#Russian mercenary force Wagner is changing its name to Africa Corps in
at least 5 African countries (src
بوابة الوصط ) « Right now, the number of regular Russian regulars in Libya is slowly increasing, but most of the Russian #mercenaries will remain #covert, and Wagner’s existing operations, including the group’s active involvement in #illegal activities, will not stop. » Jalel Harchaoui @libya
"New details of Blackwater participation in clandestine CIA raids detail the extent to which private security contractors were involved in covert government antiterror operations.
"According to former employees and current and former American intelligence officials, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity because they feared repercussions, Blackwater security guards participated in clandestine raids to capture or kill suspected insurgents in #Iraq and #Afghanistan and in transportation of detainees on CIA flights.
"The raids against suspects were said to occur almost nightly between 2004 and 2006, the height of the Iraqi insurgency. Several of the former Blackwater employees said the lines dividing the government-sanctioned agencies (the CIA and the military) and Blackwater began to blur.
"This information highlights a more extensive relationship between the CIA and Blackwater, now re-named Xe Services, than government investigation had previously acknowledged.
"This was confirmed recently by an article about #ErikPrince, the founder of Blackwater, published in Vanity Fair. In it, Prince spoke about the extent of his involvement with the CIA, which ranged from putting together, funding and executing operations to bring personnel into 'denied areas' to targeting specific people for #assassination who were deemed enemies by the #USGovernment.
"Though Prince alleged that he participated as a private citizen and used his personal funds to carry out operations, the Blackwater employees interviewed by The New York Times confirmed both their full knowledge of and participation in the raids.
"#Xe spokesman Mark Corallo, however, continued to deny this."
"The #PentagonPapers, chock full of damning revelations about America’s war in #Vietnam, caused a sensation when The New York Times published them in 1971. One revelation was that the CIA had funded and encouraged the 1963 #coup against, and #assassination of, the president of South Vietnam, #NgoDinhDiem.
"By 1963, the United States had sent thousands of U.S. soldiers to Vietnam to fight the northern communist government led by President #HoChiMinh. The U.S. initially supported Diem because he was fighting the north. However, Diem’s persecution of Buddhists made him an unpopular ruler, leading the Kennedy administration to doubt Diem’s ability to win the war. The coup and Diem’s assassination took place in early November 1963, just a few weeks before Kennedy’s assassination."
"Throughout its history, the United States has used its military and covert operations to overthrow or prop up foreign governments in the name of preserving U.S. strategic and business interests.
"U.S. intervention in foreign governments began with attacks on and displacement of #sovereign#TribalNations in North America. In the 1890s, this type of imperialist activity, fueled by the idea of #ManifestDestiny, expanded overseas when the U.S. overthrew the #HawaiianKingdom and annexed its islands. As America annexed more overseas territories for its empire, it began to intervene frequently in other countries’ governments—particularly those in its backyard.
"'During the early 20th century, the United States intervened relentlessly in the #CaribbeanBasin,' says Stephen Kinzer, a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University and author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from #Hawaii to #Iraq.
"After World War II, the United States began using the newly established Central Intelligence Agency [#CIA] to overthrow governments all over the world in a more covert manner. U.S. leaders rationalized many of these interventions as necessary for preventing the spread of communism according to the Cold War domino theory. Similarly, 21st-century leaders would later defend U.S. #MiddleEast interventions as necessary for fighting terrorism."
"After the United States established the CIA in 1947, it began to use the agency to #overthrow or prop up foreign governments in a much more covert way. Before WWII, the United States didn’t try to hide its interventions in foreign governments. But with the onset of the Cold War, the United States became much more concerned about hiding its actions from the Soviet Union, Kinzer says.
"'In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, it was a priority for President Eisenhower and [Director of Central Intelligence] Allen Dulles to assure that America always had #PlausibleDeniability,' he says. 'Eisenhower was probably the last president who believed that you could do these things and nobody would ever find out.'
"In 1953, the CIA orchestrated a coup of Iran’s #democratically elected prime minister, #MohammadMosaddegh, in order to consolidate power with Iran’s shah (or king), #MohammadRezaPahlavi. Declassified CIA documents claim the coup—known internally as Operation Ajax—was designed to prevent possible 'Soviet aggression
in Iran, but Iranian-American historian Ervand Abrahamian has argued the real motivation had more to do with securing U.S. #oil interests."
"When Chile elected #socialist#SalvadorAllende as president in 1970, U.S. President Richard Nixon originally wanted to block him from taking office, or else mount a #coup soon after Allende became president. On Nixon’s orders, the #CIA began supporting different Chilean groups plotting to overthrow the new socialist president. In 1973, military leader #AugustoPinochet staged a coup that ousted Allende. Pinochet assumed his #dictatorship the following year, ruling as Chile’s president until 1990.
"Whether the CIA was directly involved in #Pinochet’s coup is still contested. However, the agency’s support of earlier coup plots contributed to political instability that Pinochet took advantage of to seize power. In a transcribed phone conversation between #Nixon and National Security Advisor #HenryKissinger about Pinochet’s coup, Kissinger complained that the U.S. media wasn’t celebrating the coup, complaining that 'in the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.'
"'Well, we didn't—as you know—our hand doesn't show on this one,' Nixon responded. Kissinger clarified, 'I mean we helped them…created the conditions as great as possible.'"
Unlike Counter-Spy, Agee and the others said in the first issue of Covert Action, "We are confident that there will be sufficient subscribers to make this publication a permanent weapon in the fight against the CIA, the FBI, military intelligence and all the other instruments of U.S. imperialist oppression throughout the world."
John H. Rees, editor conversative newsletter called information Digest Washington correspondent for the Review of the News magazine (put out by John Birch Society). Schaap is a member of the National Lawyers Guild, and, w Ray, served on the Counter-Spy magazine advisory board. The two were in the National Lawyers Guild's Southeast Asia Military Law Project and served as the guild's observers in February 1977 at the Baader-Meinhoff trials in Hamberg. Rees reported in Information Digest.
@glynmoody von Clausewitz, in "On War" wrote something like:
"In war everything is simple. But in war even simple things are difficult. The friction added to operations is something that cannot be appreciated by those who have not been there."
Thinking back over the last 13, or perhaps very slightly less, years, my experience has been of the steady addition of friction to ordinary civil society.
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