John Stockwell quotations

excerpts from the book

The Praetorian Guard

by John Stockwell

former CIA agent

[The Roman praetors were first established in 367 B.C.. They evolved into the Praetorian Guard that came to exercise great power, making and unmaking emperors and allowing political and military action outside of the law. What rules that were observed were announced by the issuance of edicts. The Guard was characterized by corruption and political venality and was closed down by Constantine in 312 A. D..]

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Short, successful military adventures are as effective as the Super Bowl in diverting people's attention from unpleasant truths.

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Two million people had been killed [in Vietnam]. The equivalent of a 500-pound bomb had been dropped on the country for every citizen. Ninety-thousand tons of carcinogenic and toxic materials had been dropped on the country, some of which would poison it for decades to come. We were returning to the "World" to continue our lives, while leaving our Vietnamese cohorts behind

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The CIA and the big corporations were, in my experience, in step with each other. Later I realized that they may argue about details of strategy - a small war here or there. However, both are vigorously committed to supporting the system.

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We created and left behind [in Nicaragua] a National Guard with officers trained in the United States who would be loyal to our interests. This arrangement was the decisive feature of the new era of neocolonialism.

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The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing.

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...the Cambodian people knew that they were being bombed; it was no secret to them. Unfortunately, there was nothing they could do to stop the bombing. However, the people of the United Stares could stop the bombing, or at least raise an effective protest of it. Hence, it was vital to President Nixon that the bombing remain secret here at home.

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... the CIA had been running thousands of operations over the years... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations... all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries... But they are all illegal and they all disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies. They raise serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations.

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...the CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over 20 countries.

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...stirring up deadly ethnic and racial strife has been a standard technique used by the CIA.

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Nothing illustrates the power to rationalize cynicism as well as the Public Safety Program, also called the Office of Public Safety. For about twenty-five years, the CIA, working through the Agency for International Development, trained and organized police and paramilitary officers from around the world in techniques of population control, repression, and torture. Schools were set up in the United States, Panama, and Asia, from which tens of thousands graduated. In some cases, former Nazi officers from Hitler's Third Reich were used as instructors.

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The major economic impetus behind the Third World War ... is the production of arms. Every day $3 billion worth of weapons is bought and sold. So-called defense corporations are making 20-25 percent profit. In the 1980s, the United States spent a total of $2.5 trillion (at least those were the announced figures, the total was probably much greater) on the largest arms buildup perhaps in the history of the world and certainly of any country during peacetime.

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The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. According to studies published in the Washington Post, 53 cents of every tax dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars.

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This was the continuation of a post-World War II system, dominated by what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex." The U.S. taxpayer is now carrying a gigantic burden. Nearly one-third of the nation's budget goes to the military. According to studies published in the Washington Post, 53 cents of every dollar goes to the military to pay for arms, salaries, facilities, overhead, and debts from Vietnam and other wars.

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Taking smoothly over from the arcade games, which are nearly all violent, our society feeds its youth on the great military conditioning program of football, complete with the captain (coach), the sergeant (quarterback), and troops.

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The lesson of the runaway arms race, with its giant expenditures on the military, is that the nation has gone deeply, irreversibly into debt, and every conceivable social service is being sacrificed. We cannot afford guns and butter. To pay for the arms race the nation has to cut thousands of social programs, ... The nation cannot go wild on military expenditures and also afford to care for old people, poor people, disabled people, farmers, or students.

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... the United States has plummeted, relative to the rest of the industrialized world, from its pinnacle of wealth and economic strength. Twenty-five percent of the people in this country are now functionally illiterate. We are sixth in the world in terms of the percentage of children in school; seventh in life expectancy; tenth in quality of education; tenth in quality of life standards; and twentieth in infant mortality.

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Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the U.S. military machine to turn.

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Conservative intellectuals admit the harshness of U.S. counter-revolutionary activities but argue that they are necessary.... They know that people die by the thousands in these activities, but claim that they are nevertheless necessary to maintain U.S. security and the U.S. standard of living.

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The First Amendment does not require anyone to publish the truth.

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The owners of the Washington Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with the national security interests." National security in this context means "CIA."

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... the CIA [has] been running thousands of operations over the years. ... there have been about 3,000 major covert operations and over 10,000 minor operations-all illegal, and all designed to disrupt, destabilize, or modify the activities of other countries.

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The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.

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The current War on Drugs, with its broad rationales for aggressive response, police action, and stringent new laws, has quickly replaced the old anti-Christ of Communism in the hearts and minds of the national security establishment.

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The so-called "defense" corporations are multinational conglomerates that have no great loyalty to the United States; they are in fact no longer U.S. corporations but transnational entities loyal only to themselves.

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Now more clearly than ever, the CIA, with its related institutions, is exposed as an agency of destabilization and repression. Throughout its history, it has organized secret wars that killed millions of people in the Third World who had no capability of doing physical harm to the United States.

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... the United States [is] cast in the role of Praetorian Guard, protecting the interests of the global financial order against fractious elements in the Third World.

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The military has ... seen its budget restored, to an all-time high, and it has ...new rationales for continued dominance of U.S. society. The Third World is the new enemy, effectively replacing the Cold War rationales for militarism.

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As the Praetorian Guard, fighting wars for multinational interests while also paying for such adventures, our relative economic stability, domestic social and material infrastructure, and the freedom and liberties of the American people may all be forfeited.

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Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

Certainly, there are other local, regional, national and international factors in many of these operations, but if the CIA were tried fairly in a U.S. court, under U.S. law, the principle of complicity, incitement, riot, and mayhem would clearly apply. In the United States, if you hire someone to commit a murder your sentence may be approximately the same as that of the murderer himself.

Who are these six million people we have killed in the interest of American national security? Conservatives tell us, "It's a dangerous world. Our enemies have to die so we can be safe and secure." Some of them say, "I'm sorry, but that's the way the world is. We have to accept this reality and defend ourselves, to make our nation safe and insure our way of life."

Since 1954, however, we have not parachuted teams into the Soviet Union - our number one enemy - to destabilize that country... Neither do we run these violent operations in England, France, Sweden, Norway, Belgium, or Switzerland. Since the mid-1950s they have all been conducted in Third World countries where governments do not have the power to force the United States to stop its brutal and destabilizing campaigns.

One might call this the "Third World War." It is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. Others call it the Cold War and focus on the anti-Communist and anti-Soviet rationales, but the dead are not Soviets; they are people of the Third World. It might also be called the Forty-Year War, like the Thirty-Year and Hundred-Year Wars in Europe, for this one began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. Altogether, perhaps twenty million people died in the Cold War. As wars go, it has been the second or third most destructive of human life in all of history, after World War I and World War II.

The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country.

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Praetorian Guard