CIA Terrorism Conspiracy

The Fill the Gap Podcast explores various topics and fills knowledge gaps. In this episode, the host discusses the CIA's conspiracy theories and their actions to manipulate and influence power in other countries. The CIA has been involved in numerous atrocities throughout history, including election meddling and military coups. They have disrupted foreign governments and caused destabilization, often in pursuit of economic interests. The CIA's actions continue to this day, with operatives openly discussing their involvement in violence and sabotage. They have been responsible for numerous regime changes and have caused immense harm and loss of life. The CIA has developed techniques, such as psychological operations, to aid in their destructive actions. Welcome to the Fill the Gap Podcast, where we dive into the spaces between the known and the unknown, exploring a vast array of topics from the everyday to the extraordinary. Join us as we embark on a journey of discovery, bridging the gaps in our knowledge and understanding, one episode at a time. Whether you're a curious mind or an avid learner, this is the place to fill the gaps in your mental library. So tune in, get comfortable, and let's uncover the mysteries that lie just beyond our reach. This is Fill the Gap, where curiosity meets insight. This is your host, Mike Washington, and I am in Washington, D.C., talking about the conspiracy theories of the CIA, terrorist conspiracy theories. Here we go! The CIA, from the very beginning, at least as early as 1951, has used the information that it has collected. And it has used the information in order to penetrate and to manipulate the institutions of power in whatever country it is operating in order to influence the course of events in those countries. And essentially, this boils down to propping up those forces which are considered to be the friendly forces, and in penetrating, dividing, weakening, and ultimately destroying those forces which are considered to be the enemy forces. Since its very inception as the Office of Strategic Services, the clandestine operations group known today as the Central Intelligence Agency has engaged in some of the worst atrocities in modern history. In this episode, we're going to take a brief look at some of the crimes of the CIA and consider the possibility that maybe the good guys aren't so good after all. The men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency. Without you, our nation's safety would be more vulnerable and our security fragile and endangered. The work you do each day is essential to the survival and to the spread of human freedom. You remain the eyes and ears of the free world. You are the tripwire over which the totalitarian rule must stumble in their quest for global domination. As with every aspect of American life, the functions of the CIA are hailed as a way to protect freedom and democracy. Its agents are applauded as heroes. On the surface, the notion of gathering information to better understand the capabilities of other nations seems harmless enough. But, as you probably already know, the CIA is not simply the ears of the nation. They're also instigators, propagandists, spies, saboteurs, torturers, and all too often, murderers. This is a huge topic, and one that I can't possibly fit into a short video. So, I'll leave a bunch of links to other resources in the description. We're going to focus on some of the big picture stuff. Let's start with election meddling. According to US politicians, there's nothing more sacred than free and fair elections. We accuse other nations of meddling all the time. Recently, it's been Russia, Iran, and China getting the accusatory finger pointed at them. But as much as we want to project an image of our nation as a shining beacon of truth and freedom, we are the worst offender when it comes to meddling in foreign affairs. And it's not even close. The CIA isn't a fan of subtle manipulation. The intelligence agency wants the world to see the results of whatever election or administration they're disrupting. What they don't want is for people to know they're the ones pulling the strings. According to one study, the CIA had engaged in 81 overt or covert interventions in foreign affairs between 1945 and 2000. And that's just the ones we know about, and not even counting the constant meddling and destabilization of the last 20 years. The CIA's weapon of choice for foreign meddling is the military coup. One of the earlier examples is the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran. Based on what you know about US priorities and the resources of the Middle East, what do you think was the catalyst for this coup? If you said oil, congratulations, you're right. The US beating up other countries for their oil isn't just a meme. Mossad had nationalized the Iranian oil company, which negatively affected US and British economic interests. To make matters worse, from a US perspective, Mossad, while not a communist himself, had earned the support of the Iranian Communist Party. As you'll come to see, one whiff of successful non-capitalist economics, and the CIA is called in to destroy everything. In this particular instance, Winston Churchill and President Eisenhower decided to overthrow the government of Iran. The CIA paid some of Tehran's most violent mobsters to stage protests across the city, and orchestrated trucks and buses full of people to come in and seize the area. Between 200 and 300 people were killed in the conflict, which, of course, the CIA expected would happen. The intelligence agency then propped up a government under the rule of the Shah, who reigned as a monarch heavily dependent on US support to maintain power. Mossad was arrested, convicted of treason by the new US-friendly government, served three years in prison, and spent the remainder of his life under house arrest, all for the crime of trying to lead his country out from under the boot of Western imperialism. The truth about this coup wouldn't come to light until 60 years later, in 2013, when CIA documents on the subject were declassified. These documents proved the CIA's planning and execution of the coup, their use of propaganda, bribery of politicians, security and military officials, and their approval at the highest levels of government. You may be thinking, OK, if they declassified this information, that means they don't do that kind of thing anymore, right? Well, no. Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections? Oh, probably. But it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid the communists from taking over. For example, in Europe, in 748-49, the Greeks and the Italians, we... We don't do that now, though. We don't mess around in other people's elections. Oh... Only for a very good cause. Can you do a Vine video on a former CIA director? Only for a very good cause in the interest of democracy. Laura Ingram clearly gave this guy the chance to lie and say that we don't meddle anymore, but he didn't take it. The CIA director openly bragged about meddling in foreign affairs for, quote, very good reasons. Call me idealistic, but I don't think there's any reason for a country to disrupt the election process of other nations. But here we are. It's out in the open that we do it to this day. Here's another example of a CIA operative bragging about the types of crimes the agency commits. We need to make the Iranians pay a price in Syria. We need to make the Russians pay a price. The other thing I would do... We make them pay the price by killing Russians? Yes. And killing Iranians? Yes. Covertly. So you don't tell the world about it, right? You don't stand up at the Pentagon and say, we did this, right? But you make sure they know it in Moscow and Tehran. Here's the other thing I want to do. Here's the other thing I want to do. I want to go after those things that Assad sees as his personal power base, right? I want to scare Assad. So I want to go after his presidential guard. I want to bomb his offices in the middle of the night. Well, that happened about two years ago, if you remember, when his brother-in-law was... I want to destroy his presidential aircraft on the ground. I want to destroy his presidential helicopters. I want to make him think we're coming after him, right? These people aren't exactly subtle about the sabotage and violence committed by their organization. But let's return to the past for a minute. There are plenty more coups to discuss. Another study found that the U.S. was responsible for no fewer than 61 attempts at regime change during the Cold War alone. All spearheaded by the CIA. Just one year after the overthrow of Mossadegh, the CIA launched another coup to oust Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala. This is the moment the CIA established itself as a weapon to be wielded by Western capital. The agency was approached by the United Fruit Company, a U.S.-based corporation, because they were afraid new anti-exploitation laws in Guatemala would negatively affect their profits. The CIA also suspected Guatemala had ties to the USSR. And these two reasons were sufficient for them to launch a coup, oust the Guatemalan president, and install the first in a long line of right-wing dictators friendly to the U.S. This coup also set the precedent of the CIA lying to the president regarding casualties. So, by 1954, we had a largely unaccountable secret agency undermining democracy and national sovereignty around the world. This trend would continue throughout the decades. In 1963, the CIA planned a coup that culminated in the assassination of the president of South Vietnam, once again in the name of fighting communism. This particular coup resulted in U.S. involvement in a foolish ten-year war, which cost the lives of 58,000 American soldiers and almost a million Vietnamese, many of whom were civilians. The CIA would go on to launch coups in Iraq, Cuba, the Republic of Congo, Laos, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, and countless other countries, each time with little reasoning besides, what you're doing isn't ideal for the U.S. These coups often led to horrible destabilization, including civil war, economic depressions, and hundreds of thousands of deaths. Over the course of their reign of terror, the CIA would develop techniques to aid them in the destruction of foreign nations. One such batch of techniques was compiled in a 90-page handbook titled Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, which was distributed to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras, and detailed how armed propaganda teams could build political support in Nicaragua for the Contra cause through deceit, intimidation, violence, and assassination. This was a trend that would prove very useful to the U.S. By outsourcing their more heinous crimes, including over 50 assassination attempts on world leaders, to local U.S.-friendly groups, the CIA could maintain a level of plausible deniability. Here's former CIA officer John Stockwell discussing his time in the agency and what their goals were. They undertake to run operations in every corner of the globe. They also undertook the license of operating just totally above and beyond U.S. laws. They had a license, if you will, to kill, but also they took that to a license to smuggle drugs, a license to do all kinds of things to other people and other societies in violation of international law, our law, and every principle of nations working together for a healthier and more peaceful world. We manipulated and organized the overthrow of functioning constitutional democracies in other countries. We organized secret armies and directed them to fight in just about every continent in the world. We encouraged ethnic minorities to rise up and fight, people like the Miskito Indians in Nicaragua, the Kurds in the Middle East, the Hmongs in Southeast Asia. We have organized, and we still do, and fund death squads in countries around the world, like the Treasury Police in El Salvador, which are responsible for most of the killing of the 50,000 people just in the 80s, and there were 70,000 before that. And orchestration, CIA, secret teams, and propaganda led us directly into the Korean War. We were attacking China from the islands of Caymoy, Matsu, Thailand, Tibet, a lot of drug trafficking involved in this, by the way, until eventually we convinced ourselves to fight the Chinese in Korea. After the Korean War, a million people were killed. Same thing for the Vietnam War, and we have extensive documentation of how the CIA was involved at every level, or the National Security Complex, because it's a very cooperative thing, into manipulating the nation into the Vietnam War. Let me just put it this way. The best heads that I coordinate with studying this thing, we count at least, minimum figure, who've been killed in this long 40-year war that we waged against the people of the Third World. But funding coups and destabilizing entire regions takes a lot of money. Luckily for the CIA, their scope of work was broad enough to include a particularly lucrative industry, drug smuggling. At least as far back as the Vietnam War, CIA operatives were heavily involved in trafficking drugs into the United States. CIA planes would make routine trips to and from places like Costa Rica and Honduras, working with cartels to secure massive amounts of heroin and cocaine, which they would then shuttle back to the U.S. and sell for a healthy profit. Because of their secretive line of work, these planes could land in places where normal customs regulations don't apply. It's a dream scenario for drug smuggling. The piles of money the CIA makes from this practice have directly funded the undermining of democracy throughout the world, with the added effect of introducing harmful drugs to the American population. Drug running and coups are bad enough, but what really makes the CIA a terrorist organization is their fondness for bizarre, questionable, and sometimes downright evil experiments. Since the end of World War II, the intelligence agency has experimented with everything from chemical weapons to biological weapons to mind control and death rays. The CIA is on a never-ending quest to find new ways to secretly kill or otherwise control their targets. You may have seen the movie The Manchurian Candidate. The film was based on the CIA's experimental mind control program, where a subject would be hypnotized and programmed with an activation word or phrase, something that, when heard, would trigger their CIA training and turn them into a sort of deadly automaton. The CIA wanted to create these sleeper agents and plant them in target countries around the world. It sounds absurd, but the Cold War was a scary time, and the CIA was a scary place. The secretive agency may have left the notion of mind control behind, but what they haven't given up is torture. Torture is something that no human being should be capable of doing to another, but it's part of the standard CIA toolkit, and it has been for years. This really only came to the attention of the American people during the Iraq War, when the horrific images from secret prisons and black sites like Abu Ghraib found their way onto U.S. television screens. Waterboarding, sensory and sleep deprivation, dogs, insects, electrical shock, all of these and even more twisted techniques were used to get supposed criminals to confess, or get war prisoners to give up valuable information. For years, the gruesome details of America's so-called enhanced interrogation program were hidden from the public. Bits of information trickled out slowly over the course of the Iraq War and the years following. Now, nearly two decades after the CIA fabricated the intelligence that led us into war with Iraq, a fuller picture of the horrors of CIA black sites has been assembled. One prisoner, 49-year-old Abu Zubaydah, the first person to be subjected to the torture program approved by President George W. Bush, has provided drawings of what he experienced at a CIA black site in Thailand. Zubaydah, who was captured because the CIA mistakenly thought he was a top Al-Qaeda lieutenant, describes waterboarding, which he endured 83 times, being crammed into a tiny confinement box meant to break his resolve, chained in so-called stress positions for hours, for example, his wrists being chained so high that he had to stand on tiptoes. He also depicts being hooded, chained in the fetal position, and tethered to a cell bar to prevent movement. He describes a process known as walling, in which the prisoner has his head banged into a wall, and when he falls down, he is dragged back up to his feet by a plastic-wrapped towel around his neck. Another drawing shows a larger confinement box, pitch black, with the prisoner chained in a seated position over a bucket which was meant to serve as a toilet. Zubaydah also describes being deprived of sleep for two to three weeks at a time, kept awake by having water thrown on him and being chained in painful positions. This is the legacy of the CIA during the Iraq War and for years after. Cruel, inhumane torture, approved by the very highest authority in the country after the CIA fabricated the reasons for invading Iraq in the first place. Today, the CIA claims they no longer torture human beings. Instead, they're known to train non-Americans to do it for them, to maintain their plausible deniability. The CIA trains, observes, and provides equipment to foreign agents who are less constrained by public outcry. The torture continues, but now the CIA can claim that they're not the ones doing it. The question you're probably thinking is, why? Why would our country allow this organization to exist? It clearly doesn't protect freedom and democracy like Reagan claimed. The answer is simple. The US wants to maintain its number one spot. We're currently the sole world superpower. And in order to maintain that position of power, the country needs to make sure that the rest of the world depends on us. And it needs to make an example of alternative economic structures that would undermine the notion of American capitalist supremacy. But don't just take it from me. Here's former CIA operative and whistleblower Philip Agee talking about the US relationship with Cuba and why we were so adamant in destroying them. So, it's not hopeless, but you see how the United States is going around in these areas of economics and of trade and of commerce and finance to try to make the Cuban people suffer as much as they can. And this is affecting, in a drastic way, very young children and infants, and also the older, in other words, the most vulnerable. And it is an eternal shame on the United States, in my opinion, that we would do such a thing to an entire country, just because we don't like the system, just because they won't come under our protection, basically. It's a kind of a mafia attitude, and it has been that way since Eisenhower. Well, that's capitalism. Well, it's also the United States, and our tradition of being very nervous when we don't control something. And when a country like Cuba slips out from under our control, after we had ruled it practically as a neo-colony or a protectorate for 59 years or so, then it makes people nervous, because they know that if the Cubans are successful in their example of being able to provide, as a poor country, the best medical care in the third world to the whole population, because it's an inclusionary system, it's not like we have here, where you have this huge bulk of the population and you don't marginalize them, but there, if everybody can have adequate medical care, if the schooling is adequate for all, and remember, Cuba has more doctors and more teachers per capita than any country in the world, and they have succeeded in these areas, and it's all state-supported, which means people don't have to put money out for the medical care, or they, of course, pay the cost indirectly as a whole society, but they don't have to pay the bill in the hospital and so forth. And so that cannot be allowed to stand. It's a very bad example for the United States. So there's a very large mass of people out there who can look at Cuba and say, well, if they can do it, and on a per capita income of $2,000, $2,500 a year, where ours is $22,500 a year, what's wrong with our system? I mean, maybe we ought to consider an alternative. That's why Nicaragua, San Andres and Nicaragua had to be destroyed. Exactly. They were a bad example, and that's why Grenada had to be destroyed, because any movement that comes to power with the idea of providing for all the people and of escaping the control of the United States and its economy, let's say the corporations and so forth, then that is bad news here in the United States in the upper circles of power. So there you go. It really is that simple. The U.S. wants to maintain its global supremacy, and that requires destroying any competing economic system to prevent people from questioning capitalism, and it requires keeping the rest of the world under the boot of the United States. It's criminal and morally reprehensible, but who's going to stand up to the most powerful bully in the world? For those of you thinking that this doesn't matter because you live in the U.S., I've got bad news for you. In 1975, a U.S. intelligence committee found that the CIA owned more than 200 wire services, newspapers, magazines and book publishers, and subsidized many more. A separate New York Times investigation revealed an additional 50 media operations run by the CIA, both within the U.S. and abroad, and another 12 publishing houses which had produced over 1,200 books secretly commissioned by the CIA. Okay, what does this mean? It means that the CIA has been running a secret propaganda campaign on American citizens for almost half a century. More recently, the agency has awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Amazon and Google to complete assignments issued by the CIA. The Central Intelligence Agency has its tendrils in every single aspect of modern life. Books, magazines, movies, television, social media and big tech. Just as the CIA works hard to undermine freedom and democracy around the world, it also works hard to keep Americans convinced that they live in the greatest country on Earth and that there is no alternative to American supremacy. The CIA is a terrorist organization, the biggest one in the world, and it needs to be abolished and its records made public. The United States has no right to impose its will on the rest of the world, and it certainly hasn't. From Music App Podcast, your host, Mike Washington, coming to you live from Washington, D.C.