{"id":741,"date":"2015-02-14T11:39:01","date_gmt":"2015-02-14T06:39:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/jwt2015\/?p=741"},"modified":"2015-06-09T16:40:16","modified_gmt":"2015-06-09T11:40:16","slug":"the-long-shameful-history-of-american-terrorism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/internationalaffairs\/the-long-shameful-history-of-american-terrorism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long, Shameful History of American Terrorism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cIt’s official: The US is the world’s leading terrorist state, and proud of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That should have been the headline for the lead story in the New York Times, which was more politely titled \u201cCIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels.\u201d<\/p>\n

The article reports on a CIA review of recent US covert operations to determine their effectiveness. The White House concluded that unfortunately successes were so rare that some rethinking of the policy was in order.<\/p>\n

The article quoted President Barack Obama as saying that he had asked the CIA to conduct the review to find cases of \u201cfinancing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.\u201d So Obama has some reluctance about continuing such efforts.<\/p>\n

The first paragraph of the NYT article cites three major examples of \u201ccovert aid\u201d: Angola, Nicaragua and Cuba. In fact, each case was a major terrorist operation conducted by the US.<\/p>\n

Angola was invaded by South Africa, which, according to Washington, was defending itself from one of the world’s \u201cmore notorious terrorist groups\u201d \u2014 Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress. That was 1988.<\/p>\n

By then the Reagan administration was virtually alone in its support for the apartheid regime, even violating congressional sanctions to increase trade with its South African ally.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Washington joined South Africa in providing crucial support for Jonas Savimbi’s terrorist Unita army in Angola. Washington continued to do so even after Savimbi had been roundly defeated in a carefully monitored free election, and South Africa had withdrawn its support. Savimbi was a \u201cmonster whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people,\u201d in the words of Marrack Goulding, British ambassador to Angola.<\/p>\n

The consequences were horrendous. A 1989 UN inquiry estimated that South African depredations led to 1.5 million deaths in neighbouring countries; let alone what was happening within South Africa itself. Cuban forces finally beat back the South African aggressors and compelled them to withdraw from illegally occupied Namibia. The US alone continued to support the monster Savimbi.<\/p>\n

In Cuba, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched a murderous and destructive campaign to bring \u201cthe terrors of the earth\u201d to Cuba \u2014 the words of Kennedy’s close associate, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, in his semi-official biography of Robert Kennedy, who was assigned responsibility for the terrorist war.<\/p>\n

The atrocities against Cuba were severe. The plans were for the terrorism to culminate in an uprising in October 1962, which would lead to a US invasion. By now, scholarship recognizes that this was one reason why Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev placed missiles in Cuba, initiating a crisis that came perilously close to nuclear war. US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara later conceded that if he had been a Cuban leader, he \u201cmight have expected a US invasion.\u201d<\/p>\n

American terrorist attacks against Cuba continued for more than 30 years. The cost to Cubans was of course harsh. The accounts of the victims, hardly ever heard in the US, were reported in detail for the first time in a study by Canadian scholar Keith Bolender, Voices From the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba, in 2010.<\/p>\n

The toll of the long terrorist war was amplified by a crushing embargo, which continues even today in defiance of the world. On Oct 28, the UN, for the 23rd time, endorsed \u201cthe necessity of ending the economic, commercial, financial blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba.\u201d The vote was 188 to 2 (US, Israel), with three US Pacific Island dependencies abstaining.<\/p>\n

There is by now some opposition to the embargo in high places in the US, reports ABC News, because \u201cit is no longer useful\u201d (citing Hillary Clinton’s new book Hard Choices). French scholar Salim Lamrani reviews the bitter costs to Cubans in his 2013 book The Economic War Against Cuba.<\/p>\n

Nicaragua need hardly be mentioned. President Ronald Reagan’s terrorist war was condemned by the World Court, which ordered the US to terminate its \u201cunlawful use of force\u201d and to pay substantial reparations.<\/p>\n

Washington responded by escalating the war and vetoing a 1986 UN Security Council resolution calling on all states \u2014 meaning the US \u2014 to observe international law.<\/p>\n

Another example of terrorism will be commemorated on November 16, the 25th anniversary of the assassination of six Jesuit priests in San Salvador by a terrorist unit of the Salvadoran army, armed and trained by the US. On the orders of the military high command, the soldiers broke into the Jesuit university to murder the priests and any witnesses \u2014 including their housekeeper and her daughter.<\/p>\n

This event culminated the US terrorist wars in Central America in the 1980s, though the effects are still on the front pages today in the reports of \u201cillegal immigrants,\u201d fleeing in no small measure from the consequences of that carnage, and being deported from the US to survive, if they can, in the ruins of their home countries.<\/p>\n

Washington has also emerged as the world champion in generating terror. Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar warns of the \u201cresentment-generating impact of the US strikes\u201d in Syria, which may further induce the jihadi organizations Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State toward \u201crepairing their breach from last year and campaigning in tandem against the US intervention by portraying it as a war against Islam.\u201d<\/p>\n

That is by now a familiar consequence of US operations that have helped to spread jihadism from a corner of Afghanistan to a large part of the world.<\/p>\n

Jihadism’s most fearsome current manifestation is the Islamic State, or ISIS, which has established its murderous caliphate in large areas of Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the United States is one of the key creators of this organization,\u201d reports former CIA analyst Graham Fuller, a prominent commentator on the region. \u201cThe United States did not plan the formation of ISIS,\u201d he adds, \u201cbut its destructive interventions in the Middle East and the War in Iraq were the basic causes of the birth of ISIS.\u201d<\/p>\n

To this, we may add the world’s greatest terrorist campaign: Obama’s global project of assassination of \u201cterrorists.\u201d The \u201cresentment-generating impact\u201d of those drone and special-forces strikes should be too well known to require further comment.<\/p>\n

This is a record to be contemplated with some awe.<\/p>\n

President Obama should call our country’s history of supporting insurgents abroad for what it is: US-backed terrorism.<\/p>\n

115<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIt’s official: The US is the world’s leading terrorist state, and proud of it.\u201d That should have been the headline for the lead story in the New York Times, which was more politely titled \u201cCIA Study of Covert Aid Fueled Skepticism About Helping Syrian Rebels.\u201d The article reports on a CIA review of recent US …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":96,"featured_media":742,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[321,1],"tags":[451,40,452,453,14],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/96"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jworldtimes.com\/old-site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}