Julian Assange
Monday June 15, 2008
How to covertly train paramilitaries, censor the press, ban unions, employ terrorists, conduct warrantless searches, suspend habeas corpus, conceal breaches of the Geneva Convention and make the population love it
Wikileaks has released a sensitive 219 page US military counterinsurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “what we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, history making.
The leaked manual, which has been verified with military sources, is the official US Special Forces doctrine for Foreign Internal Defense or FID.
FID operations are designed to prop up a “friendly” government facing a popular revolution or guerilla insurgency. FID interventions are often covert or quasi-covert due to the unpopular nature of the governments being supported (”In formulating a realistic policy for the use of advisors, the commander must carefully gauge the psychological climate of the HN [Host Nation] and the United States.”)
The manual directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and (under varying circumstances) the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates employing terrorists or prosecuting individuals for terrorism who are not terrorists, running false flag operations and concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it repeatedly advocates the use of subterfuge and “psychological operations” (propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource control” measures more palatable.
The content has been particularly informed by the long United States involvement in El Salvador.
In 2005 a number of credible media reports suggested the Pentagon was intensely debating “the Salvador option” for Iraq.[1]. According to the New York Times Magazine:
The template for Iraq today is not Vietnam, with which it has often been compared, but El Salvador, where a right-wing government backed by the United States fought a leftist insurgency in a 12-year war beginning in 1980. The cost was high — more than 70,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, in a country with a population of just six million. Most of the killing and torturing was done by the army and the right-wing death squads affiliated with it. According to an Amnesty International report in 2001, violations committed by the army and associated groups included ‘‘extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings, ‘disappearances’ and torture. . . . Whole villages were targeted by the armed forces and their inhabitants massacred.’’ As part of President Reagan’s policy of supporting anti-Communist forces, hundreds of millions of dollars in United States aid was funneled to the Salvadoran Army, and a team of 55 Special Forces advisers, led for several years by Jim Steele, trained front-line battalions that were accused of significant human rights abuses.
…
Selected extracts follow. Note that the manual is 219 pages long and contains substantial material throughout. These extracts should merely be considered representative. Emphasis has been added for further selectivity. The full manual can be found at US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM 31-20-3.
So where's the tinfoil hat?
Moving on....
On top of the history books where the US is documented to have engineered coups and propped up dictators who terrorised their populations so that western corporations can continue raping their natural resources such as in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile and even Iran.
Oh...there's some stuff in another tinfoil hat..
Lemme see..seems the NSA admits that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie, that US escalation in Vietnam, leading to 58,000 American and 2 million Vietnamese deaths was based on a lie.
And....Operation Northwoods planned to carry out terrorist attacks in the US and blame it on the Cubans to justify an invasion.
Those tinfoil hats..such great places to store information.
Dude, we all know these things happen. They happen for a reason.
FID is not a plaything, it is a tool to ensure national interest stays paramount. In those levels of politics, you do what you must to ensure it..
But apparantly, still the stuff of tinfoil hat wearing crackpots.
Nah, I doubt they're crackpots.
Originally posted by LazerLordz:So where's the tinfoil hat?
Moving on....
So these are the crackpots?
Please realise I'm not offended. Is there a word that describes exasperation beyond normal limits before hitting apathy?
Originally posted by LazerLordz:Dude, we all know these things happen. ....[Emphasis added]
Really?