From: jd@homxc.att.com (John A Dinardo)
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Ex-CIA OFFICER STOCKWELL DESCRIBES THE CIA's NAZIISTIC TORTURE CHAMBERS
Keywords: John Stockwell, CIA torture, the Christic Institute
Date: 13 Apr 92 19:24:59 GMT
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Distribution: na
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu


    Thanks to Kerry Miller, we can now learn a bit more about the
    CIA's naziistic atrocities. Kerry made the following transcript
    from an off-the-air tape recording that I made of a broadcast
    by Pacifica Radio Network station 
                          WBAI-FM Radio (99.5)
                          505 Eighth Ave., 19th Fl.
                          New York, NY 10018       (212) 279-0707


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NARRATOR:
John Stockwell spent 13 years with the CIA, including serving as a case
officer in Africa and Viet Nam. He was commander of the CIA's secret war in
Angola in 1975 and 1976.

JOHN STOCKWELL:
     In that job I sat on the subcommitteee of the National Security Council,
so I was like the Chief of Staff, with GS-18s -- like three star generals --
Henry Kissinger, Bill Colby, the GS-18s in the CIA, making important
decisions. My job was to put it all together, make it happen, and run it. 
It was an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done.

NARRATOR:
Stockwell began his CIA career in Africa.

JOHN STOCKWELL:
     We were doing things that seemed [?] because we were there, because it
was our function. We were bribing people, corrupting people, and not
protecting the US in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with 
Larry Devlin, the famous CIA case officer who had overthrown Patrice Lumumba, 
and had him killed back in 1960, in the Congo.
     He was moving into Africa Division Chief. I talked with him at length one
night, and he was giving me an explanation. I was telling him, "Frankly, sir,
you know this stuff doesn't make any sense. We're not saving anybody from
anything, and we are corrupting people. And everybody knows we're doing it,
and that makes the US look bad."
     He said I was getting too big for my britches. He said I was "trying to
think like the people in the NSC back in Washington, who have the big picture,
who know what is going on in the world, who have all the secret information,
and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have somebody in
Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job.
Wait till you have more experience, and work your way up to that point, and
then you'll understand national secuirity, and you can make the big decisions.
Now, get to work, and stop this philosophizing."  And I said, "Aye, aye, sir.
Sorry, sir. Bit out of line, sir."
     It's a powerful argument. Our presidents use it on us. President Reagan
has used it on the American people saying, "If you knew what I know about the
situation in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us
to intervene."

NARRATOR:
In Viet Nam, Stockwell ran a CIA intelligence gathering post.

JOHN STOCKWELL:
     I had to work with a sadistic police chief. He liked to carve people with
knives in the CIA safe house. When I reported this to my bosses, they said,
One: the post is too important to close down. Two: they weren't going to get
the man transferred or fired because that would make problems politically.
He was very good at working with us in the operations he worked on. Three:
therefore, if I didn't have the stomach for it, they could transfer me, but
they hastened to point out that if I did demonstrate a lack of moral fiber, to
handle working with this sadistic police chief, I wouldn't get another good
job with the CIA. It would be a mark against my career.
     So I kept the job. I closed the safe house down. I told my staff that I
didn't approve of that kind of activity, and proceeded to work with him for
the next two years, pretending that I had reformed him and that he didn't do
this sort of thing anymore.
     The parallel is obvious with El Salvador today, where the CIA, the State
Department, works with the death squads.

NARRATOR:
In this second part of our special presentation, John Stockwell brings us up
to date with his experiences after leaving the CIA in 1977. He discusses CIA
covert operations in Central America, CIA manipulation of the press, and CIA
experiments conducted on the US public. John Stockwell: The Secret Wars of the
CIA, brought to you by the Other Americas Radio and your local public radio
station.

JOHN STOCKWELL:
"What we're going to talk about tonight are the CIA's secret wars. But
the subject is much broader than merely little CIA dirty tricks and
shenanigans. We're talking about a situation -- we're living in a world which
has grievous problems. Our planet is terminally ill, and it's not a long term
disease. We're talking about the nuclear arms race.
     This is something. These 52,000, soon to be 70,000, nuclear weapons are
going to be going off sooner rather than later. At the same time, the world
is facing serious economic problems, of the sort that triggered world wars in
the past. Leaders of countries, leaders of banks, for purposes basically of
greed, have never been able to balance their checkbooks. They always
overspend. They run countries into bankruptcy.
     When the world has gotten blocked up before, like a Monopoly game where
everything is owned and nobody can make any progress, the way they erase the
board and start over has been to have big world wars. Erase countries, bomb
cities, and bomb banks, and then start from scratch again. This is not an
option to us now, because of all these 52,000 nuclear weapons.
     The Center for Defense Information counts 60 wars that are being fought
in the world today, in which they estimate 5 million people will die. The US
is on the brink of its next war: the Central American War. In this situation
of a volatile world, about as troubled as it can get, the US CIA is running 50
covert actions, destabilizing further almost one third of the countries in the
world today.
     Now these things inter-relate. The nuclear arms race, conventional wars,
the world debt, CIA covert actions; they're all viewed from our point of view,
they're all part of our national security. They're supervised by the National
Security Council - the National Security Advisor advises the President - and
we respond to them in terms of our own national security compulsions.
     By the way, everything I'm sharing with you tonight is in the public
record. The 50 covert actions are secret, but that [information] has been
leaked to us by members of the oversight committee of Congress. I urge you not
to take my word for anything. I'm going to stand here and tell you and give
you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously, I could be lying. The only
way you can figure it out for yourselves is to educate yourselves. The French
have a saying, "Them that don't do politics will be done." If you don't fill
your mind eagerly with the truth, dig out the records, go and see for
yourself, then your mind remains blank, and your adrenalin pumps, and you can
be excited and mobilized to do things that are not in your interest to do.
     Approaching this subject from my own point of view, my own experience,
my special expertise, the CIA covert actions, let's look at Nicaragua. This is
the most famous covert action of the 50 that are going on today. They say
there are 13 "major" ones. This is not the biggest one. Afghanistan is. We've
spent several hundred million dollars in Afghanistan, We've spent somewhat
less than that, but close, in Nicaragua. Nicaragua is the most famous one, and
there's a reason. Part of it is, it's closer, but a big part of it is the fact
that the Administration is using Nicaragua for a very special purpose, so they
have made it public from the outset.
     What this is, is a technique of destabilization (in covert action, you
call it destabilization). You have a target: a government that you don't like.
You pick a country you're going to go after. The reasons are quite whimsical.
We go after a country for a while, and if it doesn't work, sometimes we wind
up big friends with them. They pick a government, they target them, they send
the CIA in with its resources and its activists: hiring people, hiring agents
to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country. [It's] a
technique for putting pressure on the government, hoping they can make the
government come to the US's terms, or that the government will collapse
altogether and they can engineer a coup d'etat, and have the thing wind up
with their own choice of people in power.
     Now ripping apart the economic and social fabric is fairly textbookish.
What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions
where the farmer can't get his produce to market; where children can't go to
school; where women are terrified, inside their homes as well as outside;
where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the
hospitals are treating wounded people, instead of sick people; where
international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.
     If you ask the State Dept. today what is their official explanation of the
purpose of the Contras, they say, it is to attack economic targets, meaning,
break up the economy of the country. Of course, they're attacking a lot more.
     To destabilize Nicaragua, beginning in 1981, we began funding this force
of Somoza's ex-National Guardsmen, calling them the Contras, the counter-
revolutionaries. We created this force, which did not exist until we allocated
money. We armed them. We put uniforms on their backs and boots on their feet,
gave them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training,
leadership, direction as we sent them in to destabilize Nicaragua. Under our
direction, they have been systematically blowing up bridges, sawmills,
grainaries, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so
the produce can't get to market, they raid farms and villages - the farmer has
to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.
     If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this and
their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that they were circulating
throughout Nicaragua. [It was] a comic-book type of a paper, with visual
explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt: how you can gum
up typewriters, what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines, what you
can stuff in a sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work; things you can do
to make a society simply cease to function.
     Systematically, the Contras have been assassinating religious workers,
teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators.
Remember the "Assassination Manual" that surfaced in 1984? It caused such a
stir that President Reagan had to address it himself in the presidential
debates with Walter Mondale. They used terror to traumatize society so that 
it can't function. I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you 
have to understand what your government and its agents are doing.
     They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced
to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put
a grenade in his mouth, and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch,
they gang-rape the mother, and slash her breasts off. And sometimes for
variety, they make the parents watch while they do these things to the
children. This is nobody's propaganda! There have been over 100,000 American
Witnesses for Peace who've gone down there, and they have filmed and
photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've
happened, and documented 13,000 people killed this way -- mostly women 
and children.
     These are the activites done by the Contras. The Contras are the people
President Reagan called "freedom fighters." He said: "They are the moral
equivalent of our founding fathers." [*]
     In 1960, we came up with a new term, a policy of trying to correct the
problems of Central and Latin America, the economic imbalances, by addressing
them directly. President Kennedy's famous program. He said, "Those who make 
peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable."
However, the millions and millions of dollars that we put into this program,
inevitably went to the rich, and not to the [ordinary] people of the
countries involved. While we were doing this -- or trying, saying we were
trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the CIA was
doing its thing too. The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units that are,
today, the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders [were] on the CIA's
payroll, trained by the CIA in the US.
     We had the public safety program going, throughout Central and Latin
America for 26 years, in which we taught them to break up subversion by
interrogating people. Interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA 
taught it.
     Dan Mitrione, the exponent of these things, spent 7 years in Brazil, and
three in Uruguay, teaching interrogation, teaching torture. He was supposed to
be the master of the business: how to apply the right amount of pain, at just
the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual.
They gave them crank generators -- with USAID written on the side, so the
people even knew where these things came from -- and developed a wire that was
strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth,
so you could put one wire between the teeth, and the other in or around the
genitals. You could crank, and submit the individual to the greatest amount 
of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.
     Now, how do you teach torture?  Dan Mitrione, I can teach you about
torture, but sooner or later you have to get involved. You have to lay on 
your hands and try it yourself. They would pick up guinea pigs off the 
streets: beggars, and take them in to use in these torture training classes. 
Of course, the horror of that is, these people wouldn't know why they were 
being tortured. They couldn't give up. They couldn't say, "I'm sorry. Stop 
the pain. I'll tell you the names of everybody involved."  All they could 
do was lie there and scream.
     When they would collapse, they would bring in doctors who would shoot
them up with Vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they
would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets
to terrify the population, so that everybody would be afraid of the police 
and the government. This is what the CIA was teaching them to do.
     One of the women who was in this program for two years -- tortured in
Brazil for two years -- testified internationally when she eventually got out.
She said the most horrible thing about it, in fact, was that the people doing
it were not raving psychopaths. She couldn't break mental contact with them
the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people.
She told about being tortured one day. She's on this table, naked in a room
full of six men, and they're doing these incredibly painful degrading things
to her body. And there's an interruption. The American is called to the
telephone, and he's in the next room, and the others take a smoke break. She's
lying on this table, and he's saying: "Oh, hi Honey. Yes, I can wrap it up
here in another hour or so, and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador's 
on the way home."
     There's a lesson in all this. The lesson is: It isn't just the Gestapo
maniacs, or KGB maniacs, who do inhuman things to other people. It's PEOPLE
who do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these
things on a massive basis, to people of the world today. We do it in a way
that gives us plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a
secret police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs in
our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though the 
information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's okay because
we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just as responsible for
these one to three million people we've slaughtered, and for all the people
we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that
they slaughtered and killed.  Genocide is genocide!

AMY GOODMAN:
That is John Stockwell, with excerpts from two of his talks on "The Secret
Wars of the CIA."  I'm Amy Goodman.

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[*  A recent article from Propaganda Review commented:
"Interestingly, when Reagan said that the contras were 'the moral
equivalent of our Founding Fathers' he was correct in ways he
would not have wanted to acknowledge.  Specifically, in the first
Red Scare in this country's history, the 'threat' posed by Native
Americans, 18th and 19th century US forces, like the contras,
made extensive and systematic use of murder, torture, and other
forms of terrorism against Indian noncombatants.  Mr. Reagan's
unconsciously ironic comment reminds us that the history of
American political demonology has been a long one, and its
consequences have been far more than ideological."]

|{hm           kerry miller   <ASTINGSH@KSUVM.KSU.EDU>
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    Now, more than ever before, the Christic Institute needs your help
    to rescue it and ensure its continued dedication to prosecuting
    our Government's crimes against humanity, as we would have striven
    to prosecute the evil Third Reich for its crimes against humanity.

                 Daniel Sheehan, Lead Attorney
                 The Christic Institute
                 1324 North Capitol St., N.W.
                 Washington, D.C. 20002        (202) 797-8106

     Lacking our help, the CIA may well succeed in its current    
     assassination plot against this public-interest law group 
     which has valiantly confronted overwhleming powers with
     the only weapon available to common citizens: the law
     under our Constitution.

           John DiNardo
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive