclear capability.  

   And this man, Saddam Hussein, had attacked Iran, with our encouragement, 
in 1980, and then he'd invaded Kuwait, so he's seen as an aggressor and he's 
developing nuclear weapons; therefore he has to be stopped. Other countries, 
including in that region, who had nuclear weapons, who put their forces into 
other countries, of course, are just simply ignored because they happen to 
be our allies. He was able to say that we were fighting for cheaper 
gasoline. I don't know if you know this, but immediately in the first week 
of August, my gasoline prices shot up by 30 percent. And there was no 
shortage of oil in the world. And the Arab emirs were not getting that extra 
30 percent tax on gasoline. This was the middleman, the oilman, of whom 
George Bush and his family are members, as a matter of fact. And magically, 
in order to make us feel good about this war, guess what happened when we 
went to war in mid-January? The prices were dropped down. So everybody's 
saying, hey we're at war and the gasoline prices have gone down, so they 
feel a little good about it, obviously without understanding.  

   Once again, if I may repeat, Senator Hiram Johnson's book of 1917: "When 
war comes, the first casualty is the truth." What we're dealing with is the 
power here of the football pep rally, as matched against the power of a 
seminar on political science, if you will, or this meeting, or the 
intellectual grappling with the issues. Very intelligent people can forget 
their intelligence when they go to a football pep rally and they begin to 
cheer, "Kill, kill, kill, kill." And they get into it and they get excited, 
and this is the war spirit, that Lyndon Johnson wouldn't tap, refused to 
tap, in the Vietnam War, that George Bush has successfully tapped, in this 
war.  

   I submit to you, that this is not in fact a good war. There's nothing 
good about it as far as I can see. The oil, for example, that we're 
supposedly fighting for, is not our oil. It belongs to the oligarchies of 
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and they sell it to Japan and Germany. We get seven 
percent of our oil from that region altogether and we have alternatives, 
even there. Japan, who depends on that oil, didn't want this war, because 
the war would interrupt the flow of oil and endanger the sources and 
installations, and they can buy the oil from Saddam Hussein just as well as 
they can buy it from the Saudis or the Kuwaitis. The United States insisted 
on proceeding into this war for our own reasons, and there was a great rift 
in our society because even the commandants of the Marine Corps, General 
Schwartzkopf himself, were against the war. They were saying: "Let sanctions 
work. This is a dangerous thing, an unnecessary thing, we shouldn't do it." 
We were orchestrated into it because George Bush, the politician and the 
people that he would rally to him, needed it and wanted it.  

   Are we fighting, I'm asking you, for democracy and freedom in the Middle 
East? Come again. This is what they said, of course, lying, in Nicaragua and 
Panama: "We were fighting to restore democracy." But certainly there isn't 
even a pretense of democracy in the Middle East. Our allies over there in 
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- forgive me if this sounds chauvinistic, it's not, 
I've lived 17 years overseas and laid my life on the line for people of the 
Third World -- but the leaders, for example, of Saudi Arabia, are not by my 
humanist standards, nice people. They stone women to death for adultery. How 
many people saw the docudrama The Death of a Princess? This is a true story. 
The granddaddy billionaire there ordered his 19-year-old granddaughter shot 
in a village square because she had sex with her lover. These are the people 
that we're fighting and dying for, to restore their oil, and their source of 
billions of dollars to them. I can't see it. I wouldn't spend $5 for one 
American life, to defend their oil interests.  

   But nevertheless, of course, they're saying that we're fighting for 
peace, that we'll restore peace into the Middle East. Now they're thinking 
in terms, people are saying today -- with this reaction among the Arab 
peoples -- they're saying how could George Bush have miscalculated the 
response of the Arab people, of the Moslems around the world, to this war. 
And I submit to you, one thing is obvious: we have controlled so much of the 
world through oligarchies until this date, and we've done it successfully 
over there using brutal death squads when we had to, that they could easily 
think, well, "We'll just go on doing it. If people don't like it, we'll slap 
them down." But I submit to you that there may be a deeper point. They may 
have predicted and expected this reaction, in fact. Because what is now 
guaranteed in the Middle East is that there will be another war in five 
years or ten years and another one and another one. There are thousands of 
babies being born named Saddam Hussein right now today. And the anguish and 
the horror and the empathy for the ones who are dying in it are going to go 
on in conditioned violence. So we have absolutely laid it out on the line, 
the rationales for our new arms race, if you will, or for continuing 
military dominance of our society.  

   We have the new rationale set up now against the Arab world and against 
countries of the Third World to actually build a more expensive army than 
the one that we had in Europe, as a matter of fact, to confront the Soviet 
Union.  So, by the summer of 1990, the military budget was facing massive 
cuts, we were talking about a peace dividend, and the columnists, because of 
these problems, were calling George Bush a one-term president. And then in 
September we had the budget fiasco in which he has no solution and it 
frustrated him enormously. He changed his mind eight times in one day on one 
of the key issues. The newspapers were reporting or observing that if we had 
a parliamentary system, that he would be out, that soon after coming into 
office, because he had no solution. He didn't have the votes to stay in 
office if we had had the system of England, for example.  

   Now, we have the war going and seven months later this one-term president 
is so strong that two days ago in the L.A. Times they had a prominent 
article saying there was no point in the Democrats running a candidate in 
1992. There's no one that could run that would have any chance of winning 
against George Bush. And the military's budget is being slashed largely back 
then, with talks about bigger cuts, and now it's back up to an all-time, 
all-nation, all-history high, in our next budget. We'll talk about that 
again in just a minute.  

   The popularity of George Bush, the military, and CNN, is sordid. The 
media pageant that we're seeing right now has been carefully rehearsed 
during these years of preparation for our next war. After Grenada -- 
remember the island -- the press couldn't get in to cover it, so they, with 
frustration, they published clippings given to them by the sidebar of the 
Army. And afterwards they had meeting with General Sydell, the Sydell 
Commission, in which they agreed that in the next war there would be a press 
pool, that would cover the war with the task force, reporting what the task 
force approved for them to report. And we're getting just that exactly in 
the coverage of the Middle Eastern war in the Persian Gulf right now today. 
A censored, Pentagon-edited view of what's happening.  

   The commentators' love affair with the military now -- of course they've 
gotten into it, after some debate and doubt at first, because the 
establishment was divided on this war. Once the war was joined, of course, 
their word, their party line, is we have to support the nation and the 
troops once we're at war, even if we didn't want it. And so they've closed 
ranks, and the media's faithfully trumpeting what the Pentagon tells them to 
say.  

   Now I ask you, what is the degree of distortion of the truth of what's 
happening in the desert over there right now in this air war today? We've 
not been shown one single miss of this new equipment in any of the raids 
that they've shown us endlessly on television. And so are they really 100 
percent infallible? I'll give you an example that will give you a measure of 
these 83,000, actually it's over 85,000, strikes that they've launched so 
far. The Pentagon made a mistake. They had one slip-up that gave us a 
reading on this.  They announced about two weeks ago in a briefing that 
preparing for the ground war they had to knock out 36 strategic bridges that 
would cut the supply lines into Kuwait. They said they had flown 790 
surgical strikes against those bridges and that they had knocked out 32 
bridges. Now that's 24 strikes per bridge with a kill factor of 8 percent 
and a miss factor of 92 percent and these are the surgical weapons that are 
supposed to be so precise that you could put them through the window of a 
Fiat. Now the other weapons they're dropping over there, the bombs and 
things, can be five miles, and even 50 miles, off-target.  

   Peeling back the layers of untruth in the rationales of this war, how 
many people have seen Ralph Schoenman's article -- unfortunately published 
in an obscure paper in Berkeley called The Socialist Action, but this is a 
renowned intellectual who worked with Bertrand Russell at one time, and 
Charlie Reese, reporting in the Houston Post down there and now we have the 
studies coming out with excellent documentation -- how the United States and 
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia lured Saddam Hussein and Iraq into this war. First, 
we encouraged them to engage Iran in the Iran-Iraq war beginning in 1980, 
for eight years. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia financed that war, encouraging Iraq 
in that war, they ran up an 80-billion-dollar debt. After the war, the 
country, in very precarious economic condition, they began calling in the 
money and they began dragging down the oil prices so that Iraq had lost 16 
billion dollars in revenues and they were faced with bankruptcy. There's 
also the factor that Saddam Hussein, with his massive testosterone problem, 
was building up his army again instead of building up the infrastructure of 
the country. Nevertheless, during that war Kuwait had actually expanded its 
floating desert border by 900 square miles to reach over the Rumaila oil 
fields that belonged to Iraq and they bought the Santa Fe Drilling Company 
for 2.3 billion dollars in California that specializes in slant oil 
drilling. And Saddam Hussein was protesting this formally to every public 
body, to Kuwait, to Saudi Arabia, saying this is economic warfare. And I 
submit to you: how long do you think it would take us to respond with the 
U.S. Marines if Mexico or Canada captured, took, 900 square miles of our 
land and began slant oil drilling into our oil fields? Like about 24 hours 
for them to get the tanks and planes down there bombing and strafing and we 
would be at war in a minute. This was a clear provocation to war.  

   So this past summer Saddam Hussein called in the U.S. ambassador, April 
Glaspie, and asked her what the U.S. position was on Kuwait, on the defense 
of Kuwait. She did not know she was being tape-recorded and she told him 10 
times in this conversation that we had no defense agreement with Kuwait. At 
one point she said that the secretary of state had ordered her to emphasize 
this instruction; she said she had conferred with the president about it.  
Congressman Lee Hamilton concluded from hearings on this that we had 
deliberately given him the green light to invade. Again, that's not my 
observation. That was the congressman who was running the committee to 
investigate this thing. We gave him the green light to invade.  

   Meanwhile the assistant secretary of state was saying publicly the same 
time in hearings that we had no defense agreement with Kuwait. So he 
[Hussein] thought he was being permitted to go in and take Kuwait. And he 
did it. And that we would not react. And of course if he had bothered to ask 
me I would have said he's walking under the great mallet and they're going 
to drop it on him. Because I knew they were shopping for a war. And you've 
seen that he is not a stupid man at all. But you've seen floundering around 
throughout this process because he doesn't understand, even today 
apparently, that the United States wants a war -- at least our leadership 
does -- they want the full orgy and pageantry of a bloody war. Once he went 
in there they would not let him off the hook.  

   Now we're in the position -- they're frustrated that Gorbachev has come 
up with a peace plan that might in fact let this thing be solved peacefully 
without the slaughter of troops on the ground. And the White House is 
admitting, they're discussing openly, that this is a big problem for the 
United States because peace might in fact happen. They are determined to go 
in on the ground, but they're under enormous pressure from the coalition, 
from the allies, from people in the United Nations who gave us the green 
light to go to war against him, to accept this peace overture and find a 
peaceful solution.  And it's a big frustration to George Bush. My estimate 
is that they would probably be engaged in the war right now, but a massive 
storm has set in in the desert. The annual rains were happening when Dan 
Rather was on the news, just a couple of hours ago tonight. And that storm 
will blow over about Friday. And unless there's some miracle, which there 
could be, in the form of peace negotiations, they will probably launch this 
thing about Friday or thereabouts.  

   The score today, in this war, in the Superbowl War: the military's back 
with an all-time world high annual budget. We have the new rationales for a 
long-term continuation of the military machine. The Third World now, 
especially the Arab Third World and Moslem Third World -- the United States 
is now once again, finally, after the Vietnam War, back to being a lean, 
mean, fighting machine -- this Third World rationale thing, just understand 
now, how long, how carefully do they plan these things, do they stumble into 
them? Let me point out that George Kennan, in the late 1940s after World War 
II, said that eventually conflict in the world would evolve to conflict 
between the haves of the Northern Hemisphere and the have-nots. And this of 
course is what has happened.  

   The Rapid Deployment Force that we exercised to get our forces over there 
was brought together by Ronald Reagan? No, by Jimmy Carter. And the first 
rehearsal of this technique was under Jimmy Carter in joint exercises with 
Egypt as a matter of fact. That's how far back they were preparing our 
military for this type of conflict and for the new rationales as communism 
subsided.  

   Meanwhile, because of some aspects of this war the peace community is 
paralyzed. There is simply none of the anger that was in the peace community 
towards the end of the Vietnam War protest. Jane Fonda of course is very 
quiet on this one. But, you see, you learned about Jane Fonda in 1981 when 
Israel put its troops into Lebanon: she and Tom Hayden went to Israel and 
spoke out publicly in support of what Israel was doing. So she wasn't 
against war, she was just against the Vietnam War. Or maybe it's because she 
was young and what she was doing was fun. But she's clearly not against war. 
Meanwhile, she's engaged to, guess who, Ted Turner, of CNN, who is profiting 
hugely from this thing. And the magic of this good war is such -- now Ted 
Turner's a fine man, and so is Jane Fonda, in fact, although we're on 
different sides in this one, a fine person. But Ted Turner is, has been, a 
champion of glasnost, working before glasnost, to get better relations 
between the countries and to deter the arms race, and a personal friend of 
Fidel Castro. And yet this one, because of the rationales and the glamor and 
what not -- he's turned CNN into the major cheerleader for the Pentagon in 
this war.  

   The peace community of course is wearing yellow ribbons in support of the 
troops over there. Now this is a very complicated issue. There's no one, at 
least not me, who can look at the troops over there without feeling some 
sympathy for them, especially the ones who were so naive that they allowed 
themselves to watch those ads on TV and get sucked into the military without 
ever thinking that the purpose of the military is to fight. And once you go 
into the military, for whatever reason -- to go to college or whatever 
reason -- if the nation goes to war you can no longer claim to be a 
conscientious objector.  

   But let me just suggest to you -- and I don't mean to be hard-nosed about 
this, but I'll give you two ideas to think about. When you are living 
history, it's hard to read history books and compare. Germany did evil 
things in 1920 and 1930 but that was somehow different because we're nice 
people. Let me just point out to you that: one, Germany was a Christian 
country; two, Germany was a democracy that allowed a segment to take over 
and direct it into a war mode. A lot of the German people did not like the 
leadership, did not like the Nazi party, and had doubts about the war, but 
once the nation joined in the war, they buckled down and sacrificed to 
support their country and their troops, as they proceeded to get 30 million 
people killed.  

   Now the soldiers that we have over there today are volunteers. In 
Vietnam, a lot of them were draftees. This is a significant difference, 
although I would certainly agree that they were seduced into this thing, as 
I was at a comparable age. But I also note when I start saying "okay I 
support the soldiers, you know, but not the war," -- but then I say but what 
about the Iraqi soldiers and what about the Iraqi people and the Kuwaiti 
people and all the others? And then I also look back in my own history when 
I was a determined member, an energetic member, of the "white male killer 
establishment." as Helen Caldicott calls it, and I would come home and my 
friends would embrace me and love me and support me; they would say, we 
don't know what you're doing, we're not sure about it over there, but we 
support you -- and I would go back feeling supported, as we got drunk, as we 
got raunchy, as we organized the killing of people. Now I've analyzed 
carefully and even written a book about what made me change. And there were 
four people that I can remember, that significantly altered my thinking, and 
they were people who punched me in the intellectual belly. They were close 
friends who said: "What you're doing with your life is dead wrong, it's 
participating in evil, and you do have a choice and you can redirect your 
life." And I raged, I hurt, I was upset, I had insomnia, it was painful, but 
they made me think and the thinking led me to break away. It's called "tough 
love." I am not going to wear a yellow ribbon.  

   In a lecture in L.A. last week Ron Kovic was there, and a couple of 
people took me on. Richard Masur [sp.?] stood up and said I want to feel 
good about this war. And I said, you know I don't feel good about anything 
about this war. But you know, so I'm a hard ass, so Ron Kovic, afterwards I 
asked him, I said, "Am I off base?" He said, "No, you're absolutely right." 
We have to stick these people who are over there. They do have a choice and 
they have to be reminded that what they're doing is wrong, not embraced with 
war and love.  They're going to come back ten feet tall with all the drums 
beating and the media and the bands playing, and what is that going to do to 
the 10-year-olds who see this happening? They're going to want to join the 
Army and they're going to be begging for a war so they could have fun like 
their uncles did.  

   The losers today, in this score card? The Kuwaiti people, for sure. The 
Iraqi people, for sure. The Israelis who are living under the Scud missiles 
and the fear and having to teach their kids about gas masks. The 
Palestinians who are having to live under a 24-hour curfew. What if your 
baby gets sick and you can't get out and you don't have the money and you 
can't go out to buy penicillin? And they're facing possible expulsion from 
where they're living right now. King Hussein of Jordan, a long-time ally of 
the United States, facing possible overthrow. Arab leaders, long-term 
allies, facing a period of severe instability. And our administration is now 
recognizing this and talking about the fact that we're going to have a 
massive problem keeping the peace in the Middle East and we'll probably have 
to leave a massive force there for an indeterminate period of time, to 
enforce a Pax Americana. And think about how that dynamic is going to build 
and make the people there love us.  

   The environment. Remember, they did have a nuclear weapons development 
plant and it's been bombed massively, and plutonium doesn't disintegrate 
when you bomb it. All of those little plutonium molecules are flipping 
through the environment and floating in the air right now and they will be 
toxic 10,000 years from now, 50,000 years from now. The Persian Gulf, 
massively polluted.  The oil fields that are burning in Kuwait -- they 
estimate it'll take a year to put them out once we can get to them and we 
can't get to them anytime soon. And they're dumping millions of tons of soot 
into the air, which is the darkest substance in the world, which is going up 
into the atmosphere, blocking the sun's rays again.  

   And other losers are the United States people. I mean the below the 50 
percent line. We are funding this war. The ultra-rich are not paying their 
share of the support of this society and they're not paying their share of 
this war itself. And we have gone back under the line of our devotion to the 
military and the military budget, which is restored to an all-time high. Now 
you notice George, in his 1984 newspeak, he announced the budget for the 
next year last week and he said it amounted to a three-and-a- half percent 
cut of the military budget, and he said that we would address infant 
mortality under this program. And if you just read down a little bit in his 
speech on the subject, it becomes clear that this war they're handling under 
a separate allocation, so that's not part of the military, and it also 
becomes clear that the rapid deployment ships and airplanes that they have 
to build to fight more wars in the Third World in the Middle East are being 
handled under a supplementary budget. So the budget is a cut, he says. In 
fact it is an all-time high budget. All-nation, all- history forever. Just a 
flat, bald manipulation of the truth is what he's done in this thing.  

   Now I submit to you that both the United States and the U.S.S.R. again 
lost the Cold War. What you have to understand is that in the United States 
the corporations that spent the two-and- a-half trillion dollars building 
all of these missiles in a 41 percent increase of our nuclear capability, 
our so-called defense corporations, are not in fact U.S. corporations. The 
U.S. has not profited from these things. We've had a massive welfare program 
in which we gave money to these corporations for a military buildup in which 
they made 20 to 24 percent profit, which is twice what is the norm in the 
society, but the key to understanding this system is that these are not U.S. 
corporations, not anymore. They're multinational corporations on a welfare 
dole from the U.S.  taxpayers, producing MX missiles which are put in holes 
in the ground, which can never be used, and producing Tomahawk missiles and 
everything that we're pouring into the desert at a million dollars a shot, 
now which are not being sold, and cannot be sold to other countries of the 
world.  

   Meanwhile, once again, Ronald Reagan -- when he was building this thing 
up and heightening it, talking endlessly about Nicaragua, a country with two 
elevators -- meanwhile in that same period of time we were building these MX 
missiles and Japan was building Toyotas and Sonys and passing us by in terms 
of trade balances, trade goods, so that our money was going overseas. So we 
plunged into the status of massive debt and massive debtor nation. These 
corporations that are taking our capital and leaking it out of the country 
are happy to do this to the United States because they are transnational 
corporations. The tradition of this goes back into history. In World War II, 
remember -- read the book Trading with the Enemy, by Charles Higgam, Dell 
Press, 1982, based on documents gotten out of the government under the 
Freedom of Information Act about how the major corporations in the United 
States were trading with Hitler's Germany throughout the war, how Standard 
Oil supplied him with more oil at a better price than they sold it to the 
United States, for example.  

   So you have these multinational corporations sucking up capital from the 
United States to build these things that are poured into the desert or put 
in holes in the ground, while in fact they are investing in the production 
of cars and trade goods in countries overseas as part of the world financial 
order. The four-and-a-half trillion dollar debt that is double-compounding 
-- I'm sure you've wondered why is it that our government is not more upset 
and concerned viscerally with such a staggering debt, which probably can 
never be repaid? And talking to Admiral Carroll at the Center for Defense 
Information -- he and I came up with a key of understanding this thing, 
their contempt for the American people and for America itself, the people 
essentially who spent this money and the multinational corporations are part 
of the same world order, world financial order, that hold the paper on this 
loan, which means that the interest that's being paid is exactly like taxes 
to them, if you will, or at least, enforced debts and loans where they're 
guaranteed by law that they'll be paid at the interest rates that are fixed. 
And that's why they're not afraid of this debt, because they're making money 
off of it, from us; the second or third line item on the budget now is the 
interest that we're paying to them on this debt for building up this 
military thing, for their own profit and policing of the world.  

   Now what we have is the United States rendered into a position because of 
these policies -- because of the Cold War and the arms race and Reagan and 
Bush's policies -- into a position where we're no longer in control of our 
economic future. However, we still are the world's military superpower and 
even the Soviet Union, in its state of semi-collapse, is the world's second 
military superpower. But we're still going strong while they're imploding 
and lapsing into chaos. The world financial order can't move us too far, or 
at least can't move without us, because we're still a major player, but also 
we have the might. It's a symbiotic relationship of money and might.  

   And so then you come up with the understanding of what we're doing in the 
Persian Gulf. The United States has now become the Praetorian Guard of what 
George Bush calls the New World Order, policing the world for the people who 
own the world, effectively, of today and tomorrow.  

   Now in closing let me point out that this New World Order will clearly 
not be more peaceful. That would not suit them economically for it to be 
peaceful.  It will not bring greater freedoms. To the contrary. It will 
bring continuing repression and forfeiture of our basic freedoms that we've 
enjoyed for so long. It will certainly not bring a greater equity in the 
distribution of wealth. To the contrary, the wealth will continue to flow 
from the poor and middle to the ultra-rich. And it certainly will not bring 
greater social services in this country because the New World Order is 
letting us go to the Persian Gulf to fight this war for them and letting us 
bear the lion's share of financing this thing as we fight the war in their 
interests over there right now.  

   Now to close -- and I won't go on for long, but just on a note of 
motivation and hope, and I hope some of the questions will get into what can 
we do. I want to remind you of what I said the last time I was here. Admiral 
LaRocque, when I went to ask him, what can I tell people what to do about 
these problems, and he said this is a wonderful question. Tell them that you 
know what you're capable of, what your skills are, what you can do. He said 
I tell people if they can write, to write letters, write articles, write 
books, write telegrams. If they can travel, go to Nicaragua, go to Germany. 
See for yourself. Understand the world so that you can witness and discuss 
it intelligently. He said he tells people if you feel comfortable lying down 
in front of trucks with bombs on them, do it. But he said you've got to do 
what you can do every day of your life, beginning today, because -- he 
didn't say this but this is what he was concerned about -- the course that 
we are on will definitely lead, eventually, to rendering this planet 
uninhabitable. It won't happen in five years or ten years, but eventually, 
unless we profoundly change what we are doing, there will be no more 
warm-blooded life on this planet.  Sooner or later, we must change or we 
will destroy ourselves.  

   So you have to get engaged. And Helen Caldicott, that wonderful, 
wonderful speaker who tells us so beautifully, she says, get involved, 
you'll feel better than sitting back in frustration. Get out and work on 
this problem, of what she calls the public health problem of this planet. 
And she points out that if you will get involved, you'll feel better and you 
can -- if the thing, or when the thing, finally blows apart, if there's a 
few minutes before the bombs land on your town -- you can turn to your loved 
ones and hug them and say "Honey, at least we tried." 

   Now we'll discuss some specifics in the question and answer which is 
coming up right now, but for openers, I urge people -- because of the 
frustration and anger and fear and anxiety that we're submitted to -- I urge 
people to remember to hug someone every day of your life. And hug some 
animal every day of your life, because they share this dilemma with us. Now 
I've noticed at the end of rallies and lectures in some confusion, a lot of 
people like to hold up the V for victory. And I reject that. Because I don't 
think there will every be a victory over evil, or a victory of peace at 
which time the world will be okay, in addition to which I don't like the 
concept of victory, because I don't think that would be a peaceful solution 
in and of itself. I give you the open hand of peace, and thank you very much 
for hearing me out. Thank you.  

   end 

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