THE WAR RACKET

"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of it.
I helped make Honduras 'right' for American fruit companies in 1903. I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. 1 brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."

General Smedley Butler, 1933

WAR

"There is nothing puzzling about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight war kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight it blasts public hope."

Walter Karp

"History is the history of war, of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young people off to fight."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die."

General Smedley Butler, 1934 - about World War One

"How does continuous war act to keep the Lows "stupefied by poverty" and thereby assure the maintenance of the social structure? The goal of the wars is to enable the economy to be kept going for the benefit of the High, its military, and its bureaucracy and control personnel (the Thought Police, etc.), but at the same time to assure that any excess production capacity is prevented from producing consumer goods for the lower classes. That excess capacity is instead directed to producing excess military goods which will ' ultimately rust away or be destroyed in warfare; that is, the excess capacity is deliberately wasted in order to turn it away from the production of goods which would result in added leisure or well-being for the lower classes. Those classes are instead continually forced into group activities expressing hatred toward the current enemy (any enemy) and dependency upon and love toward their benevolent rulers for protecting them from that enemy. They are thereby led to accept the consumer shortages, the poverty, and the other privations to which they are subjected. Their economic status is kept at the subsistence level, forcing their priorities to be focused on simply acquiring basic food, clothing, and shelter. They are thus denied either the time or the inclination to question the fairness or permanence of their societal condition, or to otherwise evolve into a threat to the established hierarchy."

George Orwell in his book "1984"

"Do you want to know the cause of war? It is capitalism, greed, the dirty hunger for dollars. Take away the capitalist, and you will sweep war from the earth."

Henry Ford - founder of Ford Motors

"Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

Hermann Goering - Nazi leader

"War is terrorism."

Howard Zinn

"The engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives, which can be summarized as follows: making the world safe for American corporations; enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors at home who have contributed generously to members of congress; preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model; extending political and economic hegemony over as wide an area as possible, as befits a "great power."

William Blum, 1999

"Without war, no government has ever been able to obtain acquiescence in its 'legitimacy,' or right to rule its society... Obviously, if the war system were to be discarded, new political machinery would be needed at once to serve this vital subfunction. Until it is developed, the continuance of the war system must be assured, if for no other reason, among others, than to preserve whatever quality and degree of poverty a society requires as an incentive, as well as to maintain the stability of its internal organization of power."

Report from Iron Mountain, 1967

"The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living... the essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. The two aims ... are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought."

George Orwell in his book "1984"

"Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.... No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

James Madison, 1795

"We like war, we are warlike people. We like war because we are good at it. You know why we are good at it because we get a lot of practice. This country is only 200 years old and already we have had 10 major wars. We average a major war every 20 years in this country, so we are good at it. And that is a good thing we are, we are not very good in anything else anymore. We can't build a decent car, can't make a TV set or VCR worth a fuck. We've got no steel industry left, can't educate our young people, can't get health care for our old people, but we can bomb the shit out of your country alright, especially if your country is full of brown people. That's our hobby. That's our new job in the world, bombing brown people! Iraq, Panama, Grenada, Libya. If you've got some brown people in your country, tell them to watch the fuck out or we will god damn bomb them!"

George Carlin

"In foreign policy administrations from Truman to Bush were all habitually interventionist, brutal, fanatically anti-communist, concerned mainly with making the world safe for US multinational corporations, and unconcerned about human rights."

William Blum in his book "Freeing the World to Death"

"War is inextricably linked to the impoverishment of people at home and around the world. Militarization and the economic crisis are intimately related. The provision of essential goods and services to meet basic human needs has been replaced by a profit-driven "killing machine" in support of America's "Global War on Terror". The poor are made to fight the poor. Yet war enriches the upper class, which controls industry, the military, oil and banking. In a war economy, death is good for business, poverty is good for society, and power is good for politics. Western nations, particularly the United States, spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to murder innocent people in far-away impoverished nations."

Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed.
... War accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society."

George Orwell in his book "1984"

"The United States of America has been engaged in some kind of war during 222 out of the nation's total 239 years of existence. Put another way, in the entire span of US history, this country has only experienced 17 years without conflict, meaning that 93% of the time, America is involved in at least one war."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

"Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it's left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves."

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, 2009

"Economic surrogates for war must meet two principal criteria. They must be "wasteful," in the common sense of the word, and they must operate outside the normal supply-demand system. A corollary that should be obvious is that the magnitude of the waste must be sufficient to meet the needs of a particular society. An economy as advanced and complex as our own requires the planned average annual destruction of not less than 10 percent of gross national product."

Report from Iron Mountain, 1967

"The United States operates almost 800 military bases in 70 different countries."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

"Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
1. We must take the profit out of war.
2. We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
3. We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes."

Major General Smedley Butler

"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum in his book "Killing Hope"

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose--especially their lives."

Eugene Debs , Canton, Ohio, June 16, 1918

"The primary aim of modern warfare is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living."

Winston Smith in George Orwell's book "1984"

""Report from Iron Mountain" says that the prime political function of warfare is to preserve poverty in the society as an aid to maintaining the elite class in control."

Report from Iron Mountain, 1967 reviewed by Alan Jones in his book "How The World Really Works"

"We have had disarmament conferences and limitations of arms conferences. They don't mean a thing. We send our professional soldiers and our sailors and our politicians and our diplomats to these conferences. And what happens? The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. Both mean men without jobs. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms. And at all these conferences, lurking in the background but allpowerful, just the same, are the sinister agents of those who profit by war. They see to it that these conferences do not disarm or seriously limit armaments. The chief aim of any power at any of these conferences has not been to achieve disarmament to prevent war but rather to get more armament for itself and less for any potential foe."

Major General Smedley Butler

"The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government; it supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority. It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions, and it has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state."

Report from Iron Mountain, 1967 reviewed by Alan Jones in his book "How The World Really Works"

"The preparation for war is useful to the holders of centralized political power. When things go badly at home, when popular discontent becomes inconveniently articulate, it is always possible, in a world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit, to shift the people's attention away from domestic to foreign and military affairs. A flood of xenophobic or imperialistic propaganda is released by the government-controlled instruments of persuasion, a "strong policy" is adopted toward some foreign power, an appeal for "national unity" (in other words, unquestioning obedience to the ruling oligarchy) is launched, and at once it becomes unpatriotic for anybody to voice even the most justifiable complaints against mismanagement or oppression. It is difficult to see how any highly centralized government could afford to dispense with militarism and the threat of foreign war."

Aldous Huxley in his book " Science, Liberty and Peace", 1946

"Since World War Two the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders, helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements, has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet, in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum, in a speech at the University of Vermont, November 2, 2007

"Since the anticommunism hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan consensus has existed on foreign policy. Meaningful political discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues. So many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public scrutiny, that almost all of what passes as official information about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for its propaganda effect."

Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks in their book "The Democratic Facade"

"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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"In the last decades of the twentieth century, self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support or resources to the globe's trouble spots. If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day."

former Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who commanaded the UN peacekeping force in Rwanda in 1993-1994

"The U.S. has over 200 incidents in which it have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Mass graves and cemeteries everywhere are filled with people which have been killed instead of helped, and the US will never again be regarded as benevolent: the world has seen enough and knows the US is a bully."

Seymour Hersh, 2005

"Military intervention to maintain the global status quo will become a constant feature of international relations, whether this is justified in terms of fighting drugs, fighting terrorism, containing "rogue states," opposing "Islamic fundamentalism," or containing China."

Walden Bello, 2001

"The Third World War is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. It began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. 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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Doing the right thing is not a principle of American foreign policy, not an ideal or a goal of policy in and of itself. If it happens that doing the right thing coincides with, or is irrelevant to, Washington's overriding international ambitions, American officials have no problem walking the high moral ground. But this is rarely the case. ... the engine of American foreign policy has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, nor even simple decency, but rather by the necessity to serve other masters."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

ENEMIES
RUSSIA, CHINA, NORTH KOREA, IRAN, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, LIBYA, SYRIA, CUBA, VENEZUELA, AL-QUEDA, ISIS, ISLAMIC TERRORISTS, SOCIALISM, COMMUNISM, ET AL

"Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"The need for major states as enemies stems partly from the fact that only the perceived presence of enemy states can justify military spending at the level which the industries concerned have come to demand."

David Edwards - Burning All Illusions

"There was no comer of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack If the interests were not Roman, they were those of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, then allies would be invented When it was utterly impossible to contrive such an interest-why, then it was the national honor that had been insulted. The fight was a/ways invested with an aura of legality. Rome was always being attacked by evil-minded neighbors, always fighting for a breathing space. The whole world was pervaded by a host of enemies, and it was manifestly Rome's duty to guard against their indubitably aggressive designs."

Joseph Schumpeter, Austrian economist, 1979 essay "The Sociology of Imperialisms"

"However unlikely some of the possible alternate enemies may seem, we must emphasize that one must be found, of credible quality and magnitude, if a transition to peace is ever to come about without social disintegration.... It is more probable, in our judgment, that such a threat will have to be invented, rather than developed from unknown conditions."

Report from Iron Mountain, 1967

"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, 'Sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second.' I said, 'Well, you're too busy.' He said, 'No, no.' He says, 'We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.' This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, 'We're going to war with Iraq? Why?' He said, 'I don't know.' He said, 'I guess they don't know what else to do.' So I said, 'Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?' He said, 'No, no.' He says, 'There's nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.' He said, 'I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.' And he said, 'I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.' So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, 'Are we still going to war with Iraq?' And he said, 'Oh, it's worse than that.' He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, 'I just got this down from upstairs', meaning the Secretary of Defense's office, 'today.' And he said, 'This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran'."

Wesley Clark, General of the United States Army, March 2007

"I don't believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ready to go when an incident set things off. Ever since Gorbachev naively ended the Cold War, the hugely over-armed United States has been actively surrounding Russia with weapons systems, aggressive military exercises, NATO expansion. At the same time, in recent years the demonization of Vladimir Putin has reached war propaganda levels. Russians have every reason to believe that the United States is preparing for war against them, and are certain to take defensive measures. This mixture of excessive military preparations and propaganda against an "evil enemy" make it very easy for some trivial incident to blow it all up."

Diana Johnstone

"The U.S. is frantically surrounding China with military weapons, advanced aircraft, naval fleets and a multitude of military bases from Japan, South Korea and the Philippines through several nearby smaller Pacific islands to its new and enlarged base in Australia."

Jack A. Smith

"War with Russia will be nuclear. Washington has prepared for it. Washington has abandoned the ABM treaty, created what it thinks is an ABM shield, and changed its war doctrine to permit US nuclear first strike. All of this is obviously directed at Russia, and the Russian government knows it.

Paul Craig Roberts, 2014

"The so-called war on terror has been a monumental fraud from the very start. The U.S. military-industrial complex needs terrorists in order to necessitate neo-colonial expansion abroad and domestic oppression at home, which is why the U.S. government does its best to create and sustain them in virtually every corner of the Middle East and North Africa."

Paul Joseph Watson, 2014

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."

General Douglas MacArthur, 1957, as quoted in "American Caesar" by William Manchester, 1978

"Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."

George Kennan, State Department Cold War strategist

"At the end of World War II, we were militarily dominant, economically dominant, and we enjoyed a remarkable international credibility. With a modicum of restraint and self-confidence we could have laid the foundations of lasting world peace. Instead, we exaggerated the challenge of a Soviet Union which had just lost 70,000 villages, 1,710 towns, 4.7 million houses, and 20 million people in the war."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Now that the cold war is becoming a memory, America's foreign policy establishment has begun searching for new enemies. Possible new villains include "instability" in Europe, the "vanishing" ozone layer, nuclear proliferation, and narco-terrorism. Topping the list of potential new global bogeymen, however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat to American economic security emanating from East Asia, and the so-called Green Peril (green is the color of Islam)."

Leon T. Hadar, Cato Institute, in the 1990s

"Among Latin American elites, a peasant asking for a higher wage or a priest helping organize a peasant cooperative is a communist. And someone going so far as to suggest land reform or a more equitable tax system is a communist fanatic. There is no word or act suggesting the desirability of elite generosity toward the poor, or the need for education, organization or material advance for the majority, that has not been branded communistic in Latin America in recent decades. ... Since communism is the enemy and peasants trying to improve themselves, priests with the slightest humanistic proclivity, and naturally anyone seriously challenging the status quo, are communists, they are also, by definition, enemies."

Edward S. Herman

"The ruling elites know who their enemies are, and their enemies are the people, the people at home and the people abroad. Their enemies are anybody who wants more social justice, anybody who wants to use the surplus value of society for social needs rather than for individual class greed, that's their enemy."

Michael Parenti

"America cherishes her enemies. Without enemies, she is a nation without purpose and direction. The various components of the National Security State need enemies to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to protect their jobs, to give themselves a mission in the aftermath of the Soviet Union."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

"It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of "fair play" must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."

Doolittle Report - White House commission to study the ClA's covert activities , 1954

"The collapse of the Soviet Union ended China's main usefulness to the United States as an ally, while enhancing its new status as a possible long-term rival to American hegemony. In the wake of the Cold War, with the Pentagon intent on maintaining near Cold War levels of military spending, enemies on the global horizon were much needed.
With the Soviet army increasingly seen as a disintegrating "paper tiger," China's economic emergence as a major power in the Pacific offered one possible fit with the Pentagon's need for a major enemy."

Chalmers Johnson in his book "Blowback"

"There's really no serious proposal about what to do about the severe problems of health, education, homelessness, joblessness, crime, soaring criminal populations, jails, deterioration in the inner cities - the whole raft of problems. In such circumstances you've got to divert the bewildered herd, because if they start noticing this they may not like it, since they're the ones suffering from it. You have to whip them up into fear of enemies."

Noam Chomsky in his book "Media Control"

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war. Our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

neoconservative Richard Perle

"The U.S. military acts in the interests of the corporate and financial elite, as those countries that do not submit to American economic hegemony are deemed enemies, and the military is ultimately sent in to implement "regime change." "

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"In order to rally people, governments need enemies. If they do not have a real enemy, they will invent one in order to mobilize us."

Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Buddhist monk

"The need for major states as enemies stems partly from the fact that only the perceived presence of enemy states can justify military spending at the level which the industries concerned have come to demand."

Anatol Lieven in his book "America Right or Wrong"

"From the era of US wars to disarm and eliminate "merciless Indian savages" to the era of capitalist wars to contain and then vanquish red communism, to the current era of global police and military operations mounted in the name of opposing the largely manufactured demon of al-Qaeda, the American empire of material aggrandizement has always required an external enemy to give military support to the expansionary enterprises of its biggest engines of corporate profit. It has required pretexts to present wars of aggression as self-defence."

Anthony J. Hall in his book "Earth into Property: Colonization, Decolonization, and Capitalism"

"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaeda was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat. It was but natural for Osama bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al-Qaeda Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages... The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al-Qaeda. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."

Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence - in an araticle in "World Affairs", Apr-Jun 2004

"Al Qaeda is nothing more than a broad euphemistic umbrella classification used to group any Middle Eastern fighter under the sun as an enemy. The most diabolical aspect of this public relations stunt is that it enables Washington to label any group it feels necessary to attack to appear to be related to an improvable organized enemy while at the same time actually increasing its approval ratings by exploiting the basic primal fears of the American public."

Sarvat N. Hanif

"Al Qaeda has been supported and financed from its inception in the early 1980s by the CIA."

Michel Chossudovsky

"The US has been working covertly with Saudi Arabia and British military intelligence for more than three decades to foster and fuel al-Qaeda extremists, beginning in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet Union from the late 1970s until 1990.
Since then, al-Qaeda has served as a protean ideological cover for imperialist predation in the Middle East and beyond. It has undergone many reinventions with mercurial name changes along the way. But the bottom line is that it is a Western/Saudi creation, which alternates between an enemy of convenience and a ruthless proxy for waging regime change."

Finian Cunningham

"As an organization and threat, al-Qaida barely exists. But as a name, al-Qaida and "terrorism" have become the west's handy universal term for armed groups fighting western influence, corruption or repression in Asia and Africa. Al-Qaida is nowhere - but everywhere.
If you're a rebel group seeking publicity, the fastest way is by pledging allegiance to the shadowy, nowhere al-Qaida.
... Back in the Cold War, almost all groups opposing western domination were called communists. Today, al-Qaida has replaced communism as a hot button name."

Eric Margolis

"ISIS, like its predecessor al-Qaeda, is a joint American-Saudi-Israeli project to destabilize and fracture the Middle East and North Africa by thrusting criminal malcontents against Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Iran and other countries not presently under Western/ Israeli control."

Brandon Martinez, 2015

"The actions of Al-Qaeda have only served to promote the interests of the U.S. and Israel, which are clearly interested in "reshaping" the Middle East in such a way that they can more easily rape and plunder the region at will... In fact the CIA is using the terrorist actions of its proxy Al-Qaeda in order to give the U.S. an excuse to extend their power into and invade the Arab countries, first countries with rich plunder (oil) like Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and second any country which is a "threat" to Israel, or more exactly which Israel dislikes for whatever reason. The third objective for which the CIA is using its proxy Al-Qaeda is to engender fear and hate of Islam and Muslims worldwide. This corresponds to an old and tried ploy of colonizers: to slander and denigrate the target population so that it is acceptable and even called for to commit genocide against them."

John Kaminski

"Humans only truly unite when faced with a powerful external enemy. At this time a new enemy must be found, one either real or invented for the purpose."

Club of Rome, 1991

"Osama bin Laden ran MAK (Maktab al-Khidamat), an organization created by Pakistan's ISI at the behest of the CIA. It funneled money, weapons, and internationally recruited fighters into the war created in part by Jimmy Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Osama was closely tied to the Afghan warlord and ISI stooge Gulbuddin Hekmatyar who ran drugs for the CIA. In the 1980s, emissaries from the United States met with Osama. The CIA paid Osama to train the militant group Abu Sayyaf and others at his CIA-built camps in Afghanistan."

Kurt Nimmo

"During the Cold War, Washington officials of course couldn't say that they were intervening to block social change, so they called it fighting communism, fighting a communist conspiracy, and of course fighting for freedom and democracy. Just like now the White House can't say that it invaded Iraq to expand the empire, or for the oil, or for the corporations, or for Israel, so it says it's fighting terrorism. The word "communist" was used exceptionally loosely during the Cold War, just as the word "terrorist" is used these days; or "al-Qaeda"-almost every individual or group that Washington wants to stigmatize is charged with being a member of al-Qaeda, as if there's a precise and meaningful distinction between people retaliating against American imperialism while being a member of al-Qaeda and people retaliating against American imperialism while not being a member of al-Qaeda; as if al-Qaeda gives out membership cards to fit into your wallet, as if there are chapters of al-Qaeda that put out a weekly newsletter, and hold a potluck on the first Monday of each month. U.S. policies keep creating new anti-American terrorists, whom Washington calls al-Qaeda, which justifies continuing the same policies to fight the new al-Qaeda terrorists."

William Blum

"Osama bin Laden and "Al Qaeda" cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation.
The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet's natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance."

General Leonid Ivashov, senior Russian military officer,
in a speech delivered in an international conference in Brussels, 2006

"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."

former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to the House of Commons

"Anyone who doesn't pretend Al Qaeda exists is ostracized. Neither is there now nor has there ever been such an organization. The Department of Justice invented it and the CIA, Mossad and other organizations are responsible for the terrorist acts falsely attributed to it.
... Osama bin Laden was never a terrorist, died in 2001, denied any complicity in 9/11 and was a CIA agent, both loved and respected by his American co-workers with whom I have spoken extensively. He never committed a single act, had no terror network and was the chosen trustee of all American Stinger missiles used against the Soviet Union. Technically, he is an American hero."

Gordon Duff, 2012

"The "war on terror" is a hoax that fronts for American control of oil pipelines, the profits of the military-security complex, the assault on civil liberty by fomenters of a police state, and Israel's territorial expansion.
There were no al Qaeda in Iraq until the Americans brought them there by invading and overthrowing Saddam Hussein, who kept al Qaeda out of Iraq. The Taliban is not a terrorist organization, but a movement attempting to unify Afghanistan under Muslim law. The only Americans threatened by the Taliban are the Americans Bush sent to Afghanistan to kill Taliban and to impose a puppet state on the Afghan people."

Paul Craig Roberts

"During the 1980s and early '90s, the CIA worked in partnership with BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] in what was, at the time, the agency's largest covert operation ever, pumping an estimated $10 billion into funding the Afghan Mujahideen. Through this operation, Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network was formed. Bin Laden had accounts in BCCI and ran CIA/BCCI-funded camps."

David Degraw

"The Elder Bush [George H. W. Bush] has been a paid consultant to the Bin Laden Group, helping them with his CIA links. Bush helped create Osama bin Laden as an American CIA bought and paid for alleged "terrorist", originally dubbed a "freedom fighter" to wear out the Soviets in their prolonged war, 1979-1989, in Afghanistan. The monopoly press falsely states that Osama is on the outs with his family, yet his family reportedly funnels tens of millions of dollars to Osama through banks such as Algemene Bank Nederland, now called ABN-AMRO, in part through their American flagship, Chicago-based La Salle National Bank."

Sherman H. Skolnick, 2001

"The US intelligence community used the term "al-Qaeda" for the first time only after the 1998 embassy bombings. Al-Qaeda was used as a 'convenient label for a group that had no formal name'. Prior to the 1998 bombings, US officials were concerned about Osama bin Laden and the financial backing he appeared to provide to Islamic terror groups - but they rarely, if ever, mentioned anything called 'al-Qaeda."

Adam Dolnik

THE WAR PEDDLERS
PRO-WAR CORPORATE MEDIA

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."

William Casey, CIA Director, February 1981

"If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars."

Cynthia McKinney, 2007

"Selling fear to the American people has become a mainstay of the press and of both political parties in this country. Taking a "tough on crime" stance, particularly in a climate of perpetual fear created by the "war on drugs" and the "war on terrorism," is always a politically safe posture... By focusing on crime, attention is effectively directed away from more divisive issues on which a politician might have to take a stand that would cost them votes. Meanwhile, a fearful populace continues to surrender their civil rights and constitutional protections at an alarming rate, so that their government may protect them from the rampant criminality of the masses."

David McGowan in his book "Derailing Democracy"

"Mainstream reporters are always pro-war, acting as cheerleaders for the military-industrial complex and propagandists for the government."

Washington's Blog, 2015

"We have a corporate media cartel that overlaps with the war industry. It has no interest in democracy."

David Swanson , 2010

"Corporations, which have hijacked the state, are delighted with the demise of journalism. And the mass communications systems they control pump out endless streams of gossip, trivia and filth in lieu of news.
... Money flows to advertising rather than to art or journalism because manipulation is more highly valued than truth or beauty.
... The faux objectivity and neutrality of the traditional news industry hastened the cultural irrelevance of traditional news gathering. The narrowing of debates within the press to the minor differences among the power elite had a debilitating effect on news.
... The lie told by newspapers and traditional news is the lie of omission, which is not as bad as the outright lies told on Fox News, but in the end it is still a lie. Our power elite are bankrupt, and the press, tethered to the elite, is as bankrupt as those it covers.
... Once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality. All totalitarian societies impart their propaganda through manipulated images and spectacles. And the death of traditional news is one more stage in the terminal illness that is ravaging American democracy.

Chris Hedges, 2010

"Concentrated corporate media have acted as a government megaphone, largely blocking out criticism of the official 9/11 account and the lies that led our troops into the disastrous war in Iraq."

9/11 and American Empire : Intellectuals Speak Out
edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott

"In 2005, newspaper circulation declined over the previous year by 2.6 percent, with the largest declines posted in the major newspapers. Still worse, in 2007, newspaper advertising revenue fell by 9.4 percent.
... In 1980, the combined audience for the NBC, CBS and ABC newscasts was 53 million. Just last month, that audience tallied at 21.5 million: about seven percent of the US population. And the median age of that audience is 60.2, which means that the networks are failing to reach the essential younger age cohorts.
... The newspaper and broadcast industries cite a number of alleged reasons for these figures: the internet, competition from cable news programs, and declining literacy and political interest among the public.
Missing from this list is "the crud factor"; namely, that the quality and credibility of reporting has deteriorated so spectacularly that the public, fed-up with the insults and lies, has turned to other sources of news and information."

Ernest Partridge, 2008

"A military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media."

Norman Solomon, 2009

"Big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America. The media elite are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision-makers regarding media resources."

9/11 and American Empire : Intellectuals Speak Out
edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott

"The real problem with professional journalism becomes evident when political elites do not debate an issue and march in virtual lockstep. In such a case professional journalism is, at best, ineffectual, and, at worst, propagandistic. This has often been the case in U.S. foreign policy, where both parties are beholden to an enormous global military complex, and accept the right of the United States, and the United States alone, to invade countries when it suits U.S. interests. In matters of war and foreign policy, journalists who question the basic assumptions and policy objectives and who attempt to raise issues no one in either party wishes to debate are considered 'ideological' and 'unprofessional. This has a powerful disciplinary effect upon journalists."

Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, 2010

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

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"The corporate media is funded by the corporations and wealthy Americans who don't want to pay higher taxes or even pay any taxes and who are largely profiting off the continuing wars."

Coleen Rowley, retired FBI Agent

"There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton, preeminent New York journalist, at a press banquet,1880

"A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself."

Joseph Pulitzer

"The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. all are stenographers for the deep state."

Edward Curtin

"The main media bias is in favor of the thieves who stole our country and economy, and own the mainstream media companies. The omnipresent mainstream media is the greatest weapon of oppression humanity has ever known."

David DeGraw

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost 40 years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

David Rockefeller - Council on Foreign Relations, June 1991

"To keep information from the public is the function of the corporate media."

Gore Vidal

"One of the best kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of giant conglomerates, all belonging to the secret Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, NATO, the Club of Rome, and the Trilateral Commission, control the world's flow of information. They determine what we see on television, hear on the radio and read in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet."

Daniel Estulin in his book "The Bilderberg Group"

"In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Operation Mockingbird was a secret CIA effort to influence and control the American media, and thus to influence and control the information received by the American people.
... Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination, a covert operations unit created under the National Security Council, recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to head the project within the media industry. By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.
... Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the CIA were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier_Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps_Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune.
... Contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America's leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.
... In 1975, the idea that the corporate media would lie and that the CIA would push fake stories for propaganda purposes was shocking but, in 2017, not so much.
Indeed, many things were shocking in 1975 that scarcely appear on the radar screen today. This is how far Americans have come down a path of acceptance of the loss of rights or even the appearance of honesty. This says nothing of the massive amount of control the CIA and other related interests have over the entertainment industry."

Brandon Turbeville, 2017

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed."

Mark Twain

"Most newspapers are part of huge conglomerates, and the policy that comes down is that you don't rock any boats. You can't make the government upset because the value of the company is the broadcast licenses, and the government will not renew them, and we can't make our corporate owners mad because they will fire us, and we can't make the advertisers mad or they will pull their advertising. So the media can't say anything that will upset the power structure. And that's what had happened to the press."

Paul Craig Roberts

"My motto is very simple: Give war a chance."

New York Times columnist Thomas Frieman to Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America"

"What the press do is they tell you lies; lies they already know you want to hear. Just as politicians look to polls to determine their policies, letting poorly-informed people lead them on important issues, the press can figure out what its readers or viewers believe, and make a hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling them that they're smart."

Allan Uthman, 2007

"News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast own 90% of the TV stations, radio stations, movies, magazines and newspapers that Americans rely on for news and entertainment."

Michael Snyder, 2017

"The major news media that serve at the pleasure of a commercial oligarchy that pays them, and pays them handsomely, for their pretense of speaking truth to power... The prominent figures in our contemporary Washington press corps regard themselves as government functionaries, enabling and codependent."

Lewis H. Lapham

"The success of print and TV pundits is based on allying with a prominent point of view or interest group and serving it."

Paul Craig Roberts

"Images sent over thousands of miles, well-lit anchors who seem alert to everything of importance taking place in our world, field reporters in far-flung places who pop up and respond instantly to the anchors and deliver close-up accounts of vital events.
And the same important faces of government leaders who, day after day, are struggling to improve our destiny against great odds, against intransigent enemies of progress.
All this is delivered to us in the space of a few minutes, each night, like clockwork.
The television news presents that little show of magic which the people sorely need. The need never dies. It's eternal.
The television anchors can be obvious oafs, hucksters, cheap con artists.
They can twist the truth, burn it, hide it, step on it, reverse it; it doesn't matter."

Jon Rappoport

"For the first time in human history, there is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it.
The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news."

Nick Davies, British investigative journalist

"The mainstream media is a conglomerate of collective corporate thought, designed to make you ignorant and unaware of the realities of the world, of the important issues, and to hide in the shadows the sacredly guarded truths of power. Our mainstream media ­ the large newspapers, radio and TV news stations ­ are dominated by billion dollar corporations, whose boards of directors reflect the 'who's who' of the corporate, political, and financial elite, with former government officials, industrialists, and bankers controlling the dispersal of information and the perspectives we are given."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"By far the most valuable associations, according to CIA officials have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc. Over the years, the [CBS] network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers. A high-level CIA official says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.
... Joseph Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services--from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries."

Carl Bernstein, Rolling Stone, 1977

"We hear about the occasions when there are differences between the mainstream media and the government. What we don't hear about are the 95 percent of occasions where the mainstream media faithfully propagate disinformation stories which are often planted by the CIA, sometimes planted abroad in newspapers that they may own or that are friendly to them."

Michael Parenti, 1988

"I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia - this is a point of no return and I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe."

Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, journalist and German political scientist, 2014
[in his book and on public television stated that while working as a journalist he was forced to print the work of intelligence agents under his own name]

"The powers behind this New World Order system are those of the global banks and financial institutions, the military-industrial complex, the oil and energy giants, the biotech and pharmaceutical conglomerates and the powerful media and communications giants, which fabricate the news and overtly influence the course of world events by blatantly distorting the facts."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"Mainstream journalists in the United States often function more like a fourth branch of government than a feisty fourth estate. If anything, the patterns of media bias that characterize sycophantic reporting in "peacetime" are amplified during a war or a national security crisis.
Since the tragic events of September 11, the separation between press and state has dwindled nearly to the vanishing point."

Martin A. Lee in his book "September 11 and the US War"

"Can anyone name a single daily newspaper in the United States that is unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? Can anyone name a single television network in the United States that is unequivocally opposed to US foreign policy? Is there a single daily newspaper or TV network in the entire United States that has earned the label "opposition media"?"

William Blum, 2007

"The factual arguments clearly establish the possibility of controlled demolition of the WTC buildings on September 11, 2001, yet, there is almost zero coverage in the corporate media in the US. This is top down corporate censorship pure and simple. Even if other scientists can be found to disagree with the study, the policy of ignoring the topic inside the corporate media is relatively absolute... Perhaps the mainstream science journalists left their critical thinking skills at home and gave the scientific method the day off. Or maybe the real conspiracy exists within the boardrooms of the corporate mainstream media."

Peter Phillips, 2009

"The main shortcoming of the establishment media lies in errors of omission, much more than errors of commission. It's not that they tell bald lies so much as it is that they leave out parts of stories or entire stories, or historical reminders, which if included might put the issue in a whole new light, in a way not compatible with their political biases."

William Blum in his book "Freeing the World to Death"

"As news organizations are increasingly driven by a bottom-line mentality, the news we get becomes more and more sensational. What is the difference between Time and Newsweek? Between ABC, NBC, and CBS News? Between the Washington Post and the New York Times? For all practical purposes, none. The concentration of media power means that Americans increasingly get their information from a few sources who decide what is "news."

Oliver Stone

"The Washington press corps has grown closer and closer to its sources. It's to the point where Brit Hume, the ABC correspondent at the White House, plays tennis with George Bush. Tom Friedman of the New York Times is very close with Jim Baker. You find these relationships are so close that reporters don't challenge the subjects of their stories, they just tell you what the government is saying. In other words, they've become stenographers for power and not journalists."

David Barsamian in his book "Stenographers to Power"

"The limitations of professional journalism, the influence of owners, the linkages of media institutions to the power structure of society, and the internalized presuppositions, have led to what can only be characterized as a palpable double standard in coverage of the U.S. role in the world.
... The U.S. news media, including our most respected newspapers like the New York Times, turn a blind eye to U.S. violations of core international law, having no qualms about playing up the violations of adversaries. It would be nearly impossible for the coverage to be more unprincipled."

John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney in their book "Tragedy & Farce"

"The Wall Street Journal, probably the most widely read newspaper in the country, heavily favors the conservative side on any and all questions of public policy, and both the Washington Post and the New York Times fortify their op-ed pages with columnists who strongly defend the established order - William Safire and David Brooks in the Times; Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and Richard Harwood in the Post. The vast bulk of the nation's radio talk shows (commanding roughly 80 percent of the audience) reflect a reactionary bias, and so do all but one or two of the television talk shows that deal with political topics on PBS, CNN, and CNBC."

Lewis Lapham in his book "Gag Rule"

"As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment - objective, impartial, balanced. in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign - you'll find they're dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism."

John Pilger, 2007

"Americans have become perfect subjects for George Orwell's Big Brother. They sit stupidly in front of the TV news or the New York Times or Washington Post and absorb the lies fed to them."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2008

"A problem that has been facing American mainstream journalism for a long time has mainly to do with access. They want to get their calls returned by the big guys at Goldman Sachs. So they develop a relationship in which the journalists themselves become insiders. Too often, consequently, they do little else than rewrite the press releases they are handed.
This has cost America a lot. Mainstream journalists of The New York Times and elsewhere were complicit insiders both in the lead-up to the Iraq war and in the lead-up to the financial meltdown."

Arianna Huffington, 2009

"What we have now is the Reagan-Bush press corp. It's the press corp that they helped create - that they created partly by purging those, or encouraging the purging of those who were not going along, but it was ultimately the editors and the news executives that did the purging. The people who succeeded and did well were those who didn't stand up, who didn't write the big stories, who looked the other way when history was happening in front of them, and went along either consciously or just by cowardice with the deception of the American people."

Robert Parry, 1993

"The CIA developed covert relationships with about 50 American journalists or employees of U.S. media organizations. According to one CIA operative, "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." The agency arranged for the publication of books to be read in America, and for at least one of these works to be reviewed favorably in the New York Times."

Peter Dale Scott in his book "The Road to 9/11"

"During its first fifty years of existence, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was almost never mentioned by any of the moguls of the mass media. When you realize that the membership of the CFR includes top executives from the New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Knight Newspaper chain, NBC, CBS, Time, Life, Fortune, Business Week, US News and World Report, and many others, you can be sure that such anonymity is not accidental."

Gary Allen

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR} control or own major newspapers, magazines, radio and television networks [and] the most powerful companies in the book publishing business. (The Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, and LA Times have their own wire services, which most mainstream news outlets use.)

Admiral Chester Ward, former CFR member

"The problem is not that a computer network [Internet] offers an alternative to the information aristocracy. The true crisis is that neither the news media nor the government has enough credibility to be accepted as either truthful or impartial on their own."

military writer William M. Arkin

"Americans are too broadly underinformed to digest nuggets of information that seem to contradict what they know of the world . Instead, news channels prefer to feed Americans a constant stream of simplified information, all of which fits what they already know. That way they don't have to devote more air time or newsprint space to explanations or further investigations. Politicians and the media have conspired to infantilize, to dumb down, the American public. At heart, politicians don't believe that Americans can handle complex truths, and the news media, especially television news, basically agrees."

Tom Fenton, former CBS foreign correspondent

"The media are a pitiful lot. They don't give us any history, they don't give us any analysis, they don't tell us anything. They don't raise the most basic questions: Who has the most weapons of mass destruction in the world by far? Who has used weapons of mass destruction more than any other nation? Who has killed more people in this world with weapons of mass destruction than any other nation? The answer: the United States."

Howard Zinn

"The use of social media to control a targeted nation's information space, and use it as a means of carrying out sociopolitical subversion and even regime change reached its pinnacle in 2011 during the US-engineered "Arab Spring."
Portrayed at first as spontaneous demonstrations organized organically over Facebook and other social media platforms, it is now revealed in articles like the New York Times', "U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings," that the US government had trained activists years ahead of the protests, with Google and Facebook participating directly in making preparations.
Opposition fronts funded and supported by the US State Department's National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its subsidiaries Freedom House, International Republican Institute (IRI), and National Democratic Institute (NDI) were invited to several summits where executives and technical support teams from Google and Facebook provided them with the game plans they would execute in 2011 in coordination with US and European media who also attended the summits.
The end result was the virtual weaponization of social media, serving as cover for what was a long-planned, regional series of coups including heavily armed militants who eventually overthrew the governments of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, with Syria now locked in 6 years of war as a result."

Tony Cartalucci, 2017

"The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent."

Malcolm X

"In America, we grew up thinking that the people that we see on the nightly news are journalists. But, there is no journalism happening there, only script reading. That is understood by anyone with a sliver of common sense, and the objectivity to realize that their newsperson is basically an actor."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

"Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media."

Noam Chomsky

"What the press do is they tell you lies, lies they already know you want to hear. The press can figure out what its readers or viewers believe, and make a hell of a living pandering to their egos and telling them that they're smart. They lie and tell the audience they are right, and they never have to change your mind about anything. And the audience rewards them, lauding them and paying them money to keep hearing those sweet, self-serving lies."

Allan Uthman

"Pravda and Izvestia in the former Soviet Union would have been hard-pressed to surpass the American media in their subservience to the official agenda. They have abandoned the notion of objectivity or even the idea of providing a public space where problems are discussed and debated. It's a scandal that reveals the existence of a system of propaganda, not of serious media so essential in a democratic society."

Edward Herman

"The American people have become some of the most naïve and gullible folks in the world, because their press enables it, almost encourages it, with its undue and sycophantic deference to the government."

Cenk Uygur, 2008

"In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers."

Congressman Oscar Callaway (TX), Congressional Record of February 9, 1917

"Reporters will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life. To be charged with questioning these foundations is far more serious than being labeled a disgruntled conspiracy nut or an anti-government traitor, or even being sidelined or marginalized within an academic, government-service, or literary career. To question the official 9/11 story is simply and fundamentally revolutionary."

9/11 and American Empire : Intellectuals Speak Out
EDited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott

"If advertisers, and corporate sponsors generally, tend to support media which boost their message, and these media consequently tend to flourish relative to those not so supported, then we have one example of a tight system of control that does not at all require a conspiracy theory but simply the operation of market forces. For advertiser control clearly extends to the detail of the contents and tone of media. "

David Edwards in his book "Burning All Illusions"

"In the press, which is owned by rich men, the interests of the investing minority are always identified with those of the nation as a whole. Constantly repeated statements come to be accepted as truths. Innocent and ignorant, most newspaper readers are convinced that the private interests of the rich are really public interests and become indignant whenever these interests are menaced by a foreign power, intervening on behalf of its investing minority. The interest at stake are the interests of the few; but the public opinion which demands the protection of these interests is often a genuine expression of mass emotion. The many really feel and believe that the dividends of the few are worth fighting for."

Aldous Huxley in his book "Ends and Means", 1937

"By the second decade of the twenty-first century virtually all news and information delivered to the American public, including publishing, movies, music, TV, and networks is controlled by a few owners of only six multinational corporations. These six conglomerates are General Electric (NBC), Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, and Viacom (former owner of CBS). This media monopoly may not tell the public how to think, but it certainly sets the agenda for what to think about. The monopoly creates an electronic "matrix" all around us.
... Topics such as climate change, gender identity ambiguity, anti-gun legislation, harmful prescription drugs and vaccines, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) continually fill the media owned by these corporate giants only because such issues keep society divided and in conflict, which serves to divert public attention from the true rulers of the world."

Jim Marrs in his book 'The Illuminati'

"The news and truth are not the same thing."

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974)

"Even open-minded people will often find themselves unable to take seriously the likes of [Noam] Chomsky, [Edward] Herman, [Howard] Zinn and [Susan] George on first encountering their work; it just does not seem possible that we could be so mistaken in what we believe. The individual may assume that these writers must be somehow joking, wildly over-stating the case, paranoid, or have some sort of axe to grind. We may actually become angry with them for telling us these terrible things about our society and insist that this simply 'can't be true'. It takes real effort to keep reading, to resist the reassuring messages of the mass media and be prepared to consider the evidence again."

David Edwards - Burning All Illusions

"You can't believe a word the American media says. If they say anything correct, it's just an accident."

Paul Craig Roberts

"Most Americans have no idea that what we are fed by the news media is nothing more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations want us to believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as not mere propaganda, that what we learn in church may have very little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own personal biases, no doubt a rather subtle modification of what they were taught by their parents. And through such a process, governments and nations around the world wield control as to what their citizens, believe, value, and do."

Doug Soderstrom

"What most Americans believe to be 'Public Opinion' is in reality carefully crafted and scripted propaganda designed to elicit a desired behavioral response from the public."

Ken Adachi

"Google is destroying the most glorious gift humanity was granted in the last 300 years [the internet]. The future under Google is a fascist dystopia, their way or the highway, no room for dissidents, no room for free speech. Google is a boot stomping on your face for eternity.
Google is the deep state. Forget about conventional wars, forget about spies, forget about intelligence agencies, forget about all of that. It's all about the internet and Google running the internet. They decide how you feel, what you think, what information you can and can't look at, and ultimately who does and doesn't have a voice."

David Bowie's final message written weeks before he died, 2015

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."

Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

"There is an Establishment history, an official history, which dominates history textbooks, trade publishing, the media and library shelves. The official line always assumes that events such as wars, revolutions, scandals, assassinations, are more or less random unconnected events. By definition events can never be the result of a conspiracy, they can never result from premeditated planned group action.
... Woe betide any book or author that falls outside the official guidelines. Foundation support is not there. Publishers get cold feet. Distribution is hit and miss, or non-existent."

Antony Sutton in his book "America's Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull and Bones"

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

George Orwell

"If the war lies were not all over the media, people would not learn them in the first place. If the corrections were heard over and over again, they would get through. If our communications system allowed the presentation of a variety of voices and viewpoints and feared promoting falsehoods more than it feared being insufficiently militaristic, we wouldn't need to investigate the widespread phenomenon of engaged citizens certain of their beliefs but completely deluded."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Voltaire

"Perhaps the most basic reason Americans should read Noam Chomsky's work today, is simply to understand the real world in which they live, that which is obscured by their leaders and the U.S. mass media."

Fred Branfman

"One of the best kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of giant conglomerates, all belonging to the secret Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, NATO, the Club of Rome, and the Trilateral Commission, control the world's flow of information. They determine what we see on television, hear on the radio and read in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet."

Daniel Estulin in his book "The Bilderberg Group"

"If war aims are stated, which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. Such aims would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United States and the British Empire. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect."

Council on Foreign Relations document from 1941

"The involvement of the Rockefellers with the media has multiple implications. One is that the Rockefeller gang's plans for monopolistic World Government are never, but never, discussed in the machines of mass disinformation. The media decides what the issues will be in the country."

Gary Allen in his book "The Rockefeller File"

"Since the anticommunism hysteria in the years following the Second World War, a bipartisan consensus has existed on foreign policy. Meaningful political discourse has been almost absent about foreign policy issues. So many foreign policy decisions have been placed beyond public scrutiny, that almost all of what passes as official information about foreign policy is manufactured by government agencies for its propaganda effect."

Daniel Hellinger and Dennis R. Judd Brooks in their book "The Democratic Facade"

"It is not at all uncommon to grow to adulthood in the United States, even to graduate from university, and not be seriously exposed to opinions significantly contrary to these prevailing myths, and know remarkably little about the exceptionally harmful foreign policy of the government."

William Blum

"According to the propaganda model, the media will tend to emphasize and ignore news according to its appropriateness for state and above all corporate ends. Thus, for example, human rights offences committed by clients of the United States supporting US corporate aims will tend to be downplayed or overlooked, while offences by states deemed to be unsupportive or enemies-of US corporate interests will tend to be vigorously emphasized.
In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman argue that elite state managers are essentially drawn from - and/or controlled by - the same pool of managers controlling the major corporations and, for this reason, state interests are often indistinguishabie from corporate interests."

David Edwards in his book "Burning All Illusions"

"No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any divine or specially wise and lofty idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group leaders and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion
... If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it?
... Whatever attitude one chooses toward this condition we are dominated by the small number of persons who understand the mental processes of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind and contrive new ways to guide the world.
... Political campaigns today are all sideshows A presidential candidate may be "drafted" in response to "overwhelming popular demand," but it is well known that his name may be decided upon by half a dozen men sitting around a table in a hotel room. The conscious manipulation of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda

"Journalists who participate in The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer are some of the best-known political pundits in the United States, such as Paul Gigot, David Gergen, William Kristol and William Safire. All of them belong to the Bilderberg Group, the CFR or the Trilateral Commission."

Daniel Estulin in is book "The Bilderberg Group"

"The society of experts will control propaganda and education. It will teach loyalty to the world government, and make nationalism high treason. The government, being an oligarchy, will instill submissiveness into the great bulk of the population It is possible that it may invent ingenious ways of concealing its own power, leaving the forms of democracy intact, and allowing the plutocrats or politicians to imagine that they are cleverly controlling these forms whatever the outward forms may be, all real power will come to be concentrated in the hands of those who understand the art of scientific manipulation."

Bertrand Russell

"The result of the manipulation of society by the Establishment elite has been four major wars in sixty years, a crippling national debt, abandonment of the Constitution, suppression of freedom and opportunity, and creation of a vast credibility gulf between the man in the street and Washington, D.C. While the transparent device of two major parties trumpeting artificial differences, circus-like conventions, and the cliché of "bipartisan foreign policy" no longer carries credibility, and the financial elite itself recognizes that its policies lack public acceptance, it is obviously prepared to go it alone without even nominal public support."

Antony C. Sutton in his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, 2002

"We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth."

Sydney Schanberg

"We're speaking here of people who get virtually all their news from the shock-and-awe tabloid weeklies, AM-radio talk shows, and television news programs which, because of marketplace pressure, aim low in order to reach the widest possible audience, resulting in short programs with lots of commercials, weather, sports, and entertainment. These news sources don't necessarily have to explicitly state falsehoods to produce distorted views; they need only channel to their audience a continuous stream of statements from the government and conservative "experts" justifying the war as if they were neutral observers; ignore contrary views except when an expert is on hand to ridicule them and label them "conspiracy theories"; and never put it all together in a coherent enlightening manner. [There is a] constant drip-drip of one- sided information, from sources who can be described as stenographers for the powers-that-be."

William Blum in his book "Freeing the World to Death"

"Today Americans are ruled by propaganda. Americans have little regard for truth, little access to it, and little ability to recognize it.
Truth is an unwelcome entity. It is disturbing. It is off limits. Those who speak it run the risk of being branded "anti-American," "anti-semite" or "conspiracy theorist."
Truth is an inconvenience for government and for the interest groups whose campaign contributions control government.
Truth is an inconvenience for prosecutors who want convictions, not the discovery of innocence or guilt.
Truth is inconvenient for ideologues."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2010

"The United States has committed itself to reshaping the Middle East, so the region will no longer be a hotbed of terrorism, extremism, anti-Americanism, and weapons of mass destruction .... The first two battles of this new era are now over. The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably."

William Kristol, The Weekly Standard, April 28, 2003

"Most Americans have no idea that what we are fed by the news media (televised and paper-print news) is nothing more than a portrayal of what powerful corporations (those who pay the salaries of those who run mass media) want us to believe, that what happens to pass as education is as often as not mere propaganda (e.g. that Americans are the good guys and their enemies are, without exception, always the bad guys), that what we learn in church may have very little or nothing to do with the truth, that what our parents teach us may be nothing more than an accumulation of their own personal biases no doubt a rather subtle modification of what they were taught by their parents. And through such a process, governments and nations around the world wield control as to what their citizens, believe, value, and do."

Doug Soderstrom, 2005

"Political intelligence might be defined as the ability to see through the bullshit which every society, past, present and future, feeds its citizens from birth on to assure the continuance of the prevailing ideology."

William Blum in his book "Freeing the World to Death"

"I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia - this is a point of no return and I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe."

Dr. Udo Ulfkotte, journalist and German political scientist, 2014
[in his book and on public television stated that while working as a journalist he was forced to print the work of intelligence agents under his own name]

"if the US uses force it's because we are the United States of America; we are the indispensable nation. We see further and stand taller than other nations."

Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton

"The most powerful component of any fear and disinformation campaign rests with the CIA, which secretly subsidizes authors, journalists and media critics, through a web of private foundations and CIA-sponsored front organizations.
... Disinformation is routinely "planted" by CIA operatives in the newsroom of major dailies, magazines and TV channels. Outside public relations firms are often used to create "fake stories"."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"Selling fear to the American people has become a mainstay of the press and of both political parties in this country. Taking a "tough on crime" stance, particularly in a climate of perpetual fear created by the "war on drugs" and the "war on terrorism," is always a politically safe posture... By focusing on crime, attention is effectively directed away from more divisive issues on which a politician might have to take a stand that would cost them votes. Meanwhile, a fearful populace continues to surrender their civil rights and constitutional protections at an alarming rate, so that their government may protect them from the rampant criminality of the masses."

David McGowan in his book "Derailing Democracy"

"It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous - schoolbooks, comic books, church sermons, Hollywood films, all forms of media, all the time; hardened into historical concrete."

William Blum

"In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Operation Mockingbird was a secret CIA effort to influence and control the American media, and thus to influence and control the information received by the American people.
... Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination, a covert operations unit created under the National Security Council, recruited Philip Graham of the Washington Post to head the project within the media industry. By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.
... Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the CIA were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier_Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps_Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune.
... Contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample evidence that America's leading publishers and news executives allowed themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.
... In 1975, the idea that the corporate media would lie and that the CIA would push fake stories for propaganda purposes was shocking but, in 2017, not so much.
Indeed, many things were shocking in 1975 that scarcely appear on the radar screen today. This is how far Americans have come down a path of acceptance of the loss of rights or even the appearance of honesty. This says nothing of the massive amount of control the CIA and other related interests have over the entertainment industry."

Brandon Turbeville, 2017

"Once the core assumptions of a disinformation campaign have been embedded in the news chain, both the printed press and network TV establish their own self-sustaining routine of fabricating the news."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"Media disinformation largely serves the interests of a handful of global banks and institutional speculators which use their command over financial and commodity markets to amass vast amounts of money wealth."

F. WIlliam Engdahl

"Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

THINK TANKS

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) remains at the center of the small plutocracy that runs the United States and much of the world."

Lawrence Shoup

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) took control of the ideological foundations of the American empire, encompassing the corporate, banking, political, foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one's ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda, the big money that was behind it would ensure one's rise through government, industry, academia and media. There are divisions within the elite, predicated on the basis of how to use American imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it, and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment, intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"Before America had even entered the war in late 1941 [World War II], the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the American branch of the Round Table groups that originated from the secret society of Cecil Rhodes, was planning on America entering the war. The CFR had essentially captured US foreign policy firmly in the grips of the banking elite. The establishment of the Federal Reserve (1913) ensured that the United States would become indebted to and owned by international banking interests, and thus, act in their interest. The Fed financed the US role in World War I, provided the credit for speculation, which led to the Great Depression, and massive consolidation for the interests that own the Federal Reserve System. It then financed US entry into World War II."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The formal membership in the CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] is composed of close to 1500 of the most elite names in the worlds of government, labor, business, finance, communications, the foundations, and the academy ... and in spite the fact that it has staffed almost every key position of every administration since those of FDR - it is doubtful that one American in a thousand so much as recognizes the Council's name, or that one in ten thousand can relate anything at all about its structure or purpose. Indicative of the CFR's power to maintain its anonymity is the fact that, despite its having been operative at the highest levels for nearly fifty years and having from the beginning counted among its members the foremost lions of the Establishment communications media. Only a handful of articles on the Council [on Foreign Relations] have appeared in the nation's great newspapers. Such anonymity - at that level - can hardly be a matter of mere chance."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"For a long time I felt that FDR had developed many thoughts and ideas that were his own to benefit this country, the United States. But, he didn't. Most of his thoughts, his political ammunition, as it were, were carefully manufactured for him in advanced by the Council on Foreign Relations - One World Money group. Brilliantly, with great gusto, like a fine piece of artillery, he exploded that prepared "ammunition" in the middle of an unsuspecting target, the American people, and thus paid off and returned his internationalist political support."

Curtis Dall, FDR's son-in-law, as quoted in his book "My Exploited Father-in-Law"

"The CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), dedicated to one-world government, financed by a number of the largest tax-exempt foundations, and wielding such power and influence over our lives in the areas of finance, business, labor, military, education and mass communication media, should be familiar to every American concerned with good government and with preserving and defending the U.S. Constitution and our free-enterprise system. Yet, the nation's news media, usually so aggressive in exposures to inform our people, remain conspicuously silent when it comes to the CFR, its members and their activities.
The CFR is the establishment. Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also finances and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high level decisions for converting the U.S. from a sovereign Constitutional Republic into a servile member state of a one-world dictatorship."

Rep. John R. Rarick of Louisiana, 1971

"The Trilateral Commission doesn't run the world, the Council on Foreign Relations does that."

CFR member Winston Lord, U.S. Ambassador to China during the Reagan Administration

"In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power center that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obviously subversive - foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power, for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families."

Antony C. Sutton in his book Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, 2002

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) possesses an unrivalled and vast domestic network of overlapping membership and directors with other leading "nonprofit" think-tanks and policy groups (Brookings, Carnegie, the Wilson Center, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the RAND Corporation. and many more), other private policy groups (including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council, and the Business Roundtable), leading lobbying firms, top Fortune 500 corporations, top private equity and other non-bank investment firms, the top for-profit strategic political risk and advisory corporations (including Kissinger Associates and the Albirght-Stonebridge Group), leading universities (Harvard and Yale above all), major foundations (led especially by the Rockefeller Foundation), and top corporate media including numerous key connections with the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post."

Paul Street

"Of some 1600 CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] members, 120 either own or control the nation's major newspapers, magazines, radio and television networks, as well as the most powerful book publishing companies. The interlock with academia is immense.
... CFR members virtually control the major foundations, whose grants quite often are bestowed on persons or groups tied to the CFR.
... The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been under virtual CFR control since its creation.
... Of the CFR's 1974 membership, about 90 represented the major Wall Street international banking organizations. In addition, presidents, vice-presidents and chairmen of the boards of most of the giant corporations are members of the CFR."

Gary Allen in his book "Kissinger", 1976

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is the American Branch of a society which originated in England ... (and) ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"I believe that the Council on Foreign Relations and its ancillary elitist groups are indifferent to communism. They have no ideological anchors. In their pursuit of a new world order, they are prepared to deal without prejudice with a communist state, a socialist state, a democratic state, a monarchy, an oligarchy - its all the same to them."

Senator Barry M. Goldwater in his book "With No Apologies"

"The most powerful clique in these groups [Round Table Groups] - the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) - have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace. What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for "the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government."

Harpers magazine, July 1958

"The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has since the 1970s developed a large number of international networks with wealthy and powerful "superclass" individuals and groups around the world. Relevant institutions here include its British counterpart and sister group The Royal Institute of International Affairs, the elite European Bilderberg Group, the heavily corporate-permeated Trilateral Commission (combining U.S., European, and Japanese elites who joined together to combat the "excess of democracy" in the early 1970s), the G30 (the Group of Thirty, a private gathering of top private and public financial authorities from across the U.S., Europe, and Asia), the CFR's International Advisory Board (headed by super-wealthy capitalists from across the world), and a global CFR "Council of Councils" bringing together the top neoliberal think-tanks from the world's richest 20 nations."

Paul Street

"The Council on Foreign Relations gets little publicity and is virtually unknown to the general public. But it represents Big Government, Big Business, Big Banking, and the Big Media. At the apex of this power elite sits none other than David Rockefeller."

Gary Allen in his book "Kissinger", 1976

"When you examine the Council on Foreign Relations' member list, you will find that 90% either sit on the Trilateral Commission or belong to the Bilderberg Group."

Daniel Estulin in his book "The Bilderberg Group"

"The CFR [Council on Foreign Relations] established six years after the Federal Reserve was created, worked to promote an internationalist agenda on behalf of the international banking elite. It was to alter America's conceptualization of its place within the world ­ from isolationist industrial nation to an engine of empire working for international banking and corporate American interests. Where the Fed took control of money and debt, the CFR took control of the ideological foundations of such an empire ­ encompassing the corporate, banking, political, foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation into a generally cohesive overall world view. By altering one's ideology to that of promoting such an internationalist agenda, the big money that was behind it would ensure one's rise through government, industry, academia and media. The other major think tanks and policy institutions in the United States are also represented at the CFR. They are constitutive of divisions within the elite, however, such divisions are predicated on the basis of how to use American imperial power, where to use it, on what basis to justify it, and other various methodological differences. The divide amongst elites was never on the questions of: should we use American imperial power, why has America become an Empire, or should there even be an empire? If one takes such considerations to heart and questions these concepts, be it within the foreign policy establishment, intelligence, military, academia, finance, corporate world, or media; chances are, such a person is not a member of the CFR."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power center that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obviously subversive - foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits, if you will), for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families."

Antony C. Sutton in his book "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

"In the beginning, the Council on Foreign Relations was dominated by J.P. Morgan. It is still controlled by international financiers. The Morgan group gradually has been replaced by the Rockefeller consortium. It is the most powerful group in America today. It is even more powerful than the federal government, because almost all of the key positions in government are held by its members. In other words, it is the United States government."

G. Edward Griffin in his book "The Creature from Jekyll Island: a second look at the Federal Reserve"

"The CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) was founded for purpose of the submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government."

Harper's magazine, July 1958

"The CFR (Council on Foreign Relations), established six years after the Federal Reserve was created, worked to promote an internationalist agenda on behalf of the international banking elite. Where the Fed took control of money and debt, the CFR took control of the ideological foundations of such an empire - encompassing the corporate, banking, political, foreign policy, military, media, and academic elite of the nation into a generally cohesive overall world view."

Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The Council on Foreign Relations remains active in working toward its final goal of a government over all the world - a government which the Insiders - a global financial elite - and their allies will control."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"[The goal of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is] to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the United States ... Primarily, they [CFR] want a world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in the control of global government."

Admiral Chester Ward, longtime Council on Foreign Relations member

"Trilateralists are members of a private, though not secret, international organization put together by the wealthy banker, David Rockefeller, to stimulate the Establishment dialogue between Western Europe, Japan and the United States. But here is the unsettling thing about the Trilateral Commission. The President-elect [Carter] is a member. So is the Vice President-elect Walter F. Mondale. So are the new Secretaries of State, Defense and Treasury: Cyrus R. Vance, Harold Brown and W. Michael Blumenthal. So is Zibigniew Brzezinski, who is a former Trilateral director and Carter's national security adviser, also a bunch of others who will make foreign policy for America in the next four years."

Washington Post, January 16, 1977

"What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved .... As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future."

Senator Barry Goldwater in his book 'With No Apologies'

"Jimmy Carter is not the President of the United States. The Trilateral Commission is the President of the United States; I represent the Trilateral Commission."

Henry Kissinger to the Prime Minister of Canada

"The Trilateralists have taken charge of foreign policy-making in the Carter Administration, and already the immense power they wield is sparking some controversy. Active or former members of the Trilateral Commission now head every key agency involved in mapping U.S. strategy for dealing with the rest of the world."

U.S. News and World Report

"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future."

Barry M. Goldwater from his memoirs "With No Apologies"

"The Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberger Group, have prepared for and are now implementing open world dictatorship... They are not fighting against terrorists. They are fighting against citizens."

Dr. Johannes Koeppi, former German Defense Ministry official and adviser to NATO - from Dean Henderson's book "Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf"

"The Trilateral Commission admitted in their own publications that they intend to merge the U.S. and other NATO countries into a single world government controlled by the big corporations."

Mark M. Rich in his book "The Hidden Evil: The Financial Elite's Covert War Against the Civilian Population"

"Right-wing think tanks producing an incessant flow of market-oriented studies were established in the 1970s. Among them are the Heritage Foundation, the American Economic Institute for Public Policy Research, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Business Roundtable.
... These think tanks virtually created the new conservative movement of the 1970s.
... The actual agenda of these corporate-funded think tanks is to (a) decrease government regulation of big business, (b) decrease taxes for corporations and for the rich, (c) destroy the unions, and (d) increase profits."

Helen Caldicott in her book "If You Love This Planet"

"If war aims are stated, which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world. Such aims would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United States and the British Empire. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect."

Council on Foreign Relations document from 1941

"One of the best kept secrets is the degree to which a handful of giant conglomerates, all belonging to the secret Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations, NATO, the Club of Rome, and the Trilateral Commission, control the world's flow of information. They determine what we see on television, hear on the radio and read in newspapers, magazines, books, or on the Internet."

Daniel Estulin in his book "The Bilderberg Group"

"Conservative funding finances right-wing think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute, which provide easy jobs for conservatives who produce the sound bites and op-eds to fill up the mainstream news stories and editorial pages.
Although many progressive think tanks exist (including the Economic Policy Institute, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the World Policy Institute), media professionals don't like to use them.
... Conservative think tanks usually have more money than progressive ones, because the right is willing to serve wealthy corporate interests. Conservative pundits are often quite willing to sell their services. As intellectuals for hire, the right offers journalists mouthpieces for corporate America with the veneer of neutrality provided under the guise of a think tank."

John K. Wilson in his book "How the Left Can Win Arguments and Influence People"

"A comprehensive Nexis search for the twenty-five largest think tanks in U.S. news media for 2002 showed that explicitly conservative think tanks accounted for nearly half of the 25,000 think-tank citations in the news, whereas progressive think tanks accounted for only 12 percent... The pro-business Right understood that changing media was a crucial part of bringing right-wing ideas into prominence and their politicians into power."

Robert W. McChesney in his book "The Problem of the Media"

"The proliferation of movement conservative think tanks since the 1970s means that it's possible for a movement intellectual to make quite a good living by espousing certain positions. There's a price to be paid - you're expected to be an apparatchik, not an independent thinker - but many consider it a good deal."

Paul Krugman in his book "Conscience of a Liberal"

"The organized intellectual powers of the West -- namely, the principle think tanks and banking interests -- have sought to create a perfect global system of governance, one in which power does not sway from nation to nation, or West to East, but rather that power is centralized globally... it is through crises -- economic, political, and social -- that this process of global governance can be rapidly accelerated."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"Journalists have recused themselves from ranking the legitimacy of "experts," so corporate and political front groups with lofty names have the same opportunity to inject themselves into public debate as research institutions that still cling to old-fashioned standards of evidence and accuracy. These "think tanks" manufacture debate. That's what they do: Their aim is to create the illusion of controversy, even when the facts are indisputable, because they know how enslaved contemporary journalism is by the tyranny of false equivalence. What's more, the louder you are, the more outrageous your claim, the less civil your discourse, the farther you stand from common ground, the more welcome you will be as a guest and a source. It is not necessary to be right; to make the sale, it is only necessary to get attention."

Martin Kaplan in the book "What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics"

"Corporations and corporate foundations fund think tanks which formulate policies which will be favorable to business. Corporate attorneys draft legislation which will make those policies the law of the land. Corporate political action committees pay for the election campaigns of the politicians who ensure that such legislation becomes law, and lobbyists make sure the politicians stay bought. Corporate executives are appointed to lead the regulatory agencies which enforce (or dismantle) the laws that aren't favorable to business. National and multilateral trade and development agencies design and subsidize an international trading system dominated by the largest corporations. Governments and banks use public monies to subsidize and insure corporate investment."

George Draffan in his book "The Elite Consensus"

"Wall Street, multinational corporations, international banks and wealthy people have formed elite groups to serve as vehicles for their interests. These include Think Tanks such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderbergers and others, which are interlocked with the Tax-exempt Foundations and the Federal Reserve."

Antony Sutton

"In 2000, the think tank and war lobby Project for a New American Century (PNAC) proposed a massive augmentation in US military power. In laying out this program, PNAC'S leadership recognized that the costly implementation of its far-reaching proposals to confirm, extend, and consolidate the coercive machinery of US global dominance would depend on a massive transformation in public opinion - through something akin to the surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor in 1941."

Anthony J. Hall in his book "Earth into Property"

"The major think tanks of the nation, specifically the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) ... are the policy-makers of the American Empire. Think tanks bring together elites from most power sectors of society ­ the military, political, corporate, banking, intelligence, academia, media, etc. ­ and they discuss, debate and ultimately produce strategy blueprints and recommendations for American foreign policy. Individuals from these think tanks move in and out of the policy-making circles, creating a revolving door between the policy-planners and those that implement them. The think tanks, in this context, are essentially the intellectual engines of the American Empire."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2011

Henry Kissinger / Zbigniew Brzezinski

THE CONSIGLIERIES
ADVISORS/COUNSELORS TO CRIMINAL ORGANIZATIONS

"Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today, with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands."

George Galloway

"Today, Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow, they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there was an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all people of the world will plead with world leaders to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by their world government."

Henry Kissinger

"It is Henry Kissinger's belief that by controlling food one can control people, and by controlling energy - especially oil - one can control nations and their financial systems. By placing food and oil under international control along with the world's monetary system, Kissinger is convinced a loosely knit world government can become a reality."

Washington columnist Paul Scott, 1976

"Depopulation should be the highest priority of foreign policy towards the third world."

Henry Kissinger

" Henry Kissinger was the high priest of imperialism and neocolonialism, animated by an instinctive hatred for nationalist world leaders.
... Kissinger was a Zionist, dedicated to economic, diplomatic and military support of Israeli aggression and expansionism to keep the Middle East in turmoil, so as to prevent Arab unity and Arab economic development."

Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkinin their book "George Bush : The Unauthorized Biography"

"I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive Secretaries of State in the modern history of this country. I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger. And in fact, Kissinger's actions in Cambodia, when the United States bombed that country, overthrew Prince Sihanouk, created the instability for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to come in, who then butchered some three million innocent people, was one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger."

Senator Bernie Sanders

"Henry Kissinger, together with his international political directorate known as Kissinger Associates, is the individual who stands at the intersection point of every one of these networks: the back-channel with the Soviet Union, the drug and terror networks from Italy to Ibero-America, and the highest levels of finance - including his directorship in American Express, the entity into which has merged a major portion of Dope, command structure."

DOPE, INC.: the international drug cartel, money-laundering, and state power, 1992

"The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.
... I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.

Henry Kissinger, about Chile under Salvador Allende

"Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs."

Henry Kissinger

"I refuse to believe that a little fourthrate power like North Vietnam does not have a breaking point."

Henry Kissinger

"If you control the oil, you control entire nations. If you control the food, you control the people. If you control the money, your control the entire world."

Henry Kissinger

"Jimmy Carter is not the President of the United States. The Trilateral Commission is the President of the United States; I represent the Trilateral Commission."

Henry Kissinger

"Although Henry Kissinger has been historically a close ally of the most rabid factions inside Israel and within the Zionist establishment in the United States, his primary allegiance through-out his political career has been to the British Crown and its intelligence and financial tentacles."

DOPE, INC., the international drug cartel, money-laundering, and state power, 1992

"if we can't control Latin America, how can we dominate the world?"

Henry Kissinger, 1970s

"The CIA and the US State Department remained primary sponsors of the Argentine military junta, which was led by General Jorge Videla. On February 16, 1976, six weeks before the coup, Robert Hill, the US ambassador to Argentina, reported to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the plans for the coup were underway and that a public relations campaign had been mounted that would cast the new military regime in a positive light."

Paul L. William in his book "Operation Gladio", 2015

"While Kissinger's 1973 oil shock had a devastating impact on world industrial growth, it had an enormous benefit for certain established interests - the major New York and London banks, and the Seven Sisters oil multinationals of the United States and Britain. By 1974, Exxon had overtaken General Motors as the largest American corporation in gross revenues. Her sisters, including Mobil, Texaco, Chevron and Gulf, were not far behind.
The bulk of the OPEC dollar revenues, Kissinger's 'recycled petrodollars,' was deposited with the leading banks of London and New York, the banks which dealt in dollars as well as international oil trade. Chase Manhattan, Citibank, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank of America, Barclays, Lloyds, Midland Bank - all enjoyed the windfall profits of the oil crisis."

William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination.
... It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book"'The Grand Chessboard"

"The three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book"'The Grand Chessboard"

"The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, in his 1997 book"'The Grand Chessboard"

"The war on terror is being used as a pretext and excuse for building up the US and NATO military and organizational machine in the region [Afghanistan and Central Asia] and maintaining its open-ended presence there."

Zbigniew Brzezinski

"As America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Council on Foreign Relations, 1977

"People, governments and economies of all nations must serve the needs of multinational banks and corporations."

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era"

"The nation-state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era"

"What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Zbigniew Brzezinski, 1998

"Society would be dominated by an elite which would not hesitate to achieve its political ends by using the latest modern techniques for influencing public behavior and keeping society under close surveillance and control."

Zbigniew Brzezinski in his book "Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era"

"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia. Now a non-Eurasian power is preeminent in Eurasia-and America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained. To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three great imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

Carter National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote of the plans to control Eurasia, including Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan

"If the American people knew the truth about what we Bushes have done to the nation, we would be chased down the street and lynched."

George H W Bush to reporter Sarah McClendon, Dec. 1992

"You can say anything you want in a debate, and 80 million people hear it. If reporters then document that a candidate spoke untruthfully, so what? Maybe 200 people read it, or 2000 or 20,000."

George H W Bush's press secretary to reporters following the 1980 vice-presidential debate

"George H W Bush's response to the Gulf crisis of 1991 will be largely predetermined, not by any great flashes of geopolitical insight, but rather by his connection to the British oligarchy, to Henry Kissinger, to Israeli and Zionist circles, to Texas oilmen in his fundraising base, and to the Saudi Arabian and Kuwaiti royal houses"

Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin in their book "George Bush : The Unauthorized Biography"

"You have a survivability of command and control, survivability of industrial potential, protection of a percentage of your citizens, and you have a capability that inflicts more damage on the opposition than it can inflict on you."

Vice-President George H W Bush, on how to win a nuclear war, 1980

"It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s will be to curb the world's fertility."

President George H W Bush

THE POLITICIANS

"American leaders are perhaps not so much immoral as they are amoral. It's not that they take pleasure in causing so much death and suffering. It's that they just don't care ... the same that could be said about a sociopath. As long as the death and suffering advance the agenda of the empire, as long as the right people and the right corporations gain wealth and power and privilege and prestige, as long as the death and suffering aren't happening to them or people close to them ... then they just don't care about it happening to other people, including the American soldiers whom they throw into wars and who come home-the ones who make it back alive-with Agent Orange or Gulf War Syndrome eating away at their bodies. American leaders would not be in the positions they hold if they were bothered by such things."

William Blum in his book "Killing Hope"

"Presidents Clinton and Bush Jr. avoided the Vietnam War, Clinton through educational privilege, Bush through being the son of his father. President Obama never went to war. Vice Presidents Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden, like Clinton and Bush Jr., dodged the draft."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

"U.S. leaders have nothing against those they regularly kill and impoverish. But they are products of a system that is indifferent to the fate of the "unpeople", whether in the Shah's Iran, Somoza's Nicaragua, Suharto's Indonesia or the many other dictatorial regimes that enjoyed US support."

Fred Branfman

"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment. People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser."

William Blum

"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, 'Sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second.' I said, 'Well, you're too busy.' He said, 'No, no.' He says, 'We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq.' This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, 'We're going to war with Iraq? Why?' He said, 'I don't know.' He said, 'I guess they don't know what else to do.' So I said, 'Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?' He said, 'No, no.' He says, 'There's nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.' He said, 'I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments.' And he said, 'I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.' So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, 'Are we still going to war with Iraq?' And he said, 'Oh, it's worse than that.' He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, 'I just got this down from upstairs', meaning the Secretary of Defense's office, 'today.' And he said, 'This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran'."

Wesley Clark, General of the United States Army, March 2007

"You have not just a military-industrial complex, but a military-industrial-Congressional complex."

Gareth Porter, 2007

"President Dwight Eisenhower, in his Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 was originally planning to describe the phenomenon as the 'Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex', however, 'Congressional' was dropped from the speech at the last minute, and it was simply referred to as the 'Military-Industrial Complex'."

Phillip F. Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, 2010

"Do American leaders really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the words "god" and "prayer" are regularly invoked in their talks, while American Hellfire missiles are sent screaming into a city center or a village marketplace teeming with life ...when they carry on endlessly about democracy and freedom, while American soldiers are smashing down doors, dragging off the men, humiliating the women, traumatizing the children... when they proclaim the liberation of a people and the bringing forth of a better life, while vast quantities of American depleted uranium are exploding into a fine vapor which will poison the air, the soil, the blood, and the genes forever."

William Blum in is book "Freeing the World to Death"

"Which nation's leaders since 1945 have murdered, maimed, made homeless, tortured, assassinated and impoverished the largest number of civilians who were not its own citizens? I have asked this question of Americans in every walk of life since I discovered the bombing of Laos in 1969. It's a simple matter of fact, not involving judgments of right and wrong, and I remain astonished at how most answer "the Russians," "the Chinese," or just have no idea that American leaders have killed more noncitizen civilians than the rest of the world's leaders combined since 1945."

Fred Branfman

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it."

H L Mencken, In Defense of Women, Dover Publications, 1918

"The B-1 bomber has a piece of it made, a piece of the plane made, in every single US state. Now, why? That's not an efficient way to make a product. So, it must be serving some end. And the end, it turns out, that it serves is that the B-1 bomber was designed by its makers according to a process called political engineering, fancy word for distributing the contracts and subcontracts to build a given weapons system to as many states, as many congressional districts as possible, so that if this thing ever comes up for review, everybody's getting a piece of the action, everybody's in on it. And as a result, when the questions arise - Do we need the B-1 bomber? Do we need to be spending this money? - there is a constituency built in in Congress that's going to keep that thing going."

Eugene Jarecki, 2008

"American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon the free market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization", that will not change its laws to favor foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will not allow asbestos, banned pesticides and other products restricted in the developed world to be dumped onto their people, that will not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the country's social services or standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil... Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be reduced to basket cases, or, where feasible, simply overthrown."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

NEOCONS
CHICKENHAWKS, WARMONGERS, PSYCHOPATHS

"Neoconservatives are crazed psychopaths willing to destroy Earth in behalf of American hegemony."

zerohedge.com

"The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful."

Vice-President Dick Cheney - lecture at West Point, June 2002

"Killing in the name of democracy is what Neocons call 'moral intervention'."

Gilad Atzmon

"This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war . . . our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

neoconservative Richard Perle

"Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."

neoconservative Michael Ledeen

"I think Vice President Dick Cheney is insane. The neocons are insane. I don't know of a sane one."

Paul Craig Roberts, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration

"Everybody hates the Neocons, not only a majority of the American people, but the entire planet. And yet that numerically small group of people has somehow managed to put everybody in danger, due to their ugly vindictiveness, infinite arrogance and ideology-induced short-sightedness. That this could ever have happened, and at a planetary scale, is a dramatic testimony to the moral and spiritual decay of our civilization.
There is a reason why the Neocons thrive in times of crisis: it allows them to hide behind the mayhem, especially when they are the ones who triggered the mayhem in the first place. This means that as long as the Neocons are anywhere near power they will never allow peace to break out, lest the spotlight be suddenly shined directly upon them. Chaos, wars, crises - this is their natural habitat. Eventually, of course, they will be stopped and they will be defeated, like all their predecessors in history. But think of the price mankind will have to pay."

The Saker, 2017

"At the turn of the millennium, the neocon faction was searching for new opportunities for conflict and violence. When those opportunities arrived, the neocons rejoiced and rushed into their favorite enterprise of sending other people's children into useless wars."

Corey Robin, assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York

"I think the level of casualties is secondary. All the great scholars who have studied American character have come to the conclusion that we are a warlike people and that we love war. What we hate is not casualties but losing."

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute, 2003

"Neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush."

Philip Giraldi, 2017

"The war on terrorism is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense that it may never end."

Vice-President Dick Cheney

"Support the overthrow of the terrorist mullahs of Iran. End the terrorist regime of Syria. Regard Saudi Arabia and France not as friends but as rivals-maybe enemies. Withdraw support from the United Nations if it does not reform. Tighten immigration at home. Radically reorganize the CIA and FBI. Squeeze China and blockade North Korea to press that member of the axis of evil to abandon its nuclear program. Abandon the illusion that a Palestinian state will contribute in any important way to U.S. security."

David Frum and Richard Perle in their book "An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror"

"Empirical studies reveal that authoritarians are frequently enemies of freedom, antidemocratic, anti-equality, highly prejudiced, mean-spirited, power hungry, Machiavellian, and amoral. They are also often conservatives without conscience.
The factor that makes rightwingers faster than most people to attack others, and that seems to keep them living in an "attack mode," is their remarkable self-righteousness. They are so sure they are not only right, but holy and pure, that they are bursting with indignation and a desire to smite down their enemies."

John Dean in his book "Conservatives Without Conscience"

"We do not want stability in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and even Saudi Arabia; we want things to change. The real issue is not whether, but how to destabilize."

neoconservative Michael Ledeen

"The good Lord did not see fit simply to put oil under those countries friendly to the United States."

Vice-President Dick Cheney

"The lesson the neo-cons learnt from the Iraq war is not that it was disastrous. It was only disastrous for the dead and maimed Iraqis, our own dead and maimed servicemen, and those whose country was returned to medievalism. It was a great success for the neo-cons, they made loads of money on armaments and oil. The lesson the neo-cons learned was not to give the public in the West any time to mount and organise opposition. Hence the destruction of Libya was predicated on an entirely false "we have 48 hours to prevent the massacre of the population of Benghazi" narrative. Similarly this latest orchestrated Syria "crisis" is being followed through into military action at a blistering pace, as the four horsemen sweep by, scything down reason and justice on the way."

Craig Murray, 2018

"The Persian Gulf will be a primary focus of U.S. international energy policy... American efforts to obtain increased supplies of foreign oil will also require the threat of or the use of force to dissuade hostile forces from attempting to obstruct the flow of petroleum to the United States. This, in turn, will require an enhanced U.S. capacity to operate militarily in areas of likely fighting over oil."

Vice-President Dick Cheney

"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival... This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power... First the US must show the leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."

neocon Paul Wolfowitz in the "Defense Planning Guidance"

"Neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush."

Philip Giraldi, 2017

"If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support."

Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute, 2003

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us."

Vice-President Dick Cheney

"There's no debate in the world as to whether they Iraqis have these nuclear weapons. We all know that. A trained ape knows that."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Sept. 13, 2002

"I don't believe anyone that I know in the administration ever said that Iraq had nuclear weapons."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, May 14, 2003

"The 2003 Iraq invasion ended quickly with few civilian casualties and with little damage to Iraq's cities, towns or infrastructure."

neocon Richard Perle

"The neoconservatives represent the greatest danger ever faced by the United States and the world. Humanity has no greater enemy."

Paul Craig Roberts - Reagan Administration Assistant Treasury Secretary

"No country in the world upholds the Geneva Conventions on the laws of armed conflict more steadfastly than does the United States."

neocon Douglas Feith

"Make the American people realize they are surrounded in the world by violent extremists."

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, in an internal memo, 2007

"Just as it is sometimes necessary temporarily to resort to evil actions to achieve worthy objectives, so a period of dictatorship is sometimes the only hope for freedom.
... Paradoxically, preserving liberty may require the rule of a single leader - a dictator - willing to use those dreaded 'extraordinary measures', which few know how, or are willing, to employ."

neocon Michael Ledeen

"The Project for a New American Century (PNAC) plan was regime change throughout the Middle East, starting with Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, and rolling on through the Middle East, ultimately even probably rolling on to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The PNAC philosophy would use hard power, military power, principally, to initiate this and even continue it if they found it was necessary to do so. That keeps the military-industrial complex alive, it keeps Halliburton alive, it keeps Lockheed alive, it keeps the entire complex the United States had developed after the demise of the Soviet Union, that I call the national security state, alive and well."

Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell

"One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today. If we wage the war effectively, we will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists."

neocon Michael Ledeen

"Democracies will not sacrifice to protect their security in the absence of a sense of danger. And every time we create the impression that we and the Soviets are cooperating and moderating the competition, we diminish that sense of apprehension."

neocon Richard Perle

"No stages. This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq, then we take a look around and see how things stand. This is entirely the wrong way to go about it... If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war ... our children will sing great songs about us years from now."

neocon Richard Perle

"Iraq floats on a sea of oil."

neocon Paul Wolfowitz

"I don't want to make a prediction, but you're going to find Iraqis out cheering American troops."

neocon Paul Wolfowitz

"A reasonable assessment of the events in the United States over the past 50 years or so gives ample evidence of the application of the ideas in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in order to bring about the current Neoconservative administration [Bush/Cheney]. Anyone who wishes to understand what has happened in the U.S. needs to read the "Protocols" to understand that some group of deviant individuals took them to heart. The document, "Project For A New American Century" produced by the Neoconservatives reads as if it had been inspired by the same schizoidal worldview."

Andrew M. Lobaczewski in his book "Political Ponerology: a science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes"

"In the Middle East and Southwest Asia, our overall objective is to remain the predominant outside power in the region and preserve U.S. and Western access to the region's oil. "

neocon Paul Wolfowitz

"I'm not concerned about weapons of mass destruction. I didn't come to Iraq in a search for weapons of mass destruction. "

neocon Paul Wolfowitz

"The rapture evangelicals and the neocons are euphoric at the prospect of nuclear war."

Paul Craig Roberts - Reagan Administration Assistant Treasury Secretary and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal

NATIONAL SECURITY STATE

"The greatest purveyor of terror in the world today is the United States national security state."

Michael Parenti

"America cherishes her enemies. Without enemies, she is a nation without purpose and direction. The various components of the National Security State need enemies to justify their swollen budgets, to aggrandize their work, to protect their jobs, to give themselves a mission in the aftermath of the Soviet Union."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

"The first characteristic of a National Security State is that the military is the highest authority. In a National Security State the military not only guarantees the security of the state against all internal and external enemies, it has enough power to determine the overall direction of the society. In a National Security State the military exerts important influence over political, economic, as well as military affairs."

www.sourcewatch.org

"The NSS [National Security State] is an instrument of class warfare, organized and designed to permit an elite, local and multinational, to operate without any constraint from democratic processes. This allows the bulk of the population to be treated as a mere cost of production."

Edward S. Herman

"In the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s, U.S.-backed armed forces carried out military coups throughout Latin America, moving to obliterate leftist forces and extirpate leftist ideas. The militaries installed a new form of rule - the national security state."

J. Patrice McSherry in the book "Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America"

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry... But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment.
... This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.
... In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

President Dwight Eisenhower's farewell speech, 1961

"The entire National Security doctrine centers on the existence of an "outside enemy", which is threatening the Homeland."

Michel Chossudovsky, 2005

"By the end of 1962, the national security establishment in Washington D.C., which had quickly come to know JFK as a skeptic during 1961, had come to view him as a heretic; and by November of 1963, the month he was assassinated, they no doubt considered him an apostate, for he no longer supported most of the so-called "orthodox" views of the Cold War priesthood.
... The national security establishment wanted to turn the Cold War against the USSR into a hot war, so that the U.S. could inflict punishing and fatal blows upon its Communist adversaries on the battlefield. It was this desire for hot war by so many within the national security establishment - their belief that conventional proxy wars with the Soviet Bloc were an urgent necessity, and that nuclear war with the USSR was probably inevitable - to which President Kennedy was so adamantly opposed. And it was JFK's profound determination to avoid nuclear war by miscalculation, and to avoid combat with conventional arms unless it was truly necessary, that separated him from almost everyone else in his administration from 1961 throughout 1963."

Douglas P. Horne, 2014

"The US. National Security State refers to the Executive Office of the White House, the National Security Council (NSC), National Security Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other such units that are engaged in surveillance, suppression, covert action, and forceful interventions abroad and at home."

Michael Parenti in his book "Against Empire"

"The term "national security" has transformed American society for the worse. It has warped the morals and values of the American people. It has stultified conscience. It has altered the constitutional order. It has produced a democratically elected government that wields totalitarian powers.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to round up people, including citizens, and take them to concentration camps, detention centers, or military dungeons where the government can torture them, incarcerate them indefinitely, and even execute them as suspected terrorists.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to send its military and intelligence forces into any country anywhere in the world, kidnap people residing there, and transport them to a prison for the purpose of torture, indefinite detention, and even execution.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to sneak and peek into people's homes or businesses without warrants; to monitor their emails, telephone calls, and financial transactions; and to spy on the citizenry.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to support, with money and armaments, totalitarian regimes all over the world and to enter into partnerships with them for the purpose of torturing people whom the U.S. government has kidnapped. We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to assassinate anyone it wants, including American citizens, anywhere in the world, including here in the United States.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to impose sanctions and embargoes on any other nation and to severely punish the American people and foreign citizens and foreign companies who violate them.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to invade and occupy any country on earth, without a congressional declaration of war, for any purpose whatever, including regime change and the securing of resources.
And it's all justified under the rubric of "national security"."

Jacob G. Hornberger, 2016

"Today, the United States spends more on military arms and other forms of "national security" than the rest of the world combined. U.S. Ieaders preside over a global military apparatus of a magnitude never before seen in human history. In 1993 it included almost a half-million troops stationed at over 395 major military bases and hundreds of minor installations in thirty-five foreign countries, and a fleet larger in total tonnage and firepower than all the other navies of the world combined, consisting of missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, destroyers, and spy ships that sail every ocean and make port on every continent. U.S. bomber squadrons and long-range missiles can reach any target, carrying enough explosive force to destroy entire continents with an overkill capacity of more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 22,000 tactical ones."

Michael Parenti in his book "Against Empire"

"The National Security State or Doctrine, generally referrs to the ideology and institutions (CIA, Department of Defense) established by the National Security Act of 1947, an enduring legacy of then President Harry S. Truman, in support of his doctrine "to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures".
In his book "Brave New World Order" Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer identified seven characteristics of a National Security State:
The first characteristic of a National Security State is that the military is the highest authority. In a National Security State the military not only guarantees the security of the state against all internal and external enemies, it has enough power to determine the overall direction of the society. In a National Security State the military exerts important influence over political, economic, as well as military affairs.
A second defining feature of a National Security State is that political democracy and democratic elections are viewed with suspicion, contempt, or in terms of political expediency. National Security States often maintain an appearance of democracy. However, ultimate power rests with the military or within a broader National Security Establishment.
A third characteristic of a National Security State is that the military and related sectors wield substantial political and economic power. They do so in the context of an ideology which stresses that 'freedom" and "development" are possible only when capital is concentrated in the hands of elites.
A fourth feature of a National Security State is its obsession with enemies. There are enemies of the state everywhere. Defending against external and/or internal enemies becomes a leading preoccupation of the state, a distorting factor in the economy, and a major source of national identity and purpose.
A fifth ideological foundation of a National Security State is that the enemies of the state are cunning and ruthless. Therefore, any means used to destroy or control these enemies is justified.
A sixth characteristic of a National Security State is that it restricts public debate and limits popular participation through secrecy or intimidation. Authentic democracy depends on participation of the people. National Security States limit such participation in a number of ways: They sow fear and thereby narrow the range of public debate; they restrict and distort information; and they define policies in secret and implement those policies through covert channels and clandestine activities. The state justifies such actions through rhetorical pleas of "higher purpose" and vague appeals to "national security".
Finally, the church is expected to mobilize its financial, ideological, and theological resources in service to the National Security State."

www.sourcewatch.org

"Ever since the United States' government was converted into a 'national-security state', it has been the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA that have run the government, just like in countries governed by military dictatorships.
... The federal government used to consist of three branches. But that quaint notion disintegrated when the federal government was converted to a 'national-security state' after World War II. Even though it was done without a constitutional amendment, that conversion effectively added a fourth branch of government to the federal government - the national-security branch, which consists of the NSA, the CIA, and the Pentagon.
The addition of that fourth branch fundamentally altered the original three-branch concept, especially because the fourth branch quickly became the most powerful branch. The reason is because ultimately government is force, and the fourth branch is where the most force was concentrated within the new, altered governmental structure.
In the United States' National Security State, the military, the CIA, and the NSA are in charge."

Jacob Hornberger, 2018

"After reading case after nauseating case of the atrocities committed in the name of national security, and after recognizing the United States' involvement in the creation of military, police, and paramilitary agencies responsible for these horrors in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia-seventeen Latin-American countries in all-one comes to the conclusion either that the Americans who helped to establish and run these military and police training programs were deranged or that they never considered the predictable results of their work-possibly didn't want to consider them."

Penny Lernoux in her book "Cry of the People"

"Our leaders are cruel because only those willing to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy establishment.
... People capable of expressing a full human measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless strangers ... do not become president of the United States, or vice president, or secretary of state, or national security adviser or secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to."

William Blum in hsi book "Rogue State"

"Just as the United States trained Latin American military and police in methods of fighting against "populism" in their countries, by this means helping to produce a "favorable climate of investment" by bringing into power National Security States, so a large, well-trained, and ruthless police is needed in the home country as it pushes a right-wing agenda that is contrary to the interests of a vast majority."

Edward Herman, 2004

"The terrorism that was committed in the country [El Salvador] was overwhelmingly governmental terrorism, committed by the Salvadoran army, the National Guard, and their death squads and affiliated agencies. They were responsible for 95 percent of the deaths, the guerrillas for only five percent.
These were the same institutions that were the favorites of Washington - receiving its indoctrination and training and profiting from its largess. El Salvador received six billion dollars in aid from Washington in the period 1979 to 1992. This subsidy to the tiny country during the government repression and terrorism came to average out at $100,000 for each member of its armed forces. This subsidy allowed the government to pay for the terrorist activities committed by the security forces."

Frederick H. Gareau in his book "State Terrorism and United States"

"Nesting within the executive is that most virulent purveyor of state power: the national security state, an informal configuration of military and intelligence agencies, of which the CIA is a key unit.
The president operates effectively as head of the national security state as long as he stays within the parameters of its primary dedication which is the maximization of power on behalf of corporate interests and capitalist global hegemony."

Michael Parenti in his book "Against Empire"

"As the imperial presidency has accrued power, surrounding the imperial presidency has come to be this group of institutions called the National Security State. The CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the other intelligence agencies. Now, these have grown since the end of World War Two into this mammoth enterprise."

Andrew Bacevich, 2008

"They have pillaged the world. When the land has nothing left for men who ravage everything, they scour the sea. If an enemy is rich, they are greedy; if he is poor, they crave glory. Neither East nor West can sate their appetite. They are the only people on earth to covet wealth and poverty with equal craving. They plunder, they butcher, they ravish, and call it by the lying name of 'empire'. They make a desert and call it 'peace'."

Publius Cornelius Tacitus - a historian of the Roman Empire

"America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number."

Arnold Toynbee,1961

"Coming to grips with 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."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"We thought we knew what would happen in Libya. We thought we knew what would happen in Egypt. We thought we knew what would happen in Iraq, and we guessed wrong. In each one of these countries the thing we have to consider is that there is some structure that's holding the society together. And as we learned, especially in Libya, when you remove the top and the whole thing falls apart . . . you get chaos."

former Secretary of State Colin Powell

"The American elite's unbounded, unquestioned, indeed unconscious sense of imperial entitlement and dominance -- based ultimately on war, the threat of war and the profit from war -- is one of the defining characteristics of our age. Our political and media elite cannot conceive of an end to empire. Our elites and their courtiers cannot imagine life without a permanent war for global dominance, fueled by a gargantuan war machine spread across hundreds and hundreds of bases implanted in more than 100 countries."

Chris Floyd

"Since the late 1940s, the United States has been deliberately engaged in an imperial project, and anyone who would hold the office of the presidency has to be willing to serve that end. All presidents have to promote the national security state, both domestically and in American foreign policy, if they wish to attain and hold on to power."

Morris Berman

"The basic and generally agreed U.S. plan is unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority."

Anatol Lieven, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

"Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment."

Tom Engelhardt

"The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok."

William Rockler, Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor

"Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the Pentagon had been pursuing a military strategy for domination of the entire planet. It was called by the Pentagon, 'Full Spectrum Dominance' and as its name implied, its agenda was to control everything everywhere including the high seas air, space and even outer space and cyberspace."

F. William Engdahl

"The real motivation behind US military interventions during the cold war was not Soviet deterrence but the crushing of popular, indigenous nationalist movements for independence, and the establishment of US control over strategic regions."

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed from his book "Behind the War on Terror"

"The U.S. military acts in the interests of the corporate and financial elite, and those countries that do not submit to American economic hegemony are deemed enemies, and the military is ultimately sent in to implement "regime change."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"The Western banking system controls a worldwide electronic banking network. The control of money creation at a world level constitutes the ultimate instrument of economic and social domination... The ultimate lever of the U.S.-NATO imperial design is to override and destroy national currencies."

Michel Chossudovsky in the book "The Global Economic Crisis"

"Stop talking so much about democracy and instead support dictatorships of the right if their policies are pro-American."

U.S. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey, 1954

"Through slick Madison Avenue marketing techniques and careful study of genuine protest movements, the US Government had perfected techniques for 'democratically' getting rid of any opponent, while convincing the world they were brought down by spontaneous outbursts for freedom."

F. William Engdahl

"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities... Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.
... The Agency's task is to develop an intemational anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian political movement to the scourge of intemational communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"The "war on terrorism" purports to defend the American Homeland and protect the "civilized world". It is upheld as a "war of religion", a "clash of civilizations", when in fact the main objective of this war is to secure control and corporate ownership over the region's extensive oil wealth, while also imposing under the helm of the IMF and the World Bank, the privatization of state enterprises and the transfer of the countries' economic assets into the hands of foreign capital."

Michel Chossudovsky

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"If the Agency [CIA] actually reported the truth about the Third World, what would it say? It would say that the United States installs foreign leaders, arms their armies, and empowers their police all to help those leaders repress an angry, defiant people; that the CIA-empowered leaders represent only a small faction who kill, torture, and impoverish their own people to maintain their position of privilege."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"Almost from the beginning, the CIA engaged not only in the collection of intelligence information, but also in covert operations which involved rigging elections and manipulating labor unions abroad, carrying on paramilitary operations, overturning governments, assassinating foreign officials, protecting former Nazis and lying to Congress."

former Senator George McGovern, 1987

STATE TERRORISM
TERROR, REGIME CHANGE, COVERT OPERATIONS, FALSE FLAGS, ASSASSINATIONS

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror."

Josef Stalin

"There has been almost no coup or government overthrow since 1945 not led by the US."

John McMurtry

"The reason why there are only a few nations that do false flags is that you need really top-of-the-line covert operations teams. The U.S. has certainly got them, and a few NATO nations have them. The other problem that you have is that you need total control over mainstream media. The United States does. Brittan does. Israel does. They can be assured when something goes down they are going to have a totally sympathetic global media that will work hand in glove with them, and that will block out uncomfortable questions and the like."

Richard Dolan

"The U.S. military acts in the interests of the corporate and financial elite, as those countries that do not submit to American economic hegemony are deemed enemies, and the military is ultimately sent in to implement 'regime change'."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI."

Robert David Steele, former CIA agent

"The easiest way to carry out a false flag attack is by setting up a military exercise that simulates the very attack you want to carry out . This is exactly how government perpetrators in the US and UK handled the 9/11 and 7/7 "terror" attacks, which were in reality government attacks blamed on "terrorists"."

Captain Eric H. May, former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, 2008

"9/11 was an example of state-sponsored, false-flag, synthetic terrorism. The 9/11 events were organized and directed by a rogue network of high government and military officials of the United States, with a certain participation by the intelligence agencies of Britain and Israel, and with a more general backup from the intelligence agencies of the other Echelon states Australia, New Zealand, Canada."

Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book "9/11 Synthetic Terror - made in the USA"

"For many Americans, the idea that we are living in a country whose own leaders planned and carried out the attacks of 9/11 is simply too horrible to entertain. Unfortunately, however, there is strong evidence in support of this view."

9/11 and American Empire : Intellectuals Speak Out
edited by David Ray Griffin and Peter Dale Scott

"Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley, Elliott Abrams, and Condoleezza Rice ran the attacks [9/11].
It was called a stand down, a false flag operation in order to mobilize the American public under false pretenses... it was told to me by the general on the staff of Wolfowitz.
I taught stand down and false flag operations at the national war college, I've taught it with all my operatives so I knew exactly what was done to the American public."

Dr. Steve R. Pieczenik , Deputy Assistant Secretary of State under Nixon, Ford and Carter

"Sandy Hook was what is known as an Integrated Capstone Event (ICE), and these events involve numerous federal and local agencies including local police. This "event" was a drill that was put on by DHS and FEMA as a training exercise to coordinate federal, state and local emergency response teams in the case of a mass-casualty event. This was just a simulated event for training purposes. The event was not a real school shooting, and nobody actually died at Sandy Hook."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

POWER: "At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."
BBC HOST: "To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?"
POWER: "Precisely."

Peter Power, former Scotland Yard anti-terrorism agent, who was a contract employee working in government exercises on the day of the July 2007 London railway bombings - interviewed by BBC

"The owner of all three [World Trade Center] buildings was Larry Silverstein, who had recently doubled the insurance value of the Twin Towers. He stated in a PBS interview that he and the New York Fire Department agreed to a controlled demolition of WTC 7. Since skyscrapers are not [normally] wired for demolition -- unless someone intends to demolish them -- Silverstein's statement is an admission that 9/11 was an inside job."

Captain Eric H. May, former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, 2008

"[Operation Northwoods] The U.S. government declassified documents showing that in the 1960's, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff signed off on a plan to blow up American airplanes, and also to commit terrorist acts on American soil, and then to blame it on the Cubans in order to justify an invasion of Cuba."

Washington's Blog, Global Research, 2010

"The Israeli embassy had been advised in advance by Scotland Yard of an impending bomb attack [London, July 7, 2005]:
Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks.
... Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by his embassy not to attend an economic conference. Netanyahu was staying at the Aidridge Hotel in Mayfair. The conference venue was a few miles away at the Great Eastern Hotel close to the Liverpool subway station; where one of the bomb blasts occurred."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"The former Italian Prime Minister, an Italian judge, and the former head of Italian counterintelligence admit that NATO, with the help of the Pentagon and CIA, carried out terror bombings in Italy and other European countries in the 1950s and blamed the communists, in order to rally people's support for their governments in Europe in their fight against communism."

Washington's Blog, 2010

"At least until 1978, the Israeli secret service infiltrated Italian subversive organizations and on more than one occasion gave arms, money and information to the terrorist Red Brigades. The Israeli plan was to reduce Italy to a country torn by civil war so that the United States would have to depend more on Israel for security in the Mediterranean."

Italian senior magistrate Ferdinando Imposimato

"The United States has the remarkable ability to stage exercises simulating the exact events that are actually taking place, such as the bombing exercise in Boston, and the hijacking exercise on September 11, 2001. The United Kingdom must have this ability as well because they were running a drill simulating a bombing of London's subway stations at the exact same time that there was an actual bombing of London's subway system. What a coincidence."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

"The truth about 9/11 is so horrific that if the American people actually were to learn that truth they would completely lose confidence in their system, because the truth of matter is that a faction of power in the United States - the neoconservative faction - orchestrated the events of September 11, 2001, as a New Pearl Harbor designed to launch their agenda of world domination and a rollback of freedom in the United States."

Dr. Kevin Barrett

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda

"The high officials, media executives and military officers who are bound by law and ethics to serve the American people have become a textbook example of a grand conspiracy. To look at it from their point of view, they are historic actors who are beyond good and evil, who must stimulate the American people to a necessary geostrategic adventure by any means necessary. To them, the official account of the 9/11 'terror' attacks is what Plato once described as the 'noble lie,' a necessary falsehood told to a childlike public in order to direct it maturely."

Captain Eric H. May, former Army military intelligence officer

"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

"Terrorism in the modern era is the means by which oligarchies wage secret wars against the people which it would be politically impossible to wage openly. Oligarchy, in turn, always has one and the same political program: the purpose and program of oligarchy is to perpetuate oligarchy."

Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book "9/11 Synthetic Terror - made in the USA"

"Just like every US president before him, just like those who ran other great powers, Barack Obama became a murderer and a terrorist, because the US has a machine that spans the globe, that has the capacity to kill, and Obama has kept it set on kill. He could have flipped the switch and turned it off. The President has that power, but he chose not to do so."

journalist Allan Nairn, 2010

"Terrorism has replaced Communism as the rationale for the militarization of the country, for military adventures abroad, and for the suppression of civil liberties at home. It serves the same purpose, serving to create hysteria."

Howard Zinn in his book "Terrorism and War"

"What occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time ... The bombing of the Murrah building was not personal, no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against government installations and their personnel. ... Many foreign nations and peoples hate Americans for the very reasons most Americans loathe me. Think about that."

Timothy McVeigh, Gulf War veteran who bombed a government building in Oklahoma City in 1995 - in a letter to Rita Cosby, Fox News Correspondent, April 27 2001

"There are many terrorist states in the world, but the United States is unusual in that it is officially committed to international terrorism."

Noam Chomsky

"If they do it it's terrorism, if we do it, it's fighting for freedom."

Anthony Quainton, the U.S. ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984

"After World War II, in the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in, among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua ... By the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror - hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile-from which the region has yet to fully recover."

Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's Workshop"

"The trigger for military coups in Latin America was less the elite fear of Soviet encroachment or guerrilla threats than fears of popular demands for social reform and democratic change."

J. Patrice McSherry in the book "Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America"

"Since the end of world War II the United States has:
* endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected
* grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries
* attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
* dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
* attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world), in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands.

William Blum, 2016

"It is unlikely the Honduras coup took place without the knowledge of the U.S. military, which has a base in that country. The coup is a message from Latin American and U.S. 'ultraconservatives' to keep leftist governments in line."

Ecuador's President Rafael Correa. July 2009

"The Americans who engineered countless military coups, death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes - instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror".

Naomi Klein

"The democratically elected president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya, had called for a new constitution to replace the old one that was really set up by the oligarchy in favor of the very wealthy and the international companies. He also called for a 60 percent increase in the bottom wage rate, which had a huge impact on Dole and Chiquita, two of the biggest employers in that company. They, along with a number of companies that have sweatshops in Honduras, strongly objected, very much the same way that they had objected to Aristide in Haiti, when he did something similar, and called in the military. The general in charge of the military was a graduate of our School of the Americas, this, you know, school that's famous for creating dictators, and they overthrew Zelaya. It was a classic CIA-sponsored type of coup, very similar to what United Fruit had done in Guatemala in the early '50s. And, of course, United Fruit became Chiquita."

John Perkins, 2009

"The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them. The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws of the United States."

Stephen Kinzer in his book "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq"

"Coups do not happen in Latin America without the support of those with power in the US."

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond, 2010

" It was under Johnson that Washington began either to organize or patronize a cycle of coups starting in Brazil in 1964, continuing through Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile, and ending in Argentina in 1976."

Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's Workshop"

"The coup against Aristide, then, must be understood not in isolation, but as the culmination of activities that really began the minute he was re-elected in 2000. Destabilization efforts by the U.S. government, active U.S. support for the creation of a so-called civil-society opposition, and eventually the invasion of Haiti by an armed band of criminals and murderers were all part of a process designed to ensure that Haiti would return fully to the fold of the U.S. empire and its minions in Haiti."

Bill Fletcher, Jr, 2004

"The United States supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests.
In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died.
In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put General Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990.
In Peru, a fragile democratic government is still unraveling the agency's role in a decade of support for the now-deposed and disgraced president, Alberto K. Fujimori.
The United States had to invade Panama in 1989 to topple its narco-dictator, Manuel A. Noriega, who, for almost 20 years, was a valued informant for American intelligence."

John Perkins in his book "Confessions of Economic Hit Man"

"Jean-Bertrand Aristide's second term as President of Haiti would end the same way as had his first had, cut short in a U.S.-backed coup d'état. Aristide's opposition to neoliberalism, his defiant stance towards the U.S. and France, and his enduring popularity with Haiti's poor had made him a marked man from the very beginning of his term in February 2001."

Nik Barry-Shaw, 2008

"On June 28, 2009, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was awakened by gunfire. A coup was carried out by US-trained military officers, including graduates of the infamous US Army School of the Americas (WHINSEC) in Georgia. President Zelaya was illegally taken to Costa Rica.
Democracy in Honduras ended as a de facto government of the rich and powerful seized control. A sham election backed by the US confirmed the leadership of the coup powers. The US and powerful lobbyists continue to roam the hemisphere trying to convince other Latin American countries to normalize relations with the coup government."

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond, 2010

"History is repeating itself in Haiti, as democracy is being destroyed for the second time in the past fifteen years. Amazingly, the main difference seems to be that this time it is being done openly and in broad daylight, with the support of the "international community" and the United Nations
... The US Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute (the international arm of the Republican Party) had spent tens of millions of dollars to create and organize an opposition ... and to make Haiti under Aristide ungovernable.
... Taking advantage of Haiti's desperate poverty and dependence on foreign aid, it stopped international aid to the government, from the summer of 2000 until the 2004 coup."

Mark Weisbrot, 2005

"In March 1982, General Efrain Rios Montt seized power in Guatemala in a military coup. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed Washington where President Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity." But under Rios Montt, the slaughter in the countryside and selective assassinations in the cities only grew worse.
By July 1982, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his "rifles and beans" policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get "beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles." In October, he secretly gave carte blanche to the feared "Archivos" intelligence unit to expand "death squad" operations. Based at the Presidential Palace, the "Archivos" masterminded many of Guatemala's most notorious assassinations.
The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres. However, during a swing through Latin America, Reagan discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Mayan villages being eradicated. On December 4, 1982, after meeting with dictator Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy" and asserted that Rios Montt's government was "getting a bum rap."
On January 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala and authorized the sale of $6 million in military hardware. Approval covered spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations. Radios, batteries and battery chargers were also in the package. State Department spokesman John Hughes said political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural conditions had improved, too.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the "Archivos" in October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."
Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. "The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year" 1982, the report stated."

Robert Parry in his book "Secrecy & Privilege"

"The President of Haiti Jean-Bertrand Aristide did not resign. He was abducted by the United States in the commission of a coup."

Randall Robinson, the founder and former director of TransAfrica, 2004

"It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that United States Government and American hand be well hidden."

cable outlining CIA objectives in Chile to the station chief in Santiago

"In Indonesia in 1965 a group of young military officers attempted a coup against the U.S.-backed military establishment and murdered six of seven top military officers. The Agency seized this opportunity to overthrow Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which had three million members. Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA operation run from one-half million to more than one million people."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"At the time of the Rios Montt coup d'etat in March 1982, the Israeli press referred to the Montt coup as "the Israeli connection" because that group was "trained and equipped by Israel"
... Rios Montt himself told ABC News reporters that his coup had been successful because "many of our soldiers were trained by the Israelis"."

Bishara Bahbah in her book "Israel and Latin America: The Military Connection"

"The U.S. wants to overthrow President Hugo Chavez to put Venezuela in line with their other clients in Latin America and knock down the only government that offers an alternative foreign policy for the whole region. They don't want that alternative present.
That's why this coup was planned, directed, and financed by the Bush administration. It wasn't just the CIA. The assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs was involved - I'm talking about the Cuban terrorist exile Otto Reich. I'm talking about people like Elliot Abrams, who was in the Reagan administration and involved in justifying the killings in Central America, which amounted to 300,000 deaths. I'm talking about John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, who was involved with the death squads in Honduras.
You have thugs running U.S. policy in Latin America, who are capable not only of overthrowing a government but engaging in the kind of violent repression that was launched in those 24 hours of the coup against Hugo Chavez."

James Petras interview, 2002

"80 percent of the officers who carried out the 1964 coup against President Goulart [Brazil] had been trained by the United States."

Penny Lernoux in her book "Cry of the People"

"The moment of Guatamalan President Arbenz's fall is the moment history stopped in Guatemala or took another course, the army withdrawing support for an elected government that had relied upon it, joining in a CIA-supported coup replacing democrat with dictator, and beginning forty years of military repression."

Kate Millett in her book "Politics of Cruelty"


"Documents clearly show knowledge of the detailed plans for the coup against Chávez, written by CIA financial and advisory agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) financed all the groups, NGOs, trade unions, businesspeople, political parties and the media involved in the coup."

Eva Golinger, 2008

"In Guatemala, United Fruit supported the CIA-backed 1954 military coup against President Jacobo Arbenz, a reformer who had carried out a land reform package. Arbenz' overthrow led to more than thirty years of unrest and civil war in Guatemala."

Nikolas Kozloff, 2009

"On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet orchestrated a coup d'état, with the aid and participation of the CIA, against the Allende government of Chile, overthrowing it and installing Pinochet as dictator. The next day, an economic plan for the country was on the desks of the General Officers of the Armed Forces who performed government duties. The plan entailed "privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending," written up by "U.S.-trained economists." These were the essential concepts in neoliberal thought, which, through the oil crises of the 1970s, would be forced upon the developing world through the World Bank and IMF."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all "what the President ordered." They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created the CIA and assigned it "duties related to intelligence affecting the national security." The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws of the United States."

Stephen Kinzer in his book "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq"

"Right wing American ideologues and shell NGOs based out of Washington played a critical role in the coup in Honduras in 2009, and are hell bent on stopping the growing populist movements throughout Latin America from gaining more influence and power."

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond

"The United States has overthrown governments in Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Nicaragua, Honduras, Iran, Guatemala, Vietnam, Chile, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq, not to mention the Congo (1960); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); Brazil (1961 & 1964); the Dominican Republic (1961 & 1963); Greece (1965 & 1967); Bolivia (1964 & 1971); El Salvador (1961); Guyana (1964); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); and of course Haiti (1991 and 2004). We've replaced democracy with dictatorship, dictatorship with chaos, and local rule with US. domination and occupation."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

"The U.S. military acts in the interests of the corporate and financial elite, as those countries that do not submit to American economic hegemony are deemed enemies, and the military is ultimately sent in to implement "regime change." "

Andrew Gavin Marshall

"From 1945 to 2003, the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements fighting against intolerable regimes. In the process, the US bombed some 25 countries, caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

William Blum in his book "Killing Hope"

"The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect "regime change". The cloaks of "human rights" and of "democracy" were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts."

Professor Eric Waddell, Global Research, 2007

"Directing and encouraging ethnic cleansing, playing one nationality off of another, bombing civilian infrastructure and murdering civilians [in Yugoslavia in the 1990s] ­ these acts engaged in by the U.S. and its NATO allies took place under the pleasant halo of 'humanitarian intervention.'"

Paul D'Amato, Dissident Voice, 2008

"So how do you improve the business climate in third world countries? Well, it's easy. You murder priests (that is, priests and other religiously oriented groups who are involved too much with the concerns of the people - i.e., the "Marynollers," the Quakers, Catholic priests involved in Liberation Theology, etc), you torture peasant organizers, you destroy popular organizations, you institute mass murder and repression to crush any popular organizations (which might try to help the poor). And that improves the investment climate. So there's a secondary correlation between American aid and the deterioration of human rights. It's entirely natural that we should tend to aid countries that are egregious violators of fundamental human rights and that torture their citizens, and that's indeed what we find."

Noam Chomsky

"The greatest myth concerning American foreign policies is the deeply-held belief that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what horror may result, the American government means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are always honorable. Of that Americans are certain. They genuinely wonder why the rest of the world can't see how kind and generous and self-sacrificing America has been."

author William Blum

"The United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries throughout the world since August 1945, a number of them many times. The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect "regime change". The cloaks of "human rights" and of "democracy" were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts."

Professor Eric Waddell, The United States' Global Military Crusade (1945- ), Global Research, February 2007

"In the last decades of the twentieth century, self-interest, sovereignty and taking care of number one became the primary criteria for any serious provision of support or resources to the globe's trouble spots. If the country in question is of any possible strategic value to the world powers, then it seems that everything from covert operations to the outright use of overwhelming force is fair game. If it is not, indifference is the order of the day."

former Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who commanaded the UN peacekeping force in Rwanda in 1993-1994

"The CIA had developed a program to assassinate the President of Zaire [later Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)] Patrice Lumumba. The operation, didn't work. It was to give poison to Lumumba. And they couldn't find a setting in which to get the poison to him successfully in a way that it wouldn't appear to be a CIA operation. Instead, the CIA chief of station in Zaire talked to Lumumba aide and Belgian security police informer Joseph Mobutu about the threat that Lumumba posed, and Mobutu had his men kill Lumumba."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"All during the length of my fight for the independence of my country, I have never doubted for a single instant the final triumph of the sacred cause to which my companions and myself have consecrated our lives. But what we wish for our country, its right to an honorable life, to a spotless dignity, to an independence without restrictions, Belgian colonialism and its Western allies - who have found direct and indirect support, deliberate and not deliberate among certain high officials of the United Nations, this organization in which we placed all our confidence when we called for their assistance - have not wished it.
... History will one day have its say, but it will not be the history that Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations will teach, but that which they will teach in the countries emancipated from colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history, and it will be, to the north and to the south of the Sahara, a history of glory and dignity."

Patrice Lumumba's last letter to his wife before his assassination, December 1960

"Do American leaders really believe the utterances that emanate from their mouths? When the words "god" and "prayer" are regularly invoked in their talks, while American Hellfire missiles are sent screaming into a city center or a village marketplace teeming with life ...when they carry on endlessly about democracy and freedom, while American soldiers are smashing down doors, dragging off the men, humiliating the women, traumatizing the children... when they proclaim the liberation of a people and the bringing forth of a better life, while vast quantities of American depleted uranium are exploding into a fine vapor which will poison the air, the soil, the blood, and the genes forever."

William Blum in is book "Freeing the World to Death"

"The Americans who engineered countless military coups, death squads and massacres in Latin America never paid for their crimes - instead they got promoted and they're now running the 'War on Terror".

Naomi Klein

"The coup against Aristide, then, must be understood not in isolation, but as the culmination of activities that really began the minute he was re-elected in 2000. Destabilization efforts by the U.S. government, active U.S. support for the creation of a so-called civil-society opposition, and eventually the invasion of Haiti by an armed band of criminals and murderers were all part of a process designed to ensure that Haiti would return fully to the fold of the U.S. empire and its minions in Haiti."

Bill Fletcher, Jr, 2004

"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests.
In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died.
In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put General Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990.
In Peru, a fragile democratic government is still unraveling the agency's role in a decade of support for the now-deposed and disgraced president, Alberto K. Fujimori.
The United States had to invade Panama in 1989 to topple its narco-dictator, Manuel A. Noriega, who, for almost 20 years, was a valued informant for American intelligence."

John Perkins in his book "Confessions of Economic Hit Man"

"The United States had invaded small Caribbean and Central American countries on numerous occasions throughout the 20th century. Indeed, before the onset of Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy in the 1930s, Washington routinely overthrew regimes it disliked."

Ted Galen Carpenter, 2010

"There appears to be something about launching bombs or missiles from afar onto cities and people that appeals to American military and political leaders. In part it has to do with a conscious desire to not risk American lives in ground combat. And in part, perhaps not entirely conscious, it has to do with not wishing to look upon the gory remains of the victims, allowing American GIs and TV viewers at home to cling to their warm fuzzy feelings about themselves and their government."

William Blum in his book "Rogue State"

"A Pentagon memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off with Iran."

General Wesley Clark, Democracy Now, March 2, 2007

"We are not hated because we practice democracy, value freedom, or uphold human rights. We are hated because our government denies these things to people in Third World countries whose resources are coveted by our multinational corporations. That hatred we have sown has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism and in the future, nuclear terrorism."

Robert Bowman, Vietnam Veteran

"The CIA orchestrated coup[s] in Guatemala in 1954 and the military occupations of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and Grenada in 1983... Whatever other motives may have been involved, the Cold War provided the indispensable justification for intervention. And for all the rhetoric about democracy and human rights that U.S. presidents employed during the struggle against communism, there was no indication that Washington would later revert to the practice of coercing Latin American countries merely, in Woodrow Wilson's infamous words, to teach those societies "to elect good men.""

Ted Galen Carpenter, 2010

"Since World War Two the United States has attempted to overthrow more than fifty foreign governments, it has dropped bombs on the people of around thirty countries, has attempted to assassinate some sixty foreign leaders, helped to suppress dozens of populist or nationalist movements, has tortured many thousands, and seriously and illegally intervened in one way or another in virtually every country on the planet, in the process of which the U.S. has caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair."

author William Blum, in a speech at the University of Vermont, November 2, 2007

"Interventions are not against dictators but against those who try to distribute: not against Jiménez in Venezuela but Chávez, not against Somoza in Nicaragua but the Sandinistas, not against Batista in Cuba but Castro, not against Pinochet in Chile but Allende, not against Guatemala dictators but Arbenz, not against the shah in Iran but Mossadegh."

Johan Galtung, Norwegian founder of the discipline of Peace and Conflict Studies

"After World War II, in the name of containing Communism, the United States, mostly through the actions of local allies, executed or encouraged coups in, among other places, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Argentina and patronized a brutal mercenary war in Nicaragua ... By the end of the Cold War, Latin American security forces trained, funded, equipped, and incited by Washington had executed a reign of bloody terror - hundreds of thousands killed, an equal number tortured, millions driven into exile-from which the region has yet to fully recover."

Greg Grandin in his book "Empire's Workshop"

"The coups in Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, and Chile were all "what the President ordered." They were not rogue operations. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, national security advisers, and CIA directors approved them, authorized by the 1947 law that created the CIA and assigned it "duties related to intelligence affecting the national security." The first thing all four of these coups have in common is that American leaders promoted them consciously, willfully, deliberately, and in strict accordance with the laws of the United States."

Stephen Kinzer in his book "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Haiti to Iraq"

"American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power, that will not lie down and happily become an American client state, that will not look upon the free market or the privatization of the world known as "globalization" as the highest good, that will not change its laws to favor foreign investment, that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not produce primarily for export, that will not easily tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the country's social services or standard of living, that will not allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil. Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be reduced to basket cases, or, where feasible, simply overthrown."

William Blum

"Patrice Lumumba was the first elected Prime Minister and ascended to power in the Congo on June 30, 1960, the date of Congo' s independence from Belgium. Within ten weeks of being elected, Lumumba's government was deposed in a coup. He was subsequently imprisoned and assassinated on January 17, 1961 by Western powers (United States, Belgium, France, England and the United Nations) in cahoots with local leaders such as Moise Tshombe and Joseph Desire Mobutu (Mobutu Sese Seko)."

friendsofthecongo.org

"The trigger for military coups in Latin America were fears of popular demands for social reform and democratic change."

J. Patrice McSherry in the book "Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America"

"The result of neo-colonialism is that foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment, under neo-colonialism, increases, rather than decreases, the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world. The struggle against neo-colonialism is not aimed at excluding the capital of the developed world from operating in less developed countries. It is aimed at preventing the financial power of the developed countries being used in such a way as to impoverish the less developed."

Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana 1957-1966

U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II

Iran (1953); Guatemala(1954); Thailand (1957); Laos (1958-60); the Congo (1960); Turkey (1960, 1971 & 1980); Ecuador (1961 & 1963); South Vietnam (1963); Brazil (1964); the Dominican Republic (1963); Argentina (1963); Honduras (1963 & 2009); Iraq (1963 & 2003); Bolivia (1964, 1971 & 1980); Indonesia (1965); Ghana (1966); Greece (1967); Panama (1968 & 1989); Cambodia (1970); Chile (1973); Bangladesh (1975); Pakistan (1977); Grenada (1983); Mauritania (1984); Guinea (1984); Burkina Faso (1987); Paraguay (1989); Haiti (1991 & 2004); Russia (1993); Uganda (1996);and Libya (2011). This list does not include a roughly equal number of failed coups, nor coups in Africa and elsewhere in which a U.S. role is suspected but unproven.

from William Blum's book "Killing Hope"

"On June 28, 2009, Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was awakened by gunfire. A coup was carried out by US-trained military officers, including graduates of the infamous US Army School of the Americas (WHINSEC) in Georgia. President Zelaya was illegally taken to Costa Rica.
Democracy in Honduras ended as a de facto government of the rich and powerful seized control. A sham election backed by the US confirmed the leadership of the coup powers. The US and powerful lobbyists continue to roam the hemisphere trying to convince other Latin American countries to normalize relations with the coup government."

Bill Quigley and Laura Raymond, 2010

"It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.... We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that United States Government and American hand be well hidden."

cable outlining CIA objectives in Chile to the station chief in Santiago

"In Indonesia in 1965 a group of young military officers attempted a coup against the U.S.-backed military establishment and murdered six of seven top military officers. The Agency seized this opportunity to overthrow Sukarno and to destroy the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI), which had three million members... Estimates of the number of deaths that occurred as a result of this CIA ... operation run from one-half million to more than one million people."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"80 percent of the officers who carried out the 1964 coup against Brazilian President Goulart had been trained by the United States."

Penny Lernoux in her book "Cry of the People"

"Documents written by the CIA clearly show knowledge of the detailed plans for the coup against Hugo Chávez in 2002... Financial and advisory agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) financed all the groups, NGOs, trade unions, businesspeople, political parties and the media involved in the coup."

Eva Golinger, 2008

"Paul Kagame is possibly the greatest mass murderer alive today. The fact that Paul Kagame continues to live and work freely in the world, unthreatened by "international justice", celebrated as the Abe Lincoln of his war-torn domain in central Africa, and highly regarded and honored in the United States, Britain, and Canada, shows us unambiguously that when the events in Rwanda 1994 are at issue, things as fragile as truth and historical clarity are only able to survive as exiles from these powers."

Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, 2014

"In Guatemala, United Fruit supported the CIA-backed 1954 military coup against President Jacobo Arbenz, a reformer who had carried out a land reform package. Arbenz' overthrow led to more than thirty years of unrest and civil war in Guatemala."

Nikolas Kozloff, 2009

"On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet orchestrated a coup d'état, with the aid and participation of the CIA, against the Allende government of Chile, overthrowing it and installing Pinochet as dictator. The next day, an economic plan for the country was on the desks of the General Officers of the Armed Forces who performed government duties. The plan entailed privatization, deregulation and cuts to social spending, written up by U.S.-trained economists. These were the essential concepts in neoliberal thought, which, through the oil crises of the 1970s, would be forced upon the developing world through the World Bank and IMF."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

THE ENFORCERS

PENTAGON-NATO-SECURITY COMPLEX

"Coming to grips with 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."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"The world of secret intelligence agencies is a realm of falsehood, camouflage, deception, violence, unspeakable cruelty, treachery, and betrayal. It is the most desolate and grim sector of human endeavor, where no human values can subsist. It knows neither hope nor mercy nor redemption."

Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book "9/11 Synthetic Terror - made in the USA"

"Fundamentally, the founding fathers of U.S. intelligence were liars. The better you lied and the more you betrayed, the more likely you would be promoted. . . . Outside of their duplicity, the only thing they had in common was a desire for absolute power. ... Dulles, Helms, Wisner were the grand masters. If you were in a room with them, you were in a room full of people that you had to believe would deservedly end up in hell."

James Jesus Angleton, CIA counterintelligence operative

"BCCI [Bank of Credit and Commerce International] would become the mixing bowl into which Persian Gulf petrodollars were stirred with generous helpings of drug money to finance worldwide covert operations for the CIA and its Israeli Mossad and British MI6 partners."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"The CIA's control of the MSM (mainstream media) is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., the coup in Ukraine, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner, drone murders, the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing - everything."

Edward Curtin, 2017

"There has been since almost the earliest days of the Israeli state and the earliest days of the CIA a secret bond, basically by which Israeli intelligence did jobs for the CIA and for the rest of American intelligence. You can't understand what's been going on with American covert operations and the Israeli covert operations until you understand this secret arrangement."

journalist Andrew Cockburn

"Intelligence agencies and powerful business syndicates, which are allied with organized crime, are competing for the strategic control over the heroin routes. The multi-billion dollar revenues of narcotics are deposited in the Western banking system. Most of the large international banks, together with their affiliates in the offshore banking havens, launder large amounts of narco-dollars.
This trade can only prosper if the main actors involved in narcotics have "political friends in high places". Legal and illegal undertakings are increasingly intertwined; the dividing line between "business people" and criminals is blurred."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"Intelligence, government, and organized crime interests are intimately connected and operate outside the law (and public scrutiny) to preserve and promote their self-interests. Regrettably, they all joined forces in 1963 to eliminate the last American president who wasn't bought, sold, and controlled by the Globalist money interests."

Michael Collins Piper

"The Safari Club, formed by the intelligence services of Saudi Arabia, Israel, France, Iran, Egypt, and Morocco in 1976 - with a "wink and a nod" from the Central Intelligence Agency-was responsible for much of the West's clandestine operations against the Soviet Union in conflict zones extending from Afghanistan to Somalia and Angola to Nicaragua."

Wayne Madsen, 2018

"The cooperation and interpenetration of the Anglo-American intelligence agencies is overwhelming and thoroughly institutionalized. The CIA and MI-6 are virtually Siamese twins sharing a number of vital organs."

Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book "9/11 Synthetic Terror - made in the USA"

"The hidden agenda behind the Anglo-American "trans-Atlantic bridge" is to eventually displace the Franco-German military conglomerates and ensure the dominance of the US military industrial complex (in alliance with Britain's major defense contractors).
Moreover, this integration in the area of defense production has been matched by increased cooperation between the CIA and Britain's MI6 in the sphere of intelligence and covert operations, not to mention the joint operations of British and US Special Forces."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book "America's War on Terrorism", 2005

"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities... Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.
... The Agency's task is to develop an intemational anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian political movement to the scourge of intemational communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"We live in an era in which political and social reality are incessantly manipulated by huge and pervasive intelligence agencies - CIA, FBI,
MI6, FSB (KGB), Mossad."

Webster Griffin Tarpley in his book "9/11 Synthetic Terror - made in the USA"

"The very best CIA, Mossad and MI6 agents are recruited to become better paid private spooks for multinational corporate and banking empires."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"The Church committee report made it clear that the CIA had, directly or indirectly, been involved in assassination plots, coups, or attempted coups against eight foreign leaders: Premier Fidel Castro of Cuba, Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, President Salvador Allende and General René Schneider of Chile, President Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, President François Duvalier of Haiti, and President Sukarno of Indonesia."

David Wise in his book "The American Police State:The Government Against the People"

"Mounting numbers of victims, the millions of people whose lives have been trampled or splattered by CIA operations are increasingly cynical of America. Because of the CIA the world is a more dangerous place. Americans have reduced credibility. Worst of all, by retaining the CIA we are accepting ourselves as a harsh and ruthless people. It's the wrong game for a great nation."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"The CIA and the US State Department remained primary sponsors of the Argentine military junta, which was led by General Jorge Videla. On February 16, 1976, six weeks before the coup, Robert Hill, the US ambassador to Argentina, reported to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that the plans for the coup were underway and that a public relations campaign had been mounted that would cast the new military regime in a positive light."

Paul L. William in his book "Operation Gladio", 2015

"Between 1996 and 2002, the United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia. Between 1996 and 2002, the United States, planned, financed, and helped execute every single uprising and terror related scheme in Xinjiang."

Sibel Edmonds, FBI Whistleblower, 2010

"The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them [Muslims] against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia."

Graham Fuller, CIA spy

"Al Qaeda has been supported and financed from its inception in the early 1980s by the CIA."

Michel Chossudovsky, 2012

"Business people manipulate political and social movements, including terrorists and counterterrorists, through instruments like the CIA, so they can make more money. The police keep resistant poor and black neighborhoods in lockdown. The FBI manipulates lost, insecure, and even intellectually disabled individuals into attempting acts of terrorism, which they then jump in to prevent. The CIA conducts false flag operations all over the world to enhance public fear of terrorists, even as they arm and train them in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow elected governments."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, six million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations ... Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington's dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. "

Steve Kangas,1994

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"Theodore Shackley one of the CIA's most infamous agents, had helped to set up the heroin trade in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and had overseen Operation Phoenix, which involved the killing of 40,000 noncombatant Vietnamese who were suspected of collaborating with the Viet Cong. He also served as a principal figure in Nugan Hand Bank, overseeing the deposit of billions in black funds into the Australian laundry. From Australia, he went to South America, where he took an active part in Operation Condor by organizing death squads. In Chile, he teamed up with Stefano Delle Chiaie for the murder of Salvador Allende."

Paul L. William in his book "Operation Gladio", 2015

"The CIA's highly structured assassination program in Vietnam - the Phoenix Program - is the template for "the war on terror"."

Edward Curtin, 2017

"Secret CIA operations constitute the usually unseen efforts to shore up unjust, unpopular, minority governments, always with the hope that overt military intervention (as in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic) will not be necessary. The more successful CIA operations are, the more remote overt intervention becomes - and the more remote become reforms. Latin America in the 1960s is all the proof one needs."

Philip Agee in his book "CIA Diary"

"In my 30 year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA."

Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit

"It isn't only Gestapo maniacs who do inhuman things to people. The CIA is responsible for doing inhuman things on a massive scale to people all over the world."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President's foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting "intelligence" justifying those activities... Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies.
... The Agency's task is to develop an intemational anti-communist ideology. The CIA then links every egalitarian political movement to the scourge of intemational communism. This then prepares the American people and many in the world community for the second stage, the destruction of those movements. For egalitarianism is the enemy and it must not be allowed to exist."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"President Truman authorized Allen Dulles to supervise the organization of the new agency (CIA). Dulles recruited almost exclusively the nation's elite: millionaire businessmen, Wall Street bankers and lawyers, members of the national news media, and Ivy League scholars. The new recruits included Desmond Fitzgerald, Tracy Barnes, and Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, three Harvard-trained Wall Street lawyers; Richard Bissell, a Yale economics professor; William F. Buckley, Jr., a Yale graduate and son of a prominent oil baron; Philip Graham, a Harvard graduate and future owner of the Washington Post ; William Colby, a graduate of Princeton and the Columbia Law School; and Richard Mellon Scaife, the principal heir to the Mellon banking, oil, and aluminum fortune.
... The first concern of the newly created Central Intelligence Agency was funding (since it had received no allocation in the federal budget), which would be solved with the implementation of the idea of Col. Paul E. Helliwell - the CIA could obtain funds by working with the Mafia to import heroin to supply the black community in America's ghettos... World War II had disrupted international shipping and imposed tight waterfront security that made smuggling heroin into the United States almost impossible. Heroin supplies were small and international crime syndicates had fallen into disarray. But opiates were becoming the rage of the jazz scene in Harlem, and the demand for heroin was increasing day by day among black musicians in New York... Selling heroin to the black jazz subculture would provide US intelligence with a steady supply of revenue for Gladio operations in Europe throughout the postwar era.
... The Truman Administration had set aside no funds for covert, postwar operations in the federal budget. And the availibility of funds would become the key weapon of the new agency. It alone could provide the means to purchase the services of foreign agents, foreign politicians, and foreign assassins without the approval of any elected official... The drug scheme would enable the CIA to make use of Charles "Lucky" Luciano and the Sicilian Mafia.
... During the summer of 1947, the terms of the working relationship between the CIA and the Mafia were ironed out."

Paul L. William in his book "Operation Gladio", 2015

"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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Brutal dictators such as the Shah of Iran in 1953, General Suharto in Indonesia in 1967, and Pinochet in Chile in 1973, were all installed in power by the CIA, and relied on American support and weapons to hold on to power. Their dependence on U.S. support all but guaranteed a friendly regime."

David Model in his book "Lying for Empire"

"If the Agency [CIA] actually reported the truth about the Third World, what would it say? It would say that the United States installs foreign leaders, arms their armies, and empowers their police all to help those leaders repress an angry, defiant people; that the CIA-empowered leaders represent only a small faction who kill, torture, and impoverish their own people to maintain their position of privilege."

Ralph McGehee in his book "Deadly Deceits"

"There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth."

John Pilger

"The Third World War is a war that has been fought by the United States against the Third World. It began when the CIA was founded in 1947 and continues today. 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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"In country after country, from Mexico and Honduras to Panama and Peru, the CIA helped set up or consolidate intelligence agencies that became forces of repression, and whose intelligence connections to other countries greased the way for illicit drug shipments."

Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their book "Cocaine Politics"

"The CIA's control of the MSM (mainstream media) is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., the coup in Ukraine, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner, drone murders, the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing - everything."

Edward Curtin, 2017

"Almost from the beginning, the CIA engaged not only in the collection of intelligence information, but also in covert operations which involved rigging elections and manipulating labor unions abroad, carrying on paramilitary operations, overturning governments, assassinating foreign officials, protecting former Nazis and lying to Congress."

former Senator George McGovern, 1987

"The CIA's involvement in planning assassinations goes back at least to 1954, when it prepared a manual for killings as part of a U.S.-run coup against the leftist government of Guatemala."

David Wise, 2009

"The CIA had developed a program to assassinate Congolese President Patrice Lumumba, The program they developed, the operation, didn't work. They didn't follow through on it. It was to give poison to Lumumba. And they couldn't find a setting in which to get the poison to him successfully in a way that it wouldn't appear to be a CIA operation. And so, they gave up on it. They got cold feet. And instead, they handled it by the chief of station talking to Mobutu about the threat that Lumumba posed, and Mobutu going out and killing Lumumba, having his men kill Lumumba."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"The CIA's involvement in the trafficking of heroin goes back to the predecessor organization OSS and its involvement with the Italian mafia, the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and Southern Italy. Later on when they were fighting communists in France, they got in tight with the Corsican brotherhood... As things changed in the world the CIA got involved with the Kuomintang types in Burma who were drug runners because they were resisting the drift towards communism there. The same thing happened later in Latin America.
Thanks to the CIA's assistance, Marseilles became the new center of the heroin industry. By 1951, the Corsican and Sicilian Mafias took control of the waterfront and opened their first opium refineries. The French connection to the Sicilian Mafia and the American crime family of Lucky Luciano had been established.
... From Marseilles, heroin was shipped on freighters to Cuba under CIA protection."

Victor Marchetti inhis book The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence

"Fifty years ago the CIA coined the term "conspiracy theory" as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcom X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line."

Edward Curtin, 2017

"Mounting numbers of victims, the millions of people whose lives have been trampled or splattered by CIA operations are increasingly cynical of America. Because of the CIA the world is a more dangerous place. Americans have reduced credibility. Worst of all, by retaining the CIA we are accepting ourselves as a harsh and ruthless people. It's the wrong game for a great nation."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"In every country, embassies are used for spying. So, it would be dumb for a country to put its real intelligence-gathering officers inside an embassy or consulate or attaché', because that is the first place a hosting nation is going to look for spies. So, the number one place the United States and other countries place their intelligence-gathering officers and informants is NGOs. In Russia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and elsewhere in the world, United States' NGOs - over 90% of them - are operations bases for the CIA."

Sibel Edmonds

"CIA Chief of CounterIntelligence James Jesus Angleton, assuming this post in 1954 under the guidance of Allen Dulles and Richard Helms, managed a 'second CIA' within the CIA.".. Angleton formed an extremely close relationship with the Mossad and David Ben-Gurion, and was fully aware of the Israeli Prime Minister's hatred for JFK. Angleton became so intimate with the Israelis that he even helped them develop their secret nuclear program, while the CIA and Mossad became as one in the Middle East - a virtually indistinguishable entity working in unison to carry out their mutual goals."

Michael Collins Piper

"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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any future global competitor... Our first objective is to prevent the emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere.
... The United States must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to overturn the established political and economic order... We must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.
Therefore it is of fundamental importance to preserve NATO as the primary channel for U.S. influence."

US Defense Planning Guidance, 1994-99

"The U.S.-NATO-Israel axis constitutes the most powerful military alliance in world history. America's allies are the NATO member states, NATO associate member States and partners under the Istanbul Initiative (including Israel), the Mediterranean Dialogue, the Partnership for Peace, and various other bilateral agreements (New Zealand, Australia, Colombia, Mongolia, Singapore). All in all, the U.S.-NATO-Israel military axis includes more than fifty countries."

Michel Chossudovsky in the book "The Global Economic Crisis"

"You make yourself ridiculous by thinking you can do anything. The world is divided in two. There are the communists on that side and on this side the free world. The Russians and the Americans, no one else. What are we. Americans. Behind me there is the government, behind the government is NATO, behind NATO is the U.S. You can't fight us, we are Americans."

inspector Basil Lambrou, speaking to prisoners before torturing them, during the US-supported Greek dictatorship in the 1960s

"The Clinton administration is revamping NATO and redefining its mission in order to make it an instrument of American world engagement as peacekeeper, peacemaker, and policeman."

William Pfaff, 1999

"The U.S.-NATO destruction of Yugoslavia established a precedent for military attack, cloaked in the disguise of democracy and human rights, against any sovereign country that might have the temerity to stand up to the encroachment of TNCs."

Social Justice magazine, 2000

"I didn't know the North Atlantic extended to Afghanistan. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is being turned into the French Foreign Legion for the White House."

Tony Benn, former member of British Partliament

"The NATO military alliance is a world encompassing threat. It is now conducting various forms of hybrid warfare against Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and most of Africa. They have destroyed directly or are largely responsible for the destruction of the USSR, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and too many to name in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Destruction is the fate that each nation on earth can expect unless it pays homage and obeisance to NATO's neo-feudal overlords who promise protection in return for national servitude, and for the complete surrender of their people and natural resources to increase the rate of profit for the capital that controls the NATO military machine."

Christopher Black, 2017

"Israel is expected to eventually join the European Union. The E.U.'s enlargement is tied into the process of NATO expansion. Israel and the E.U. will both manage, from an economic and political standpoint, the western outer periphery of the "Arc of Instability" under the framework of a Mediterranean Union.
The Mediterranean Union is tied to "energy security." It is a process towards the economic domination of the Mediterranean by the European Union.The balkanization of Lebanon and Syria serve the interests of Western energy corporations, amongst a host of other interests. The envisioned redrawn borders for the Middle East that are tied to the Mediterranean Union and the Project for the "New Middle East" are designed to secure energy corridors, "pacify" the region's population, and ultimately set the stage for the economic colonization of the new weaker states.
Israeli security concerns through the Yinon Plan would be integrated into the equation, but only because of the regional security role Tel Aviv serves for the U.S. and the European Union.
This process of dividing and economically absorbing is similar to the pattern imposed in the former Yugoslavia by the Franco-German entente and the Anglo-American alliance through the E.U. and NATO.
Brute force is being used as the muscle behind neo-liberal economic policies. NATO is playing a major role in enforcing the establishment of the Mediterranean Union and the creation of the "New Middle East.""

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, 2008

"The wars in Yugoslavia throughout the 1990s served as a justification for the continued existence of NATO in the world, and to expand American imperial interests in Eastern Europe.
... The war [Yugoslavia]-1990s] created a raison d'être for the continued existence of NATO in a post-Cold War world, as it desperately tried to justify its continued existence and desire for expansion."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2009

"A process of degeneration is well underway in the present day, led largely by the US and its coterie of allies among the NATO alliance and oil-rich Arab dictatorships. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen are but some of the evil fruit from the poison that is coursing through international relations."

Finian Cunningham , 2015

"A close look at the map of Eurasia began to suggest what was at stake for Washington in Eurasia. The goal was not only the strategic encirclement of Russia through a series of NATO bases... All of this had the overarching goal of enabling NATO to control energy routes and networks between Russia and the EU."

F. William Engdahl in his book "Full Spectrum Dominance"

"The U.S.-NATO military agenda serves to endorse a powerful business elite which relentlessly overshadows and undermines the functions of civilian government."

Michel Chossudovsky and Andrew Gavin Marshall in the book "The Global Economic Crisis"

"[The] North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and affilated and allied military blocs [are expandng] into and throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, Central and South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, Africa, the so-called Greater Middle East and beyond.
NATO is the first attempt in history to establish an aggressive global military formation, one which currently includes a third of the nations of the world either as members or partners, has members and partners on five continents and has conducted active operations on four, with the potential to expand its reach into the remaining two where it has not yet officially intruded itself."

Rick Rozoff

"NATO is the armed fist not only of the United States and its allies, but of the capitalists of those nations who are prepared to strike against any country, capitalist or socialist, that stands in their way of obtaining profit."

Christopher Black, 2017

"The main heroin supply routes from the NATO-dominated Afghanistan [are a] land heroin route through Turkey, Bulgaria, Kosovo or Bosnia, [and a] maritime heroin route via Mediterranean trade lines to the island of Corsica.
... How many tons of heroin were intercepted on merchant vessels in Mediterranean during more than ten years of the operation Active Endeavour? ... Not a single gram... In 2003-2009 155 merchant vessels were boarded and checked by NATO inspection teams. They did not find anything.
... Why is NATO is wasting stupendous resources on a purposeless operation [Operation Active Endeavor]? The answer is evident: both NATO's International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Active Endeavour are perfectly complying with their real mission: to ensure total control over production, transportation and distribution of illegal drugs."

www.voltairenet.org/, April1 , 2012

"The drug activities of the US - and the US-led NATO - are tightly linked with the NATO expansion and the creation of US military bases in the protectorates established along the drug-trafficking and pipeline routes."

by Elena Ponomareva

"Since the early 19th century, when the first European settlers began arriving in what was to become the western states of the United States of America, this has been an imperial nation, a conquering nation; annihilation of natives, acquisition, expansion, a society made safe for the freest of enterprise; belief in American "exceptionalism", a people providentially exempted from the dark side of human nature; all this in the American blood, the nation's myths, its songs, its national character."

William Blum in his book "Freeing the World to Death"

"Since the late 1940s, the United States has been deliberately engaged in an imperial project, and anyone who would hold the office of the presidency has to be willing to serve that end. All presidents have to promote the national security state, both domestically and in American foreign policy, if they wish to attain and hold on to power."

Morris Berman

"Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad. In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponents. With neo-colonialism neither is the case.

Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first postcolonial president

"Imperialism is the process whereby the dominant investor interests in one country bring to bear their economic and military power upon another nation or region in order to expropriate its land, labor, natural resources, capital, and markets-in such a manner as to enrich the investor interests. Empires do not just pursue "power for power's sake." There are real and enormous material interests at stake, fortunes to be made many times over."

Michael Parenti, 2010

"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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"For centuries the ruling interests of Western Europe and later on North America and Japan went forth with their financiers---and when necessary their armies---to lay claim to most of planet Earth, including the labor of indigenous peoples, their markets, their incomes (through colonial taxation or debt control or other means), and the abundant treasures of their lands: their gold, silver, diamonds, copper, rum, molasses, hemp, flax, ebony, timber, sugar, tobacco, ivory, iron, tin, nickel, coal, cotton, corn, and more recently: uranium, manganese, titanium, bauxite, oil.
... Empires are enormously profitable for the dominant economic interests of the imperial nation but enormously costly to the people of the colonized country. In addition to suffering the pillage of their lands and natural resources, the people of these targeted countries are frequently killed in large numbers by the intruders."

Michael Parenti, 2010

"If the structure of imperialism gives the United States the power to impose its will in many foreign locales, its institutions and intelligentsia will, as a matter of course, normalize and support the ensuing projection of power."

Edward S. Herman, 2002

"The United States has been inching toward imperialism and militarism for many years. Our leaders, disguising the direction they were taking, cloaked their foreign policies in euphemisms such as "lone superpower?' "indispensable nation?' "reluctant sheriff?' "humanitarian intervention?' and "globalization?' With the advent of the George W. Bush administration and particularly after the assaults of September 11, 2001, however, these pretenses gave way to assertions of the second coming of the Roman Empire."

Chalmers Johnson in his book "Sorrows of Empire"

"The primary goals of U.S. imperialism have always been to open up investment opportunities to U.S. corporations and to allow such corporations to gain preferential access to crucial natural resources."

John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney in the book "Pox Americana"

"The broader function of empire is simply imperialism. It's this kind of ideology that has grown up in the wake of the cold war, propounded quite openly by what we are calling neoconservatives in America, which identifies the United States as a colossus athwart the world, a new Rome, beyond good and evil. We no longer need friends. We don't need international law. Like the old Roman phrase, "It doesn't matter whether they love us or not, so long as they fear us." That's very much the ideology that's at work today."

Chalmers Johnson in the book "Hijacking Catastrophe"

"The U.S. has over 200 incidents in which it have put our troops into other countries to force them to our will."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"Tallying only the death toll inflicted by US. armed forces or U.S.-backed surrogate forces around the world, the estimates are as follows: 3,000,000 in Vietnam, 1,000,000 in Cambodia, 1,000,000 in Mozambique, 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia, 600,000 in Angola, 300,000 in Laos, 250,000 in East Timor, 200,000 in Iraq, 200,000 in Afghanistan, 150,000 in Guatemala, 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and tens of thousands in Chile, Argentina, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Somalia, South Yemen, Western Sahara, and other countries."

Michael Parenti in his book " Dirty Truths"

"Imperialism and militarism will ultimately breach the separation of powers created to prevent tyranny and defend liberty. The United States today, like the Roman Republic in the first century BC, is threatened by an out-of-control military-industrial complex and a huge secret government controlled exclusively by the president."

Chalmers Johnson in his book "Nemesis"

"There is a firm determination to maintain a world in which United States capitalism will feel at home. War in Indochina, the fantastic waste of vast military spending, the encouragement of assassinations of foreign leaders, support of reactionary regimes the world over, bribes and corruption, as well as the domestic repression necessary to maintain imperialism abroad - political trials of dissenters, FBI-CIA harassment of radicals, and wiretaps - are all the result of and testimony to the destructive nature of imperialism."

Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter in their book "Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy"

"The Roman Empire produced few exportable goods. Material innovation, whether through entrepreneurialism or technological advancement, all but ended long before the final dissolution of the Empire. Meanwhile the costs of military defense and the pomp of Emperors continued. Financial needs continued to increase, but the means of meeting them steadily eroded. In the end due to economic failure, even the armor of soldiers deteriorated and the weaponry of soldiers became so obsolete to the extent that the enemies of the Empire had better armor and weapons as well as larger forces. The decrepit social order offered so little to its subjects that many saw the barbarian invasion as liberation from onerous obligations to the ruling class."

Alfred Toynbee

"According to the Defense Department's 2007 Base Structure Report, we maintain 823 military facilities in 39 foreign countries, and another 86 facilities in seven U.S. territories."

Paul Waldman, 2008

"Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it's hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment."

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, 2009

"The West is habituated to the idea that the world is its world; that the international community is its community; that international institutions are its institutions; that the world currency - namely the dollar - is its currency; that universal values are its values; that world history is its history; and that the world's language - namely English - is its language. The assumption has been that the adjective 'Western' naturally and implicitly belongs in front of each important noun. That will no longer be the case."

Martin Jacques in his book "When China Rules the World"

"Business people manipulate political and social movements, including terrorists and counterterrorists, through instruments like the CIA, so they can make more money. The police keep resistant poor and black neighborhoods in lockdown. The FBI manipulates lost, insecure, and even intellectually disabled individuals into attempting acts of terrorism, which they then jump in to prevent. The CIA conducts false flag operations all over the world to enhance public fear of terrorists, even as they arm and train them in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow elected governments."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"The UN plays a very important role. But if we don't like it, we always have the option of following our own national security interests, which I assure you we will do if we don't like what's going on."

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in an interview in 1998

"Since the end of world War II the United States has:
* endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;'
* grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries
* attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
* dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
* attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world), in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands."

William Blum

"Washington desperately needs to stop the rollback of American power, stop the erosion of the dollar, block the economic integration of Eurasia and Latin America, keep Russia from trading amicably with Euripe. It will do anything to maintain its grip. All of its remote wars in far-off savage lands, of no importance to America or Americans, are to this purpose. A militarized America threatens Russia, threatens China, threatens Iran, threatens North Korea, threatens Venezuela, expands NATO, on and on.
America has been hijacked."

Fred Reed, 2018

"The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful. "

Vice-President Dick Cheney - West Point lecture, June 2002

"A process of degeneration is well underway in the present day, led largely by the US and its coterie of allies among the NATO alliance and oil-rich Arab dictatorships. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen are but some of the evil fruit from the poison that is coursing through international relations."

Finian Cunningham , 2015

"US Special Operations Forces are deployed in 132 countries.
... America's empire is built of 800 bases in more than 70 countries and territories.
... More than 73% of the world's dictators are currently being sponsored through the military assistance provided by US taxpayers."

Martin Berger, 2018

"While securing corporate control over extensive oil reserves and pipeline routes along the Eurasian corridor on behalf of the AngloAmerican oil giants, Washington's ultimate objective is to eventually destabilize and then colonize both China and Russia. This means the takeover of their national financial systems and the control over monetary policy, leading eventually to the imposition of the US dollar as the national currency."

Michel Chossudovsky, 2005

"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States."

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996

"For the world as a whole, the CIA has now become the bogey that communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it. Our phobia about the CIA is, no doubt, as fantastically excessive as America's phobia about world communism; but in this case, too, there is just enough convincing guidance to make the phobia genuine. In fact, the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world's eyes. Today America has become the nightmare."

Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, quoted in the New York Times of May 7, 1971

"We first fought in the name of religion, then Communism, and now in the name of drugs and terrorism. Our excuses for global domination always change."

Serj Tankian

"U.S. and Western imperialism is the root cause of the "refugee crisis". Everyday men, women, and children are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. and Western-backed militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, European and North American mining and oil conglomerates in Central and Western Africa, or are starved to death in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Arab blockade of the country. Until the genocidal aims of U.S. imperialism, with the support of Canada, Australia, the European Union, and regional allies, are defeated, the "war on terror" will continue to make life too unbearable for working people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to remain in their home countries."

T.J. Petrowski, 2015

"The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the "axis of evil" countries: Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century. Welcome to the brave new era of permanent war."

Jacques R. Pauwels, 2003

"What's the point of having this superb military that you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

Madeline Albright, Secretary of State under Bill Clinton

"By one estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.
There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.
... Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war."

Philip Giraldi, 2015

"The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales ... controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008... with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position."

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch, 2009

"In the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria, America has destroyed any significant progress those nations had made in education, healthcare, infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity, postal services, courts. By degrading the standards of living for people in perceived "hostile" nations, America's ruling elite empowers itself, while claiming that it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are "humanitarian" and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"The US government has not publicly identified - nor even estimated - the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans and Syrians it has killed, or caused to be killed, during its invasions, occupations, and CIA-led insurgencies. Neither is anyone in the media publicly counting the number of Muslims the US has killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, driven into poverty and despair, and/or condemned to disease and insanity.
... US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars - the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives -out of the press and away from the public's consciousness, in order to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American "exceptionalism."

Guy Debord

"The "Anglo-American axis" in defense and foreign policy is the driving force behind the military operations in Central Asia and Middle East. This rapprochement between London and Washington is consistent with the integration of British and American business interests in the areas of banking, oil and the defense industry."

Michel Chossudovsky in his book " America's War on Terrorism"

"Yes, over 100 people died in Paris (November 2015). While thousands are dying in Yemen, every month... While 17,000 already vanished in Iran - victims of West-sponsored terrorism... While hundreds of thousands have been dying in Libya and Syria... While millions have been dying in Somalia and Iraq... While some 10 millions already died in a looted and raped DRC (the Democratic Republic of Congo) ... All of them victims of Western assaults and banditry or of Western-sponsored terrorism directly."

Andre Vltchek, 2015

"Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and part of Syria. Washington has enabled Saudi Arabia's attack on Yemen, Ukraine's attack on its former Russian provinces, and Israel's destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2016

"America is the most destructive nation in history. We have overthrown more than 50 foreign governments, we have attempted to assassinate or have assassinated more than 50 foreign leaders, we have bombed more than 35 countries, we have interfered in the elections of dozens of countries."

William Blum

THE BENEFICIARIES

"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it."

George Orwell

"The military-industrial complex, the big bankers and the transnationals are the ones that really govern in the United States."

Eva Golinger, 2008

MILITARY-CORPORATE-INTELLIGENCE-MEDIA COMPLEX

"Like all members of the military profession, I never had an original thought until I left the service. My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military service."

General Smedley Butler

"So important did military spending and the military-industrial sector become during World War II and the Cold War that they have become fundamental to the U.S. economy, U.S. economic growth and above all U.S. technological development. Despite its often almost incredible wastefulness and corruption, this military spending has also been in some ways a kind of unacknowledged but rather successful state industrial development strategy in a country whose free market ideology meant that it could not formally adopt or admit to such a strategy."

David Edwards - Burning All Illusions

"My guess is that, like it or not, or want it or not, we are going to go to war because that is the only solution Bush and his people can see. The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in our lives .... And before it is all over, democracy, noble and delicate as it is, may give way .... Indeed, democracy is the special condition ... we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already."

Norman Mailer

"Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as human subjects in the 1940s to test two chemical agents, mustard gas and lewisite [blister gas]. Most of these subjects were not informed of the nature of the experiments and never received medical follow-up after their participation in the research. Additionally, some of these human subjects were threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if they discussed these experiments with anyone, including their wives, parents, and family doctors. For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research had taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many veterans who became ill after the secret testing."

a report of the US Congress, 1994

"I would only hope that anyone considering joining the military today ... realize that they have a higher calling than serving their country: to restore faith in our system of governance, before they make themselves ready to fight and kill and die in the United States of America, knowing that they may end up dying for a lie."

Adam Kokesh, with the Marine Corps civil affairs unit, 2008

"War is largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know--I've been in eleven of these expeditions."

General Smedley Butler, 1931

"We in the U.S. military are held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don't, to make it right again ... And it's why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people, months, if not years. It doesn't matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn't matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn't even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it ... Lose the people's trust, and we lose the war ... I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion."

General Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 2009

"If we had a draft - or merely the threat of a draft - we would not be in Iraq or Afghanistan. But we don't have a draft so it's safe for most of the nation to be mindless about waging war. Other people's children are going to the slaughter."

Bob Herbert , New York Times, August 25, 2009

"in our lifetimes, the American military establishment has virtually become an autonomous system. It is today an entirely mercenary-voluntary-force increasingly separate from all but the transnational corporate interests it protects."

William F. Pepper in his book "An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"

"Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peace time, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of ploughshares could, with time as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every state house, and every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted; only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

President Dwight Eisenhower's Farewell Address, 1961

"It is no longer a question of controlling a military-industrial complex, but rather, of keeping the United States from becoming a totally military culture."

Jerome Weisner, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"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."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"President Dwight Eisenhower, in his Farewell Address, January 17, 1961 was originally planning to describe the phenomenon as the 'Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex', however, 'Congressional' was dropped from the speech at the last minute, and it was simply referred to as the 'Military-Industrial Complex'."

Phillip F. Nelson, LBJ: The Mastermind of JFK's Assassination, 2010

"The military-industrial complex warmly welcomed the wars against Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq as good for business. Actions just short of war, such as bombings and missile strikes, are also giant bazaars for selling the wares of the armaments manufacturers."

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

"The armed forces have embedded themselves so deeply into the country that they have almost become the country. America is little more than a funding mechanism for what may be called the military-industrial-intelligence-media-Israeli complex. Some of these entities belong to the military (NSA). Some depend on it (Lockheed-Martin). Some use it to their own ends (Israel), But the military is the central infection from which the other symptoms flow. Congress? A storefront, a subcommittee of the Knesset. Factories, jobs, contracts, towns depend on military spending. "

Fred Reed, 2018

"Those in power are blind devotees to private enterprise. They accept that degree of socialism implicit in the vast subsidies to the military-industrial-complex, but not that type of socialism which maintains public projects for the disemployed and the unemployed alike."

William O.Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice from 1939-1975

"The military-industrial complex has become a rich source of' places to "retire" for high-ranking military officers, just as many executives of defense contractors receive appointments as high-ranking officials in the Pentagon. This "circulation of elites" tends to undercut attempts at congressional oversight of either the Defense Department or defense contractors. The result is an almost total loss of accountability for public money spent on military projects of any sort."

Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

"The military-industrial complex is a vast cesspool of mismanagement, waste, and transgressions not only bordering on but often entering deeply into criminal conduct. The great arms firms have managed to slough off much of the normal risks of doing business in a genuine market, passing on many of their excessive costs to the taxpayers while still realizing extraordinary rates of return on investment."

Robert Higgs, a senior fellow in political economy at the Independent Institute

"During the Harry Truman administration the military-industrial complex insisted on, and got, a permanent war economy - one that generates vast wealth for American defense contractors."

Morris Berman, Dark Ages America

"The Pentagon has long had a conflict of interest. The Department of Defense builds the weapons of war. Yet the department also supervises and funds 85 percent of the intelligence effort to identify threats that those weapons, at least theoretically, are designed to counter. Thus, political pressure for more business from states and congressional districts containing defense industries leads the U.S. government to inflate external threats to justify ever greater defense spending.
The Pentagon helps generate such political pressure by distributing defense contracts and subcontracts, not on the basis of the best or most efficient defense companies, but to companies in as many states and congressional districts as possible.
Such is the way the military-industrial complex - identified by president and former general Dwight Eisenhower - works."

Ivan Eland, 2008

"The iron triangle of the air force, Congress, and the military-industrial complex, sanctified by the high-tech jobs it offers to American workers, is driving our country toward bankruptcy. For some, it is tempting to continue the lucrative practice of buying arcane space technologies that do not work - missile defenses, for example - simply because it keeps people employed. Meanwhile, our democracy is undercut by members of Congress who use the lavish "campaign contributions" they receive - bribes by any other name - to buy elections. The only public business these bought- and-paid-for congressmen attend to is providing a legal veneer for munitions makers' unquestioned access to the tax venues of the government."

Chalmers Johnson in his book Nemesis

"The military/industrial/governmental complex is perfectly positioned to profit handsomely from both the endless war on terror and the privatization of public resources, with nary a complaint from government officials and next to no meaningful media coverage of the long term ramifications of such 'profit centers'."

Geraldine Perry, 2009

"Since 1945, what you call the military-industrial complex has been a terribly important vehicle in American development. It has been the center of what we call military Keynesianism. It's the one sector where deficit financing was thoroughly permitted, and it was the one sector under Reagan that expanded immensely and has never been let go of, in spite of the end of the Cold War."

David Harvey, 2009

"In the summer of 1963, the leaders of the military-industrial complex could see storm clouds on their horizon. After JFK's American University address and his quick signing of the Test Ban Treaty with Khrushchev, corporate power holders saw the distinct prospect in the not distant future of a settlement in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
... In [the] direction of U.S.-Soviet disarmament lay the diminished power of a corporate military system that for years had controlled the United States government. In his turn toward peace, Kennedy was beginning to undermine the dominant power structure that Eisenhower had finally identified and warned against so strongly as he left the White House."

James Douglass, author of the book 'JFK and the Unspeakable

"The congressional-military-industrial complex has enormous power that is basically unchecked. It has become a real and constant danger to this country, certainly to the democratic republic that we like to think we are."

Lawrence Wilkerson, 2009

"Retired senior officers with financial ties to the military-industrial complex teamed up with the Pentagon to sell the case for war on the major news networks. Ultimately, the rottenest apples are at the top of the barrel, and that's certainly the case in the military. The men involved in the military analyst program were, by and large, retired generals, many of them retired four-stars. They were sending American kids into harm's way to line their own pockets."

Jeff Huber, 2009

"By the year 2000, the warning of President Dwight Eisenhower about the power of the military-industrial complex was all too real. In our lifetimes, the American military establishment has virtually become an autonomous system. It is today an entirely mercenary - voluntary - force increasingly separate from all but the transnational corporate interests it protects."

William F. Pepper in his book An Act of State - the Execution of Martin Luther King, 2003

"President Dwight Eisenhower warned of the increasing power and influence of the military industrial complex and it seems his worst fears have come true. He believed in a strong national defense, but warned that the building up of permanent military and weapons industries could prove dangerous if their influence got out of hand. After all, if you make your money on war, peace does you no good. With trillions of dollars at stake, there is tremendous incentive to keep the decision makers fearful of every threat in the world, real or imagined, present or future, no matter how ridiculous and far-fetched."

Ron Paul, 2009

"An evolving military-industrial complex, a partnership of interlocking government and corporate networks, has used public wealth to enrich itself. The manufacturing part of this complex rarely produces anything people live in, wear, or eat - armaments do not meet civilian needs. In fact, there exists a dramatic gulf between a healthy economy and a social order based on military spending."

Saul Landau and Nelson P. Valdes, 2010

"I have grave difficulty believing that that any president can bring under control the Pentagon, the secret intelligence agencies, the military-industrial complex. The Department of Defense is not, today, a department of defense. It's an alternative seat of government on the south bank of the Potomac River. And, typical of militarism, it's expanding into many, many other areas in our life that we have, in our traditional political philosophy, reserved for civilians."

Chalmers Johnson, 2010

"Washington has a vested interest in preserving the status quo, no matter how much it costs or where it leads. For the military-industrial complex, there are contracts to win and buckets of money to be made. For those who dwell in the bowels of the national security state, there are prerogatives to protect. For elected officials, there are campaign contributors to satisfy. For appointed officials, civilian and military, there are ambitions to be pursued."

Andrew Bacevich, 2010

"Because of the enormous dollar potential of the war in Vietnam to the great military-industrial complex of the United States and because of other threats to the power elite, it had become absolutely necessary, for them, to bring about a coup d'etat (JFK assassination) on the streets of Dallas."

L. Fletcher Prouty, JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, 1996

"The military-industrial complex today finances and dominates both political parties, as well as dominating our international policy."

Peter Dale Scott, 2011

"President Eisenhower recognized that the United States was turning into a military-industrial-congressional dominated national security state. And the Republicans have cheered that transmogrification. They've gained their political power from helping it move in the right direction when it needs to be moved. The Republican Party leadership live, drink, breath and sleep the military-industrial complex. They love war because it keeps them in power."

Lawrence Wilkerson

"The ideology that military activities may become a profitable enterprise leads to the realization that peace is the main enemy of the military-industrial complex. The military-industrial complex would be put out of business by lasting peaceful conditions because the development, production, marketing and use of military equipment would be not needed."

Julie Lévesque, 2014

"'Controlled' wars tend to safeguard the fortunes of war profiteers and beneficiaries of military spending - mainly the military-security-industrial complex and major banks."

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, 2014

"The ability of private military companies who profit massively from war to finance elections, lobby the government and manipulate public opinion represents a dangerous evolution of the military-industrial complex."

Jeremy Kuzmarov, 2014

"Today only the US armed forces are capable of backing the dollar, and their primary function is to make sure that there is continued demand for them. America's classical military-industrial complex was long ago transformed into a military-banking complex."

Valentin Katasonov, 2015

"American leadership is ruthlessly pursuing immoral wars all over the world with the intent of creating outside enemies to focus public anger on, as a conscious diversion away from the criminality happening domestically. As an added bonus, the intelligence-military-industrial complex makes an incredible sum of money. The end result: serfs are distracted with inane nationalistic fervor, while the "elites" earn billions."

Michael Krieger, 2015

"Once the Cold War ended, the ruling class sought enemies to keep their military-industrial complex and Wall Street financiers enriched and happy. 9/11 was used to further that agenda, as the war on terror will never end. Perpetual conflict is a chief goal of the establishment. Both parties continue to promote war and increase the profits of the military-industrial complex."

blacklistednews.com, 2015

"Continuing small wars (or the threat thereof) are essential for the corporate component of the military-industrial-congressional complex. These companies have no alternative means to survive."

former Pentagon insider Franklin C. "Chuck" Spinney

"The American citizenry has no say over the military-industrial complex, which is autonomous and out of control. If the Complex wants war with Russia or China, we will have war with Russia or China.
The military-industrial complex drives foreign policy, and in directions of no benefit to America or Americans.
We are being forced to pay through the nose for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls."

Fred Reed, 2018

"The normal profits of a business concern in the United States are six, eight, ten, and sometimes even twelve per cent. But wartime profits, that is another matter - twenty, sixty, one hundred, three hundred, and even eighteen hundred per cent-the sky is the limit. All that the traffic will bear. Uncle Sam has the money. Let's get it.
Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulder to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket-and are safely pocketed."

General Smedley Butler, 1936

"The real motives behind most of U.S foreign policy as measured by the kinds of countries U.S. Ieaders support and the kinds of countries or political movements they try to destroy is to keep the world safe for the Fortune 500. To make sure that the transnational corporations and international global finance capital continues to control the land, labor, resources, and markets of most of the world, and ultimately, all of the world on terms that are extremely favorable to them. The goal is to destroy, to obliterate, to thwart any social movement or national leader who is trying for an alternative way of using the land, the labor, the natural resources, the markets, the capital of his or her country."

Michael Parenti

"U.S. foreign policy is largely directed towards serving the transnational corporations."

James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer in their book "Globalization Unmasked"

"The corporate-dominated economy and the transnational corporate state had consolidated its power over almost every aspect of public and private life, and under a formal globalization movement the transnational corporations were extending their tentacles all over the planet.
Footsoldiers like Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the ever-dutiful Bush family, Helmut Kohl, and a list of Japanese leaders had diligently kept the faith. Working with the timeworn International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and ultimately with the new engine of globalization, the World Trade Organization, they ensured that the interests of capital were nowhere endangered by the needs of the world's three billion poor to eat, have shelter, clothing, sanitation, medical care, and education."

William F. Pepper in his book "An Act of State: the Execution of Martin Luther King"

"This empire that we've created really has an emperor, and it's not the president of this country. it doesn't really matter whether we have a Democrat or a Republican in the White House or running Congress; the empire goes on, because it's really run by what I call the corporatocracy, which is a group of men who run our biggest corporations. This isn't a conspiracy theory. They don't need to conspire. They all know what serves their best interest. But they really are the equivalent of the emperor, because they do not serve at the wish of the people, they're not democratically elected, they don't serve any limited term. They essentially answer to no one, except their own boards, and most corporate CEOs actually run their boards, rather than the other way around. And they are the power behind this."

John Perkins, 2007

"It is in the interest of the corporate elites to accept dissent and protest as a feature of the system inasmuch as they do not threaten the established social order. The purpose is not to repress dissent, but, on the contrary, to shape and mould the protest movement, to set the outer limits of dissent. To maintain their legitimacy, the economic elites favor limited and controlled forms of opposition To be effective, however, the process of "manufacturing dissent" must be carefully regulated and monitored by those who are the object of the protest movement "

Michel Chossudovsky, 2010

"Ronald Reagan .. was most definitely a global empire builder, a servant of the corporatocracy... He would cater to the men who shuttled back and forth from corporate CEO offices to bank boards and into the halls of government. He would serve the men who appeared to serve him but who in fact ran the government - men like Vice President George H. W. Bush, Secretary of State George Shultz, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Richard Cheney, Richard Helms, and Robert McNamara. He would advocate what those men wanted: an America that controlled the world and all its resources, a world that answered to the commands of that America, a U.S. military that would enforce the rules as they were written by America, and an international trade and banking system that supported America as CEO of the global empire."

John Perkins in his book "Confessions of Economic Hit Man"

THE BANKERS

"War is largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know, I've been in eleven of these expeditions."

General Smedley Butler, 1931

"During the past two centuries when the peoples of the world were gradually winning their political freedom from the dynastic monarchies, the major banking families of Europe and America were actually reversing the trend by setting up new dynasties of political control through the formation of international financial combines. These banking dynasties had learned that all governments must have sources of revenue from which to borrow in times of emergency. They had also learned that by providing such funds from their own private resources, they could make both kings and democratic leaders tremendously subservient to their will."

Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"Nothing drives government deeply into debt like a war; and it has not been an uncommon practice among international bankers to finance both sides of the bloodiest military conflicts."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"The goal is control. They [international banking cartel] want all of us enslaved to debt, they want all of our governments enslaved to debt, and they want all of our politicians addicted to the huge financial contributions that they funnel into their campaigns. Since the elite also own all of the big media companies, the mainstream media never lets us in on the secret that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way that our system works."

Karen Hudes was Senior Counsel in the legal department of the World Bank for more than 20 years

"What is really going on is that the world's resources are being dominated by this an international banking cartel."

Karen Hudes was Senior Counsel in the legal department of the World Bank for more than 20 years

"The merchant bankers of London had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the London money market... In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other."

Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation. To depart from mere generalizations, let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes.
They practically control both parties, write political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.
These international bankers and Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection."

New York City Mayor John F. Hylan during a speech, 1922

"The influence of financial capitalism and of the international bankers who created it was exercised both on business and on governments, but could have done neither if it had not been able to persuade both these to accept two "axioms" of its own ideology. Both of these were based on the assumption that politicians were too weak and too subject to temporary popular pressures to be trusted with control of the money, system; accordingly, the sanctity of all values and the soundness of money must be protected in two ways: by basing the value of money on gold and by allowing bankers to control the supply of money."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"International bankers created the central banks of the world (including the Federal Reserve), and they use those central banks to get the governments of the world ensnared in endless cycles of debt from which there is no escape. Government debt is a way to "legitimately" take money from all of us, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy."

Michael Snyder, 2013

"The substantive financial powers of the world were in the hands of investment bankers (also called "international" or "merchant" bankers) who remained largely behind the scenes in their own unincorporated private banks. These formed a system of international cooperation and national dominance which was more private, more powerful, and more secret than that of their agents in the central banks. This dominance of investment bankers was based on their control over the flows of credit and investment funds in their own countries and throughout the world. They could dominate the financial and industrial systems of their own countries by their influence over the flow of current funds through bank loans, the discount rate, and the re-discounting of commercial debts; they could dominate governments by their control over current government loans and the play of the international exchanges. Almost all of this power was exercised by the personal influence and prestige of men who had demonstrated their ability in the past to bring off successful financial coupes to keep their word, to remain cool in a crisis, and to share their winning opportunities with their associates. In this system the Rothschilds had been preeminent during much of the nineteenth century, but, at the end of that century, they were being replaced by J. P. Morgan whose central office was in New York, although it was always operated as if it were in London."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The Four Horsemen of Banking [Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup] own the Four Horsemen of Oil [Shell, Chevron, British Petroleum, Exxon] , in tandem with Deusche Bank, Banque Paribas, Barclays and other European old money behemoths... These same Four Horsemen of Banking are also among the top 10 stock holders of virtually every Fortune 500 corporation. "

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"In the United States, five banks control half the economy: JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and Goldman Sachs Group collectively held $8.5 trillion in assets at the end of 2011, which equals roughly 56% of the U.S. economy. This data was according to central bankers at the Federal Reserve. In 2007, the assets of the largest banks amounted to 43% of the U.S. economy."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2012

"In the period up to 1931, bankers, especially the Money Power controlled by the international investment bankers, were able to dominate both business and government. They could dominate business, especially in activities and in areas where industry could not finance its own needs for capital, because investment bankers had the ability to supply or refuse to supply such capital."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"International financier Paul Warburg masterminded establishment of the Federal Reserve to put control over nation's economy in hands of international bankers. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply, which allows manipulators to create alternate cycles of boom and bust, ie., a roller coaster economy. This allows those in the know to make fabulous amounts of money, but even more important, allows the insiders to control the economy and further centralize power in the federal government."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"[The] period, 1884-1933, was the period of financial capitalism in which investment bankers moving into commercial banking and insurance on one side and into railroading and heavy industry on the other were able to mobilize enormous wealth and wield enormous economic, political, and social power. Popularly known as "Society," or the "400," they lived a life of dazzling splendor.
... The influence of these business leaders was so great that the Morgan and Rockefeller groups acting together, or even Morgan acting alone, could have wrecked the economic system of the country merely by throwing securities on the stock market for sale, and, having precipitated a stock-market panic, could then have bought back the securities they had sold but at a lower price. Naturally, they were not so foolish as to do this, although Morgan came very close to it in precipitating the "panic of 1907."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"This world is not run by the Presidents or the Prime Ministers. It is run by the global corporations and the banks. For it is these entities that control the money supply and it is these entities that decide which country lives or falls."

the dailybell.com

"The power of investment bankers over governments rests on a number of factors, of which the most significant, perhaps, is the need of governments to issue short-term treasury bills as well as long-term government bonds. Just as businessmen go to commercial banks for current capital advances to smooth over the discrepancies between their irregular and intermittent incomes and their periodic and persistent outgoes (such as monthly rents, annual mortgage payments, and weekly wages), so a government has to go to merchant bankers (or institutions controlled by them) to tide over the shallow places caused by irregular tax receipts."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"Eventually international bankers actually owned as private corporations the central banks of the various European nations. The Bank of England, Bank of France and Bank of Germany were not owned by their respective governments, as almost everyone imagines, but were privately owned monopolies granted by the heads of state, usually in return for loans."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"The merchant bankers of London had already at hand in 1810-1850 the Stock Exchange, the Bank of England, and the London money market when the needs of advancing industrialism called all of these into the industrial world which they had hitherto ignored. In time they brought into their financial network the provincial banking centers, organized as commercial banks and savings banks, as well as insurance companies, to form all of these into a single financial system on an international scale which manipulated the quantity and flow of money so that they were able to influence, if not control, governments on one side and industries on the other. The men who did this, looking backward toward the period of dynastic monarchy in which they had their own roots, aspired to establish dynasties of international bankers and were at least as successful at this as were many of the dynastic political rulers. The greatest of these dynasties, of course, were the descendants of Meyer Amschel Rothschild (1743-1812) of Frankfort, whose male descendants, for at least two generations, generally married first cousins or even nieces. Rothschild's five sons, established at branches in Vienna, London, Naples, and Paris, as well as Frankfort, cooperated together in ways which other international banking dynasties copied but rarely excelled."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC), remains the largest and least controlled clearinghouse bank for the opium trade.

John Coleman in his book "Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300"

"In addition to their power over government based on government financing and personal influence, bankers could steer governments in ways they wished them to go by other pressures. Since most government officials felt ignorant of finance, they sought advice from bankers whom they considered to be experts in the field. The history of the last century shows that the advice given to governments by bankers, like the advice they gave to industrialists, was consistently good for bankers, but was often disastrous for governments, businessmen, and the people generally. Such advice could be enforced if necessary by manipulation of exchanges, gold flows, discount rates, and even levels of business activity."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The bankers control the world's major corporations, media, intelligence agencies, think tanks, foundations and universities."

Henry Makow

"In the Bolshevik Revolution we have some of the world's richest and most powerful men financing a movement which claims its very existence is based on the concept of stripping of their wealth, men like the Rothschids, Rockefellers, Schiffs, Warburgs, Morgans, Harrimans, and Milners. But obviously these men have no fear of international Communism. It is only logical to assume that if they financed it and do not fear it, it must be because they control it."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"It is in the pecuniary interests of the international bankers to centralize political power - and this centralization can best be achieved within a collectivist society, such as socialist Russia, national socialist Germany, or a Fabian socialist United States.
There can be no full understanding and appreciation of twentieth-century American politics and foreign policy without the realization that this financial elite effectively monopolizes Washington policy."

Antony C. Sutton in his book "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

"The Warburgs, Kuhn Loebs, Goldman Sachs, Schiffs and Rothschilds have intermarried into one big happy banking family. The Warburg family - which controls Deutsche Bank and BNP- tied up with the Rothschilds in 1814 in Hamburg, while Kuhn Loeb powerhouse Jacob Schiff shared quarters with Rothschilds in 1785. Schiff immigrated to America in 1865. He joined forces with Abraham Kuhn and married Solomon Loeb's daughter. Loeb and Kuhn married each others sisters and the Kuhn Loeb dynasty was consummated. Felix Warburg married Jacob Schiff's daughter. Two Goldman daughters married two sons of the Sachs family, creating Goldman Sachs. In 1806 Nathan Rothschild married the oldest daughter of Levi Barent Cohen, a leading financier in London."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"The structure of financial controls created by the tycoons of 'Big Banking' and 'Big Business'... was of extraordinary complexity, one business fief being built on another, both being allied with semi-independent associates, the whole rearing upward into two pinnacles of economic and political power, of which one, centered in New York, was headed by J. P. Morgan and Company and the other, in Ohio, was headed by the Rockefeller family. When the two cooperated, as they generally did, they could influence the economic life of the country to a large degree and could almost control its political life, at least at the Federal level. They caused the "panic of 1907" and the collapse of two railroads, one in 1914 and the other in 1929."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"In foreign affairs the Council on Foreign Relations, superficially an innocent forum for academics, businessmen, and politicians, contains within its shell, perhaps unknown to many of its members, a power center that unilaterally determines U.S. foreign policy. The major objective of this submerged - and obviously subversive - foreign policy is the acquisition of markets and economic power (profits, if you will), for a small group of giant multi-nationals under the virtual control of a few banking investment houses and controlling families."

Antony C. Sutton in his book "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

"There is a special breed of international financiers whose success typically is built upon certain character traits. Those include cold objectivity, immunity to patriotism, and indifference to the human condition. That profile is the basis for proposing a theoretical strategy, called the Rothschild Formula, which motivates such men to propel governments into war for the profits they yield... As long as the mechanism of central banking exists, it will be to such men an irresistible temptation to convert debt into perpetual war and war into perpetual debt."

G. Edward Griffin in his book "The Creature from Jekyll Island"

"CPA Thomas D. Schauf states that ten banks control all twelve Federal Reserve Bank branches. He names N.M. Rothschild of London, Rothschild Bank of Berlin, Warburg Bank of Hamburg, Warburg Bank of Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers of New York, Lazard Brothers of Paris, Kuhn Loeb Bank of New York, Israel Moses Seif Bank of Italy, Goldman Sachs of New York and JP Morgan Chase Bank of New York."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through the process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."

American's Banker Association, 1924

"In the latter half of the 1800s European financiers were in favor of an American Civil War that would return the United States to its colonial status.
The Civil War, lasted from 1861 until 1865 ... during which, Congress also set up a national bank, putting the government into partnership with the banking interests, guaranteeing their profits."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research

"Our global banking system is a global cartel, a "super-entity" in which the world's major banks all own each other and own the controlling shares in the world's largest multinational corporations.
... This is the real "free market," a highly profitable global banking cartel, functioning as a worldwide financial Mafia."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2012

"The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over [Including Washington]. In country after country, they have looted national economies at the expense of local populations, consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion ­ the top economic one-tenth of one percent is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore accounts."

David DeGraw, 2011

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in inequity and born in sinBankers own the earth. Take it away from them but leave them the power to create money, and, with a flick of a pen, they will create enough money to buy it back againTake this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live inBut, if you want to continue to be the slaves of bankers and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit."

Sir Josiah Stamp (1880-1941), President of the Bank of England in the 1920_s, the second richest man in Britain, speaking at the Commencement Address of the University of Texas in 1927

"The real menace of our republic is the invisible government, which, like a giant octopus, sprawls its slimy length over our city, state and nation. At the head is a small group of banking houses generally referred to as 'international bankers.' This little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run our government for their own selfish ends."

John F. Hylan, 1922, Mayor of New York, in a speech

"The world's money-lenders became experts at parasitic high finance and got rich through the explosive growth of fractional reserve banking. These people have dominated the economies of nations through such institutions as the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and other central and commercial banks, currency and commodity exchanges, and stock and bond markets.
... The bankers on the one hand and the political racketeers on the other merged over a century ago under the oversight of figures associated with the creation of the Anglo-American Empire, such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Alfred Milner, Colonel Mandell House, Winston Churchill, the House of Windsor, and the Rothschilds, Schiffs, Morgans, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Myers, and Bushes."

Richard C. Cook, 2008

"The big bankers of the world, who practice the terrorism of money, are more powerful than kings and field marshals, even more than the Pope of Rome himself. They never dirty their hands. They kill no one: they limit themselves to applauding the show.
Their officials, international technocrats, rule our countries: they are neither presidents nor ministers, they have not been elected, but they decide the level of salaries and public expenditure, investments and divestments, prices, taxes, interest rates, subsidies, when the sun rises and how frequently it rains."

Eduardo Galeano

"International investment bankers took seats on the boards of directors of industrial firms, as they had already done on commercial banks, savings banks, insurance firms, and finance companies. From these lesser institutions they funneled capital to enterprises which yielded control and away from those who resisted. These firms were controlled through interlocking directorships, holding companies, and lesser banks. They engineered amalgamations and generally reduced competition, until by the early twentieth century many activities were so monopolized that they could raise their noncompetitive prices above costs to obtain sufficient profits to become self-financing.
But before that stage was reached a relatively small number of bankers were in positions of immense influence in European and American economic life."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"While wars and revolutions have been useful to international bankers in gaining or increasing control over governments, the key to such control has always been control of money. You can control a government if you have it in your debt; a creditor is in a position to demand the privileges of monopoly from the sovereign. Money-seeking governments have granted monopolies in state banking, natural resources, oil concessions and transportation. However, the monopoly which the international financiers most covet is control over a nation's money."

Gary Allen in his book "None Dare Call It Conspiracy"

"Hundreds of years ago, bankers began to specialize, with the richer and more influential ones associated increasingly with foreign trade and foreign-exchange transactions. Since these were richer and more cosmopolitan and increasingly concerned with questions of political significance, such as stability and debasement of currencies, war and peace, dynastic marriages, and worldwide trading monopolies, they became the financiers and financial advisers of governments.
Moreover, since their relationships with governments were always in monetary terms and not real terms, and since they were always obsessed with the stability of monetary exchanges between one country's money and another, they used their power and influence to do two things: (1) to get all money and debts expressed in terms of a strictly limited commodity-ultimately gold; and (2) to get all monetary matters out of the control of governments and political authority, on the ground that they would be handled better by private banking interests."

Carroll Quigley, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"On September 1, 1894, we will not renew our loans under any consideration. On September 1st we will demand our money. We will foreclose and become mortgagees in possession. We can take two-thirds of the farms west of the Mississippi, and thousands of them east of the Mississippi as well, at our own price."

American Bankers Association, 1891

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controlling money and it's issuance."

James Madison, 1820

"The money powers prey upon the nation in times of peace and conspire against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than a monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, and more selfish than bureaucracy. It denounces as public enemies all who question its methods or throw light upon its crimes. I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me and the bankers in the rear. Of the two, the one at my rear is my greatest foe.

Abraham Lincoln

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

Thomas Jefferson

"We must keep the people busy with political antagonisms... By dividing the electorate ... we'll be able to have them spend their energies at struggling amongst themselves on questions that, for us, have no importance whatsoever.
... Let us make use of the courts... When through the law's intervention, the common people shall have lost their homes, they will be more easy to control and more easy to govern, and they shall not be able to resist the strong hand of the Government acting in accordance with ... the control of the leaders of finance."

United States Bankers magazine, 1892

"I fear that foreign bankers with their ... tortuous tricks will entirely control the exuberant riches of America and use it systematically to corrupt modern civilization. They will not hesitate to plunge the whole [world] into wars and chaos in order that the earth should become their inheritance."

Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, after the assassination of President Lincoln, 1863

"The banking cartel succeeds in creating "false" prices for commodities such as oil, gold and silver through their creation of bogus paper markets (futures, ETFs, etc.), in which sometimes a hundred times or more of the commodity is bought and sold in paper form than exists in real physical form."

F. WIlliam Engdahl

"With the exception of a few thousand very powerful people, the entire world's population, all seven billion of us, are trapped ... trapped into a criminal debt creating banking 'system' that has taken hundreds of years to perfect and to come to fruition. This 'system' results in enslavement and servitude. It creates dreadful unhappiness amongst ordinary decent people and causes wars, debt, starvation, pollution and environmental destruction. It feeds on greed, fear and division. It forces people onto the corporate treadmills of mass mindless production and mass mindless consumption. It uses lies, deception, intimidation and entrapment at all times. It is a system that is so clever and so cunning that most of the world is completely oblivious to its existence. It is a system that allows a few winners at the expense of a huge number of losers. It is a system that considers itself to be unbeatable and indestructible and is now so arrogant that it believes it can control everything and everyone on its terms. It is a system where psychopaths and sociopaths can flourish. And without question the center of this system, the heart of this global corporate beast is the innocent sounding Square Mile known as the City of London."

Justin Walker

"Here are the card-carrying shareholders in the `Federal' Reserve Corporation: Rothschild Banks of London and Berlin, Lazard Brothers Bank of Paris, Isreal, Moses Sieff Banks Of Italy, Warburg Bank of Hamburg and Amsterdam, Lehman Brothers Bank of new York, Kuhn Loeb Bank Of New York, Chase Manhattan Bank Of New York, Goldman Sachs Bank Of New York."

Miles Franklin Newsletter

"The world's money-lenders became experts at parasitic high finance and got rich through the explosive growth of fractional reserve banking. These people have dominated the economies of nations through such institutions as the Bank of England, the Federal Reserve System, the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), and other central and commercial banks, currency and commodity exchanges, and stock and bond markets.
... The bankers on the one hand and the political racketeers on the other merged over a century ago under the oversight of figures associated with the creation of the Anglo-American Empire, such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Alfred Milner, Colonel Mandell House, Winston Churchill, the House of Windsor, and, as examples of families involved, the Rothschilds, Schiffs, Morgans, Harrimans, Rockefellers, Myers, and Bushes."

Richard C. Cook, 2008

"Every country suspended the gold standard at the outbreak of the war [WWI]... This removed the automatic limitation on the supply of paper money. Then each country proceeded to pay for the war by borrowing from the banks. The banks created the money which they then lent by merely giving the Government a deposit of any size against which the Government could draw checks. The banks were no longer limited in the amount of credit they could create because they no longer had to pay out gold for checks on demand. Thus the creation of money in the form of credit by the banks was limited only by the demands of its borrowers."

Carroll Quigley, historian and Georgetown University professor, in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"Before World War I, two opposing systems of political economy competed for dominance in the United States. One operated out of Wall Street, the New York financial district that came to be the symbol of American finance. Its most important address was 23 Wall Street, known as the "House of Morgan." J. P. Morgan was an agent of powerful British banking interests. The Wizards of Wall Street and the Old World bankers pulling their strings sought to establish a national currency that was based on the "gold standard," one created privately by the financial elite who controlled the gold. The other system dated back to Benjamin Franklin and operated out of Philadelphia... The Philadelphia faction favored a bank on the model established in provincial Pennsylvania, where a state loan office issued and lent money, collected the interest, and returned it to the provincial government to he used in place of taxes. President Abraham Lincoln returned to the colonial system of government-issued money during the Civil War; but he was assassinated, and the bankers reclaimed control of the money machine. The silent coup of the Wall Street faction culminated with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913."

Ellen Brown in her book "Web of Debt"

"You can count the number of banks that own half of all the wealth in the U.S. economy on just one hand. There are just five of them: Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Citigroup. Their total assets equal 8.5 trillion, which is 56% of our entire economy."

Thom Hartmann

"Only low echelon drug dealers get caught with drug money in their hands. The elite - Drexel Burnham, Credite Suisse, Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC) - escape detection... American Express was and still is a conduit for laundering drug money."

John Coleman in his book "Conspirators' Hierarchy: The Story of the Committee of 300"

"A competent war on drugs must begin with a war against the banking institutions and bankers who 'launder' Dope, Inc.'s ill-gotten gains...Shut down the drug money-laundering by the major Anglo-American banks, and the dope cartel would choke to death on its own profits... Dope, Inc.'s vulnerable flank is the international network of banks and other financial institutions that 'launder' the cartel's $558 billion per year in gross revenue... Action by governments against the drug bankers could rapidly shut down Dope, Inc."

from the book "Dope. Inc.", Executive Intelligence Review,1978

"By 2000 four giant banks emerged to rule the US financial roost. JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup were kings of capital on the East Coast. Together they control 52.86% of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. Bank of America and Wells Fargo reigned supreme on the West Coast.
During the 2008 banking crisis these firms got even bigger, taking on distressed assets for pennies on the dollar. Barclays took over Lehman Brothers. JP Morgan Chase got Washington Mutual. Bank of America was handed Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, while Wells Fargo got the nation's 5th biggest bank- Wachovia."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations."

Carroll Quigley in his book 'Tragedy and Hope

"The eight largest U.S. financial companies (JP Morgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, U.S. Bancorp, Bank of New York Mellon and Morgan Stanley) are 100% controlled by ten shareholders and we have four companies always present in all decisions:
BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity.
In addition, the Federal Reserve is comprised of 12 banks, represented by a board of seven people, which comprises representatives of the "big four," which in turn are present in all other entities.
In short, the Federal Reserve is controlled by four large private companies: BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard and Fidelity. These companies control U.S. monetary policy (and world) without any control or "democratic" choice.

www.theglobalelite.org, 2013

"States, most especially the large hegemonic ones, such as the United States and Great Britain, are controlled by the international central banking system, working through secret agreements at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), and operating through national central banks (such as the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve)... The same international banking cartel that controls the United States today previously controlled Great Britain and held it up as the international hegemon. When the British order faded, and was replaced by the United States, the US ran the global economy. However, the same interests are served. States will be used and discarded at will by the international banking cartel; they are simply tools."

Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

"The institutional changes which the 1999 Financial Services Modernization Act (FSMA) brought about, including the concentration and centralization of power in the hands of a small number of financial giants, largely contributed to Wall Street's unswerving quest for global financial domination.
The tendency was towards a worldwide financial supermarket controlled by a handful of global financial institutions which penetrate and permeate the fabric of national economies. The sweeping deregulation of U.S. banking imparted unprecedented powers to Wall Street's financial conglomerates to acquire and take over banking institutions all over the world."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research

"Since 2008, bad debt from banks, corporations, and private investors was in transferred from the balance sheets of private banks to the balance sheets of the central banks as a result of nine years of bailout via QE (quantitative easing), zero interest rate free money, and other policies of the central banks. The central banks bailed out the capitalist system in 2008-09 by shifting the bad debts to themselves. In the course of the last 9 years, the private system loaded itself up on still more debt than it had in 2007. Can the central banks, already bloated with $20 trillion bail out bankers and friends once again? That's the question. Attempting to unload the $20 trillion to make room for the next bailout-as the central banks now propose to do-may result, however, in precipitating the next crisis.
... After eight years of treating symptoms and not the disease, the global financial system has become addicted to super-low rates and to continued central bank excess liquidity provisioning. What started in 2008 as a massive, somewhat coordinated central bank lender of last resort experiment - i.e. global bank bailout - has over the past eight years evolved into a more or less permanent subsidisation of the private banking and financial systems by central banks. The system has become addicted to free money.
... What happened was an unprecedented acceleration in financial asset markets as equity and bond prices surged for eight years, high end real estate prices rose to prior levels, derivatives boomed, gold and crypto-currencies escalated in value, and income inequality soared to record levels - all fueled by the massive $10 trillion central bank liquidity injections that drove interest rates to zero or below."

Jack Rasmus , 2017

"Capital must protect itself in every possible way, both by combination and legislation. Debts must be collected, mortgages foreclosed as rapidly as possible. When, through the process of law, the common people lose their homes, they will become more docile and more easily governed through the strong arm of government applied by a central power of wealth under leading financiers. These truths are well known among our principal men who are now engaged in forming an imperialism to govern the world. By dividing the voter through the political party system, we can get them to expend their energies in fighting for questions of no importance. It is thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves that which has been so well planned and so successfully accomplished."

American's Banker Association, 1924

"The debt crisis of the early 1980s unleashed a wave of corporate mergers, buyouts and bankruptcies. These changes then paved the way for the consolidation of a new generation of financiers clustered around the large merchant banks, the institutional investors, stock brokerage firms and large insurance companies. In this process, commercial banking functions have coalesced with those of the investment banks and stock brokers, leading to the consolidation of a handful of global financial conglomerates."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research

BIG OIL

"Everyone knows that the Iraq war is largely about oil."

Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, 2008

"After 1971, a White House policy was initiated, under the effective control of Henry Kissinger, to control the economies of the nations and to reduce their populations, rather than to facilitate technology transfer and industrial growth. The strategy was to force the price of the cartelized world oil up by about a factor of four, recover the Arab oil receipts back into the British and American central banks, and lend them to the Third World to acquire control over those countries. To this end, the Bilderberg group, containing the world's top financial and political insiders, met privately in Saltsjoebaden, Sweden in May 1973 to discuss how the coming flood of oil dollars was to be handled.
... The great bulk of the petro-dollars were repatriated in purchasing U.S. government debt and in deposit accounts in Chase Manhattan, Citibank, et al. From there they were loaned to the Third World, which could not otherwise buy the fuel they needed to survive, whence many of those countries became enslaved to the bankers, and forced to follow their edicts on how to run their countries.

F William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"
reviewed in the book "How The World Really Works" by Alan Jones

"The dollar's current strength is supported by the requirement of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), secured originally by a secret agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia, that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars."

Peter Dale Scott in his book "The Road to 9/11"

"Over the long haul, since World War II, oil interests have dictated the general disposition of U.S. foreign policy."

Peter Dale Scott

"If you want to know who rules the world, just think of two words: "Oil Bankers." The western financial institutions that dominate the world economy can all be traced back to fossil fuels. The House of Rockefeller, tied in with Exxon-Mobil, sucessor of Standard Oil, along with the House of Morgan now exercise their titanic power via an entity called Chase Bank. HSBC Bank is closely tied to British Petroleum. The British banking dynasty known as the Rothschilds is closely tied in with Royal Dutch Shell."

Caleb Maupin, 2018

"We must never make it appear as if we went into Iraq for its oil."

Republican Arizona Senator Jon Kyl

"Since the Bush-Cheney Administration took office in January 2001, controlling the major oil and natural gas fields of the world had been the primary, though undeclared, priority of US foreign policy... Not only the invasion of Iraq, but also the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan, had nothing to do with 'democracy,' and everything to do with pipeline control across Central Asia and the militarization of the Middle East."

F. William Engdahl

"The United States handled the quadrupling of oil prices in the 1970s by arranging, by means of secret agreements with the Saudis, to recycle petrodollars back into the U.S. economy. The first of these deals assured a special and ongoing Saudi stake in the health of the U.S. dollar; the second secured continuing Saudi support for the pricing of all OPEC oil in dollars. These two deals assured that the U.S. economy would not be impoverished by OPEC oil price hikes. The heaviest burdens would be borne instead by the economies of less developed countries."

Peter Dale Scott, 2003

"One of the verboten topics is oil. Do you notice how it is almost never mentioned in the press as a real reason we went into Iraq. When is the last time you heard any major media outlet talking about it? Was there ever a magazine cover that asked -- Was it About the Oil? Can you imagine Wolf Blitzer asking this question of a government official?
... Do Americans realize that the rest of the world, is absolutely convinced we went in for the oil?

Cenk Uygur, 2008

"We had virtually no economic options with Iraq, because the country floats on a sea of oil."

Paul Wolfowitz, 2008

"In April 2005 Sudan's government announced it had found oil in South Darfur, a major geopolitical event which major US and European media "forgot" to mention when discussing the sudden new "Darfur conflict."
Washington, using US Secretary of State Colin Powell, an African-American, to deliver the message, began accusing the Khartoum regime of "genocide" in Darfur, though no independent proof was given. Only Washington and the NGO's close to it used the term "genocide" to describe Darfur. If they could get a popular acceptance of the charge of genocide, it opened the possibility for drastic "regime change" interventions by NATO and by Washington in Sudan's sovereign affairs. The Washington Darfur smear campaign soon enlisted Hollywood stars like George Clooney in this effort. Washington and NATO launched a campaign to argue for a de facto NATO occupation of the region.
In 2004, Chad's dictator Idriss Deby launched the initial strike that set off the conflict in Darfur, using members of his elite Presidential Guard who originate from the province. He provided all-terrain vehicles, arms and anti-aircraft guns to Darfur rebels fighting the Khartoum government in southwest Sudan. The US military support to Deby was the trigger for the Darfur bloodbath. Khartoum reacted and the ensuing tragic debacle was unleashed in full force.
... In 2011 a new "republic" was declared in southern Sudan titled The Republic of South Sudan. It (conveniently for the Pentagon) controlled a major part of Sudan's oil flows to China."

F. William Engdahl, 2014

"Only in an America dumbed down by constant propaganda about our innate moral superiority will anyone any longer believe that we didn't invade Iraq for the oil."

Robert Scheer, 2008

"In Colombia, we are fighting a war (supposedly on drugs but in fact financed in part by drugs) with a drug proxy - the corrupt Colombian army and its even more corrupt paramilitary auxiliaries. In 2001 Colombian government sources estimated that 40 percent of Colombian cocaine exports were controlled by rightwing paramilitary warlords and their trafficking allies. Meanwhile the amount controlled by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the target of the U.S. "war on drugs," was estimated by the Colombian government to be 2.5 percent."

Peter Dale Scott, 2003

"The United States is not interested in the oil in that region from Iraq. That's just utter nonsense."

Donald Rumsfeld, US. Secretary of Defense, interview with Al Jazeera TV, February 25, 2003

"We're there in Iraq because that part of the world controls the world supply of oil, and whoever controls the supply of oil would have a stranglehold on the American economy and indeed on the world economy."

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, 1990

"Regardless of whether we say so publicly, we will go to war, because Saddam sits at the center of a region with more than 60 percent of all the world's oil reserves."

Anthony H. Cordesman, senior analyst at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies

"After U.S. troops captured Baghdad in April 2003, they were ordered to protect the Oil Ministry even as looters ransacked priceless antiquities from Iraq's national museums and stole explosives from unguarded military arsenals."

Jason Leopold, Global Research, 2009

"As of 2006, Libya had the largest proven oil reserves in Africa, some 35%, larger even than Nigeria."

F. William Engdahl, 2014

"The US-led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region. Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves."

Michel Chossudovsky, 2012

"Right after World War II ... the United States moved to dominate a global system for the production and distribution of oil. Starting with the Truman Doctrine in 1946, U.S. geostrategic thinking was oil based. What began as a strategy for containment of the Soviet Union has become more and more nakedly a determination to control the oil resources of the world. This pursuit has progressively deformed the domestic U.S. economy, rendering it more and more unbalanced and dependent on heavy military expenditures in remote and ungovernable areas-most recently Afghanistan."

Peter Dale Scott, 2003

"Washington and the New York banks had exchanged their flawed postwar Bretton Woods gold exchange system for a new, highly unstable petroleum-based dollar exchange system, which, unlike the gold exchange system, they reckoned they could control. Henry Kissinger and the financial establishment of London and New York had in effect replaced the old gold exchange standard of the postwar world with their own 'petrodollar standard.'"

William Engdahl in his book "A Century of War"

"The American habit of training, arming, and financing its drug-trafficking allies in order to help secure oil resources abroad has been a major factor in the huge increase in global illicit drug trafficking since World War II."

Peter Dale Scott, 2003

"The oil market is now cornered by five major companies - Exxon-Mobil, Chevron-Texaco, British Petroleum-Amoco-Arco, Royal Dutch Shell and Conoco-Phillips - which control over 60 percent of refinery output.
... The operating strategy ... is to force independent refiners out of business, tighten gasoline supplies, and then jack up the price. Finally, when the profit skyrockets, take ads in newspapers to claim that the profit is reasonable."

Ravi Batra in his book "The New Golden Age", 2007

"Drug networks are important factors in the politics of every continent. The United States returns repeatedly to the posture of fighting wars in areas of petroleum reserves with the aid of drug-trafficking allies - drug proxies - with which it has a penchant to become involved."

Peter Dale Scott in his book "Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina

THE DEEP STATE

"The term 'Deep State' describes a system composed of high-level elements within the intelligence services, military, security, judiciary and organized crime.
... It is a hybrid association of elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States without reference to the consent of the governed as expressed through the formal political process."

former congressional staff member Mike Lofgren

"The "deep state" refers to a parallel secret government, organized by the intelligence and security apparatus, financed by drugs, and engaging in illicit violence, to protect the status and interests of the military against threats from intellectuals, religious groups, and occasionally the constitutional government.
... The "deep state" refers to the wider interface in America between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government. You might call it the back door of the Public state, giving access to dark forces outside the law."

Peter Dale Scott

"The "deep state" consists of individuals across all elements within and external to the government, who in the aggregate are able to leverage government capabilities while violating, with impunity, all Constitutional checks and balances. Related to this is the matter of funding and reach - if you follow the money, where do you end up? From New York banks to Texas energy to global drugs, there is a criminal network that is above the law and above the state."

Daniel Sheehan

"America's deep state is something of a hybrid creature that operates along a New York to Washington axis.
... The U.S.-style deep state includes key players in the police and intelligence agencies, the military, the treasury and justice departments and in the judiciary. It is structured to materially reward those who play along.
... Even though government is needed to implement desired policies, the banksters comprise the truly essential element, capable of providing genuine rewards for compliance. As corporate interests increasingly own the media, little dissent comes from the Fourth Estate as the process plays out while many of the proliferating Washington think tanks that provide deep state "intellectual" credibility are similarly funded by defense contractors.
... The cross fertilization that is essential to make the deep state system work takes place through the famous revolving door whereby senior government officials enter the private sector at a high level. In some cases the door revolves a number of times, with officials leaving government before returning in an even more elevated position.
This has been characteristic of the rise of the so-called neoconservatives. Along the way, those select individuals are protected, promoted and groomed for bigger things. The senior government officials, ex-generals, and high level intelligence operatives who participate find themselves with multi-million dollar homes for their retirement years, cushioned by a tidy pile of investments."

Philip Giraldi, 2016

"By the end of 1962, the national security establishment in Washington D.C., which had quickly come to know JFK as a skeptic during 1961, had come to view him as a heretic; and by November of 1963, the month he was assassinated, they no doubt considered him an apostate, for he no longer supported most of the so-called "orthodox" views of the Cold War priesthood.
... The national security establishment wanted to turn the Cold War against the USSR into a hot war, so that the U.S. could inflict punishing and fatal blows upon its Communist adversaries on the battlefield. It was this desire for hot war by so many within the national security establishment - their belief that conventional proxy wars with the Soviet Bloc were an urgent necessity, and that nuclear war with the USSR was probably inevitable - to which President Kennedy was so adamantly opposed. And it was JFK's profound determination to avoid nuclear war by miscalculation, and to avoid combat with conventional arms unless it was truly necessary, that separated him from almost everyone else in his administration from 1961 throughout 1963."

Douglas P. Horne, 2014

"The long-time tendency of business and government to become more intricately and deeply involved with each other has now reached a new point of explicitness. The two cannot now be seen clearly as two distinct worlds."

John Stuart Mills in his book The Power Elite

"The "Deep State" is a parallel secret government, organized by a covert faction of the intelligence agencies, operated by a splinter cell of the United States military-industrial complex, financed through both the major banks, and the sale of illegal drugs, weapons, and human trafficking. They are international in their reach, owe no allegiance to any particular country, and are unbelievably ruthless in the protection of their interests."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

"The Deep State has a life of its own, like the government itself. It's composed of top-echelon employees of a dozen Praetorian agencies, like the FBI, CIA, and NSA, top generals, admirals, and other military operatives, long-term congressmen, senators, and directors of important regulatory agencies. But Deep State is much broader than just the government. It includes the heads of major corporations, all of whom are heavily involved in selling to the State and enabling it. That absolutely includes Silicon Valley, although those guys at least have a sense of humor, evidenced by their "Don't Be Evil" motto. It also includes all the top people in the Fed, and the heads of all the major banks, brokers, and insurers. Add the presidents and many professors at top universities, which act as Deep State recruiting centers, all the top media figures, of course, and many regulars at things like Bohemian Grove and the Council on Foreign Relations. They epitomize the status quo, held together by power, money, and propaganda."

Doug Casey, financial analyst

"The deep forces dominating both political parties in the United States are now so powerful, so affluent, and above all so invested in the profits from war-making, that a president is farther than ever from challenging this power - even as it becomes more and more clear that America's era of world dominance, like Britain's before it, is drawing to a close."

Peter Dale Scott

"There is an amorphous group of unelected corporate lawyers, bankers, and intelligence and military officials who form an American "deep state," setting real limits on the rare politicians who ever try to get out of line. They collaborate with and nurture their deep state counterparts in other countries, to whom they feel far more loyalty than their fellow citizens. The minions of the deep state hate and fear even the mildest moves towards democracy, and fight against it by any means available to them. They're not all-powerful and don't get exactly what they want, but on the issues that matter most they almost always win in the end. And while all this is mostly right there in the open, discernible by anyone who's curious and has a library card, if you don't go looking you will never hear a single word about it."

Jon Schwarz

"The deep state wins no matter who is in power by creating bipartisan-supported money pits within the system. Unending wars and simmering though hard to define threats together invite more spending on national security and make for good business. Monetizing the completely unnecessary and hideously expensive global war on terror benefits the senior government officials, beltway industries and financial services that feed off it. Because it is essential to keep the money flowing, the deep state persists in promoting policies that otherwise make no sense, to include the unwinnable wars currently enjoying marquee status in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The deep state knows that a fearmongered public will buy its product and does not even have to make much of an effort to sell it."

Philip Giraldi, 2016

"John Stuart Mills wrote in his 1956 masterpiece The Power Elite, that America was ruled by those who control the "strategic command posts" of society-the big corporations, the machinery of the state, and the military establishment. These dominant cliques were drawn together by their deep mutual stake in the "permanent war economy" that had emerged during the Cold War.
Though political tensions could flare within the power elite, Mills wrote, there was a remarkable unity of purpose among these ruling groups. The top corporate executives, government leaders, and high-ranking military officers moved fluidly in and out of one another's worlds, exchanging official roles, socializing in the same clubs, and educating their children at the same exclusive schools.
... Within this system of American power, Mills saw corporate chiefs as the first among equals. Long interlocked with the federal government, corporate leaders came to dominate the "political directorate" during World War II. The United States had largely become a democracy in form only. More than half of a century before the John Roberts-era Supreme Court that legally sanctioned corporate control of the electoral process."

David Talbot

"Wall Street may be the ultimate owner of the Deep State and its strategies, if for no other reason than that it has the money to reward government operatives with a second career that is lucrative beyond the dreams of avarice - certainly beyond the dreams of a salaried government employee."

former congressional staff member Mike Lofgren

"The United States of America is not exactly deep state Turkey, but any democracy can be subverted by particular interests hiding behind the mask of patriotism buttressed by phony international threats. Ordinary Americans frequently ask why politicians and government officials appear to be so obtuse, rarely recognizing what is actually occurring in the country. That is partly due to the fact that the political class lives in a bubble of its own creation but it might also be because many of America's leaders actually accept and benefit from the fact that there is an unelected, un-appointed and unaccountable presence within the system that actually manages what is taking place from behind the scenes. That would be the American deep state."

Philip Giraldi, 2016

"The deep state is intimately connected by a web of money, mutual goals, and careerism to specific and very powerful elements of corporate America. These elements include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley.
[The spy agencies are completely dependent on Silicon Valley's technology, communications backbones, and cooperation to perform their mission.]"

Mike Lofgren in his book The Deep State, 2016

"Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were a part of the permanent, though hidden, national security apparatus of the United States, inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but America always keeps on fighting."

Peter Dale Scott

THE VICTIMS

CHILDREN, FAMILIES, COMMUNITIES, SOCIETIES, NATIONS

"Tallying only the death toll inflicted by US. armed forces or U.S.-backed surrogate forces around the world, the estimates are as follows: 3,000,000 in Vietnam, 1,000,000 in Cambodia, 1,000,000 in Mozambique, 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia, 600,000 in Angola, 300,000 in Laos, 250,000 in East Timor, 200,000 in Iraq, 200,000 in Afghanistan, 150,000 in Guatemala, 100,000 in Nicaragua, 90,000 in El Salvador, and tens of thousands in Chile, Argentina, Zaire, Iran (under the Shah), Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Panama, Somalia, South Yemen, Western Sahara, and other countries."

Michael Parenti in his book " Dirty Truths"

"Coming to grips with 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."

John Stockwell, CIA official in the 1960s and 1970s

"The CIA's control of the MSM (mainstream media) is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., the coup in Ukraine, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner, drone murders, the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing - everything."

Edward Curtin, 2017

"Since the end of world War II the United States has:
* endeavored to overthrow more than 50 foreign governments, most of which were democratically elected;'
* grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries
* attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders
* dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries
* attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries.
Since 1945, the United States has carried out one or more of the above-listed actions, on one or more occasions, in seventy-one countries (more than one-third of the countries of the world), in the process of which the US has ended the lives of several million people, condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair and has been responsible for the torture of countless thousands."

William Blum

"Mounting numbers of victims, the millions of people whose lives have been trampled or splattered by CIA operations are increasingly cynical of America. Because of the CIA the world is a more dangerous place. Americans have reduced credibility. Worst of all, by retaining the CIA we are accepting ourselves as a harsh and ruthless people. It's the wrong game for a great nation."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"If Nuremberg were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

Noam Chomsky

"U.S. and Western imperialism is the root cause of the "refugee crisis". Everyday men, women, and children are killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. and Western-backed militias in Afghanistan, Syria, and Somalia, European and North American mining and oil conglomerates in Central and Western Africa, or are starved to death in Yemen by the U.S.-backed Arab blockade of the country. Until the genocidal aims of U.S. imperialism, with the support of Canada, Australia, the European Union, and regional allies, are defeated, the "war on terror" will continue to make life too unbearable for working people in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East to remain in their home countries."

T.J. Petrowski, 2015

"By one estimate, as many as four million Muslims have died or been killed as a result of the ongoing conflicts that Washington has either initiated or been party to since 2001.
There are, in addition, millions of displaced persons who have lost their homes and livelihoods, many of whom are among the human wave currently engulfing Europe. There are currently an estimated 2,590,000 refugees who have fled their homes from Afghanistan, 370,000 from Iraq, 3,880,000 million from Syria, and 1,100,000 from Somalia. The United Nations Refugee Agency is expecting at least 130,000 refugees from Yemen as fighting in that country accelerates. Between 600,000 and one million Libyans are living precariously in neighboring Tunisia.
... Significantly, the countries that have generated most of the refugees are all places where the United States has invaded, overthrown governments, supported insurgencies, or intervened in a civil war."

Philip Giraldi, 2015

"In the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria, America has destroyed any significant progress those nations had made in education, healthcare, infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity, postal services, courts. By degrading the standards of living for people in perceived "hostile" nations, America's ruling elite empowers itself, while claiming that it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are "humanitarian" and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys."

Douglas Valentine, 2017

"Washington is responsible for the destruction of Yugoslavia and Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and part of Syria. Washington has enabled Saudi Arabia's attack on Yemen, Ukraine's attack on its former Russian provinces, and Israel's destruction of Palestine and the Palestinian people."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2016

"This is a very hard choice, but ... we think the price is worth it."

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright when asked whether she considered the deaths of half a million Iraqi children a reasonable result of U.S. sanctions

"The United States and its officials aided and abetted by others engaged in a continuing pattern of conduct from August 6, 1990 until this date to impose, maintain and enforce extreme economic sanctions and a strict military blockade on the people of Iraq for the purpose of injuring the entire population, killing its weakest members, infants, children, the elderly and the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines, drinking water, food, and other essentials in order to maintain a large US military presence in the region, and dominion and control over its people and resources including oil.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its [former] Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed a crime against humanity as defined in the Nuremberg Charter against the population of Iraq.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions."

International Court On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security Council, Madrid, November 1996

"American air power pounded the hell out of Iraqi armor and buildings with depleted uranium rounds... I have been in and around buildings destroyed by depleted uranium rounds, as well as vehicles, armored personnel carriers, tanks and corpses... During the invasion, we were also exposed to severe sandstorms, which meant that we were breathing in sand for days, sand that more than likely contained depleted uranium."

James Gilligan, United States Marine Corps, 2008

"The Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was the institution that tried Nazi war leaders for their crimes [WWII]. Among the crimes listed in the charter were "crimes against peace," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity" Crimes "against peace" were defined as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

"Libya was the most prosperous and successful nation in Africa... It had one of the biggest reserves of gold in the world before NATO's takeover. A big bulk of those reserves is now sitting in the vaults of the Bank of England - the Bank of Rothschilds - in the City of London.
... NATO, US, France, UK, Qatar, and every other nation involved in the overthrow of Gaddafi's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya took a thriving, first-rate, self-reliant Arab nation and turned it into a miserable failed state with Al-Qaeda and ISIS savages terrorizing its population and balkanizing Libya.
... The Europeans' violent and shameful history in the last 500 years alone has been responsible for 100-year long religious wars, colonialism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, World War I, World War II, the Holocaust, the degradation of the environment, greed and predatory capitalism.
So, the people who have been responsible for 500 years of theft, rape, and murder, literally all over the world from the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Subcontinent and East Asia, are supposed to be the moral compass of the world.

Alexander Azadgan, 2018

"To initiate a war of aggression ... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.
... The very essence of the Charter is that individuals have international duties which transcend the national obligations of obedience imposed by the individual state. He who violates the laws of war cannot obtain immunity while acting in pursuance of the authority of the state if the state in authorizing action moves outside its competence under international law,"

International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany - 1946

"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

Noam Chomsky

"After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes, the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."

Major General Antonio Taguba led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison

"The people of Fallujah, Iraq are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.
... In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed.
... The US military's decision to heavily deploy depleted uranium was a wanton act of brutality, poisoning an entire generation of children not yet born in 2004."

Tom Eley, Information Clearinghouse, 2010

"Henry Kissinger was largely responsible for bombing to death 600,000 peasants in Cambodia in 1969-73.

John Pilger, 2009

"People in the US, no more or less so than in other countries, don't want to look with clear eyes upon the transgressions or crimes that their own countrymen have perpetrated on others. There is a denial movement in virtually every country whose people have undertaken eliminationist assaults."

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

"Soldiers are paid killers. Young men and women are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor by accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions.
... These poor young men and woman propagandized into an undead ethical status lied to about what is noble, virtuous, courageous, honorable, decent, and good to the point that they're rolling hand grenades into children's rooms and the illusion that, that is going to make the world a better place. We have to stare this in the face if we want to remember why these people died. They did not die to set us free. They did not die to make the world a better place. They died because we are ruled by sociopaths."

Stefan Molyneux, Canadian blogger

"Washington puts foreign leaders on trial for war crimes, while committing war crimes every day."

Paul Craig Roberts

"If the worst crime that can be committed against an individual is murder, then the worst possible crime is organized, deliberate, self-righteous, mass murder. 'War' is just a word that governments use to make mass murder and theft seem acceptable."

Adam Kokesh

"A group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village [[Mai Lai in Vietnam].
They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they thought they would meet the enemy. There were 550 women, children and old men, and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch."

Seymour Hersh, 2005

"We are told that we are fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism was this occupation (of Iraq).
... Those who send us to war do not have to pull the trigger or lob a mortar round. They don't have to fight the war; they merely have to sell the war. They need a public that is willing to send their soldiers into harm's way. They need soldiers willing to kill and be killed without question.
... The billionaires, the "ruling class" that profit from human suffering, care only about expanding their wealth, controlling the world's economy, understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation are in our interests. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the "working class" to die to control the wealth of another country. And convincing us to kill and die is based on their ability to make us feel that we are somehow superior.
... Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country to make the rich richer. Without racism, soldiers would realize they have more in common with the Iraqi people than with the billionaires that send us to war.
... Our real enemies are not in some distant land whose names we don't know and cultures we don't understand. The enemy is people that we know very well, and people that we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, it's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable, it's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable.
... Our enemy is not five thousand miles away. They are right here at home. If we organize we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world."

Mike Prysner, former U.S. Soldier

"If Bradley Manning had committed war crimes in Iraq instead of exposing them, he would be a free man today."

author William Blum

"In the end, as in the beginning, Nixon and Kissinger remained blind to the human costs of their actions - a further price of power. The dead and maimed in Vietnam and Cambodia - as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra, and the Middle East - seemed not to count as the President and his national security adviser battled the Soviet Union, their misconceptions, their political enemies, and each other."

Seymour Hersh in his book "Price of Power"

"Our most deadly enemies are not in caves and compounds abroad but in the corporate boardrooms and governmental offices where decisions are made that consign millions to death and misery-not deliberately, but as the collateral damage of the lust for profit and power."

Howard Zinn, 2002

"The Bush Administration clearly knew that the laws of war were supposed to apply to prisoners apprehended by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they found every legal loophole to find ways it didn't apply to the US side... It's clear to me these actions came down from the very top. Denying prisoners of war humane treatment is the greatest breach of the Geneva Convention. It's a war crime."

Claire Tixeire, a human rights attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, 2008

"Which nation's leaders since 1945 have murdered, maimed, made homeless, tortured, assassinated and impoverished the largest number of civilians who were not its own citizens? I have asked this question of Americans in every walk of life since I discovered the bombing of Laos in 1969. It's a simple matter of fact, not involving judgments of right and wrong, and I remain astonished at how most answer "the Russians," "the Chinese," or just have no idea that American leaders have killed more noncitizen civilians than the rest of the world's leaders combined since 1945."

Fred Branfman

"If Nuremberg were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."

Noam Chomsky

"This is a very hard choice, but ... we think the price is worth it."

U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright when asked whether she considered the deaths of half a million Iraqi children a reasonable result of U.S. sanctions

"The United States and its officials aided and abetted by others engaged in a continuing pattern of conduct from August 6, 1990 until this date to impose, maintain and enforce extreme economic sanctions and a strict military blockade on the people of Iraq for the purpose of injuring the entire population, killing its weakest members, infants, children, the elderly and the chronically ill, by depriving them of medicines, drinking water, food, and other essentials in order to maintain a large US military presence in the region, and dominion and control over its people and resources including oil.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its [former] Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed a crime against humanity as defined in the Nuremberg Charter against the population of Iraq.
... The United States, its President Bill Clinton and other officials, the United Kingdom and its Prime Minister John Major and other officials have committed genocide as defined in the Convention against Genocide against the population of Iraq including genocide by starvation and sickness through use of sanctions."

International Court On Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the UN Security Council, Madrid, November 1996

"American air power pounded the hell out of Iraqi armor and buildings with depleted uranium rounds... I have been in and around buildings destroyed by depleted uranium rounds, as well as vehicles, armored personnel carriers, tanks and corpses... During the invasion, we were also exposed to severe sandstorms, which meant that we were breathing in sand for days, sand that more than likely contained depleted uranium."

James Gilligan, United States Marine Corps, 2008

"The Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg was the institution that tried Nazi war leaders for their crimes [WWII]. Among the crimes listed in the charter were "crimes against peace," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity" Crimes "against peace" were defined as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

THE SOLDIERS

"Our boys were sent off to die with beautiful ideals painted in front of them. No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason they were marching off to kill and die."

General Smedley Butler, 1934

"The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about."

Noam Chomsky

"The call to "support our troops," or "our boys," is really an appeal to support the war in which the troops are engaged... The proper support of our troops is to oppose the war and fight to get our boys (and girls) out before they can kill or be killed while participating in such a criminal enterprise."

Edward S. Herman

"History is the history of war, of leaders of countries finding reasons and rationales to send the young people off to fight."

former CIA agent John Stockwell

"War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder."

Alexander Berkman

"'Our boys' are not noble warriors protecting democracy, rescuing maidens, and righting wrongs. They are, like all soldiers, obedient and amoral killers. Pilots bombing Iraq or Syria know they are killing civilians. They do not care. If ordered to bomb Switzerland, they would do it. This is the nature of all armies. Glamorizing this most reprehensible of trades is just a means of usefully stimulating the pack instinct which we often call patriotism."

Fred Reed, 2018

"American boys were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the Army ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed. Then, suddenly, we discharged them and told them to make another "about face"! This time they had to do their own readjustment, without mass psychology, without officers' aid and advice and without nation-wide propaganda. We didn't need them anymore. So we scattered them about without any speeches or parades. Many, too many, of these fine young boys are eventually destroyed, mentally, because they could not make that final "about face" alone."

Major General Smedley Butler

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."

Senator George McGovern

"As long as the greatest honor one can aspire to is to be shipped off and killed in somebody's war, there will be war.
... War will exist until the distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige as the warrior does today."

David Swanson in his book "War Is A Lie"

"A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He is not a man. His is not a brute, for brutes kill only in self defense. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistment roll. His mind, his conscience, aye, his very soul, are in the keeping of his officer. No man can fall lower than a soldier-it is a depth beneath which we cannot go."

Jack London

"Is a young man bound to serve his country in war? In addition to his legal duty there is perhaps also a moral duty, but it is very obscure. What is called his country is only its government and that government consists merely of professional politicians, a parasitical and anti-social class of men. They never sacrifice themselves for their country. They make all wars, but very few of them ever die in one. If it is the duty of a young man to serve his country under all circumstances then it is equally the duty of an enemy young man to serve his. Thus we come to a moral contradiction and absurdity so obvious that even clergymen and editorial writers sometimes notice it."

H.L. Mencken

"War means blind obedience, unthinking stupidity, brutish callousness, wanton destruction, and irresponsible murder."

Alexander Berkman

"US Empire has been using the expression "support our troops" to brainwash Americans and justify its wars and violence for far too long.
Supporting our troops has resulted in the United States being the most warring, aggressive nation on earth. Our ultraviolent country has been killing other human beings somewhere on this planet for 223 out of the last 240 total years the US has been in existence. That's 93% of our time as a nation-turned-Empire we've been destroying human life. That's certainly nothing to be proud of. Yet it's "our troops" who've been the murdering culprit.
America's entire domestic and foreign history has been made of genocidal killing, enslaving, stealing and subjugating other darker-skinned races into death and submission. Given this context, "supporting our troops" is really supporting mass murder around the world."

Joachim Hagopian, 2017

"Soldiers are paid killers. Young men and women are suckered into a life of evil through propaganda and the labeling of heroic to a man in costume who kills for money and the life of honor by accepting ordered killings for money, prestige, and pensions.
... These poor young men and woman propagandized into an undead ethical status lied to about what is noble, virtuous, courageous, honorable, decent, and good to the point that they're rolling hand grenades into children's rooms and the illusion that, that is going to make the world a better place. We have to stare this in the face if we want to remember why these people died. They did not die to set us free. They did not die to make the world a better place. They died because we are ruled by sociopaths."

Stefan Molyneux, Canadian blogger

"In the World War (World War I), we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side. It is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies, to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious."

General Smedley Butler, 1933

"We are told that we are fighting terrorists, but the real terrorist was me, and the real terrorism was this occupation (of Iraq).
... Those who send us to war do not have to pull the trigger or lob a mortar round. They don't have to fight the war; they merely have to sell the war. They need a public that is willing to send their soldiers into harm's way. They need soldiers willing to kill and be killed without question.
... The billionaires, the "ruling class" that profit from human suffering, care only about expanding their wealth, controlling the world's economy, understand that their power lies only in their ability to convince us that war, oppression, and exploitation are in our interests. They understand that their wealth is dependent on their ability to convince the "working class" to die to control the wealth of another country. And convincing us to kill and die is based on their ability to make us feel that we are somehow superior.
... Poor and working people in this country are sent to kill poor and working people in another country to make the rich richer. Without racism, soldiers would realize they have more in common with the Iraqi people than with the billionaires that send us to war.
... Our real enemies are not in some distant land whose names we don't know and cultures we don't understand. The enemy is people that we know very well, and people that we can identify. The enemy is a system that wages war when it's profitable. The enemy is the CEOs who lay us off our jobs when it's profitable, it's the insurance companies who deny us health care when it's profitable, it's the banks who take away our homes when it's profitable.
... Our enemy is not five thousand miles away. They are right here at home. If we organize we can stop this war, we can stop this government, and we can create a better world."

Mike Prysner, former U.S. Soldier

"Winning wars is not in the interest of the Pentagon and those who feed on it. Wars generate profitable contracts for all manner of supplies and equipment. Either winning or losing ends the gravy train. For example, the war on Afghanistan of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the arms industry, accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants, and lacking purpose other than maintaining an unneeded empire and funneling money to the Complex."

Fred Reed, 2018

"In the World War (World War I), we used propaganda to make the boys accept conscription. They were made to feel ashamed if they didn't join the army.
So vicious was this war propaganda that even God was brought into it. With few exceptions our clergymen joined in the clamor to kill, kill, kill. To kill the Germans. God is on our side. It is His will that the Germans be killed.
And in Germany, the good pastors called upon the Germans to kill the allies, to please the same God. That was a part of the general propaganda, built up to make people war conscious and murder conscious."

General Smedley Butler, 1933

"Working-class voters perceive America's military as a profoundly working-class institution. Indeed, the armed forces is one of the most homogeneously working-class institutions in America.
This intense identification with the members of the armed forces leads working people to feel that there is only one legitimate point of view on issues of war and peace: that of the ordinary soldier.
The identification with the troops also generates an emotional need for working people to believe that the armed forces are doing the right thing. This easily extends to a need to believe that their political and military leaders are following the right path. They therefore tend to adopt the ethos of the armed forces themselves, an ethos that places a very high value on following orders and trusting superior officers.
Working-class voters see their patriotic support for the troops as inextricably linked to support for the war in general."

Andrew Levison

"The implicit demand in the "support the troops" rhetoric was - and likely will be in future wars - that even if I am against the war, once troops are in the field I should shift my focus from opposition to the war to support for my fellow Americans who are doing the fighting. But to support the troops is, for all practical purposes, to support the war. Asking people who oppose a war to support the troops in that war is simply a way of asking people to drop their opposition. If I had believed this war would be wrong before it began, and if none of the conditions on which I based that assessment had changed, why should I change my view simply because the war had started?"

Robert Jensen

"When our military is no longer committing war crimes, when we are in compliance with basic standards of human rights and social justice, then we can break out the bumper stickers and ribbons that say "Support Our Troops". Until then, every American, as well as our military, are guilty of crimes against peace."

Joe Mowrey

"If there's any question as to what "The Hunger Games" is an allegory for I will tell you. It is the powers-that-be in the United States of America. It's profiteers. War is for profit. It's not 'to save the world for democracy' or 'for king and country'. No. It's for the profit of the top 10%. And the young people who see this film must recognize that, as Bruce Springsteen said, 'blind faith in their leaders will get you dead'."

Donald Sutherland, the actor who played President Coriolanus Snow, discussing the underlying meaning in "The Hunger Games"

"Since World War II, 90 percent of the casualties of war are unarmed civilians, a third of them children. Our victims have done nothing to us. From Palestine to Afghanistan to Iraq to Somalia to wherever our next target may be, their murders are not collateral damage. They are the nature of modern warfare. They don't hate us because of our freedoms. They hate us because every day, we are funding and committing crimes against humanity.
The so-called 'War on Terror' is a cover for our military aggression to gain control of the resources for Western nations. This is sending the poor of this country to kill the poor of those Muslim countries. This is trading blood for oil. This is genocide, and to most of the world, we are the terrorists.
... Our soldiers don't sacrifice for duty, honor, and country. They sacrifice for Kellogg, Brown, and Root. They don't fight for America-they fight for their lives and their buddies beside them because we put them in a war zone. They're not defending our freedoms-they are laying the foundations for permanent military bases to defend the freedoms of ExxonMobil and British Petroleum. They're not establishing democracy; they're establishing the basis for an economic occupation to continue after the military occupation has ended."

Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, in a speech to the Congressional Progressive Caucus, April 27, 2006

"The sentiment expressed by "support our troops" ... has become little more than a patriotic platitude on par with "God Bless America" and a euphemism for "support our war." As a balm to the national conscience for once again consigning our troops to the killing field, it is the battle cry that leads and sustains our country in an unjust war [Iraq].
... Yellow ribbon patriots have an opportunity to support our troops in a meaningful way. They can begin by removing their magnetic yellow ribbon bumper stickers, by listening to the troops and helping to get them home, and by demanding that those who took the country to war with lies and deception be held to account."

Robert Weitzel

"The American citizenry has no say over the military-industrial complex, which is autonomous and out of control. If the Complex wants war with Russia or China, we will have war with Russia or China."

Fred Reed, 2018

"Washington DC warmongers are ever-at-the-ready to send young men and women from America's lower class into harm's way fighting dirty little secret wars in multiple combat zones around the world that the public never even hears about. Yet you'll see next to none of their own sons or daughters fighting in some far off war."

Joachim Hagopian, 2017

"All Americans are left responsible, regardless of whether we supported or opposed the war. When we pull out, our hands will drip with the blood of the tens of thousands of American casualties and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead.
Of course we can continue to compartmentalize ourselves from the truth, remove the troops and blame the rubble on the Iraqis. We can feed the collective fantasy that our good intentions and heroic efforts were thwarted by the cowardice and incompetence of others. But if that's what we take from our experience in Iraq, we will never learn the true lessons and we will be condemned to repeat the same mistakes.
The inability to admit a mistake and assume responsibility is not just a morally bankrupt way to walk through life; it is a dangerous and deadly way to lead a nation."

former Senator Mike Gravel

"There are many people who say they support the troops, and they really mean it. But what does it mean to support the troops? It needs to mean more than putting a sticker on the back of your car.
I don't think we actually support the troops. We the people. What we the people do is we contract out the business of national security to approximately 0.5 percent of the population. About a million and a half people that are on active duty.
And then we turn away. We don't want to look when they go back for two or three or four or five combat tours. That's not supporting the troops. That's an abdication of civic responsibility. And I do think it - there's something fundamentally immoral about that."

Andrew J. Bacevich

"How is it possible for people to consider themselves supporters of the troops when they approve of an event that throws those troops into peril?"

Ramman Kenoun

"People, and not only Americans, are losing their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers for no other reason than the profits of US armaments corporations, and the gullible American people seem proud of it. Those ribbon decals on their cars, SUVs and monster trucks proclaim their naive loyalty to the armaments industries and to the whores in Washington who promote wars."

Paul Craig Roberts

"Despite the asphyxiating economic presence, the military keeps aloof from America. This too serves the purposes of the military-industrial complex, further preventing attention by the public to what is not its business. In the days of conscription there was a familiarity with the armed services. Young men from most social classes wore the uniform however ruefully and told of their experiences. Not now. The career military have always tended to keep to themselves, to socialize with each other as the police do. Now the isolation is almost hermetic. You can spend years in Washington or New York and never meet a colonel. Military society with its authoritarianism, its uniforms and its uniform government-issue outlook is not compatible with civil society."

Fred Reed, 2018

"America's entire domestic and foreign history has been made of genocidal killing, enslaving, stealing and subjugating other darker-skinned races into death and submission. Given this context, "supporting our troops" is really supporting mass murder around the world."

Joachim Hagopian, 2017

"In a democratic society, the question should not be whether one supports the troops. The relevant question is whether one supports the policy. The demand that war opponents must "support the troops" is nothing more than a way of demanding that we drop our opposition to the policy."

Robert Jensen

"What does "supporting the troops" mean? It means supporting what they do. Why should anyone with a conscience support people who carry out war crimes in service of the obscene goal of violently maintaining a system of global exploitation, including the very system that shoots Black and Latino youths down in the streets and degrades and abuses women in a thousand ways?
Whatever their background or personal lives, these are not "our" troops-they're cogs in a global military machine, the troops of the U.S. imperialist system. Whatever the soldiers thought they were doing-and no doubt the military hierarchy forcefully breaks down and brainwashes the troops and no doubt many are crippled mentally and/or physically by the war's toll-the fact is they were carrying out an unjust and bloody war of conquest, suppressing any opposition, installing a new reactionary regime, and trying to turn Iraq into a neo-colony."

Larry Everest

"There is a very deep and emotional commitment among a significant group of working-class voters to the belief that "supporting the troops" and "being patriotic" requires adopting a wartime attitude of unquestioning support for military leaders and a refusal to oppose or criticize any war-related policies or actions."

Andrew Levison

"The government's view is: US soldiers fighting in Iraq signed a contract to serve for three years. The fact that they get blown up after one month means they haven't fulfilled their contract... They have to pay back the money.
... [US soldiers] check out helmets and other equipment... then they lose their helmet in an explosion... they're shipped out, they're disabled, they're in concussion. Somebody in the military will send them a bill for their helmet."

Joseph Stiglitz, 2008

"We were told that in a crowded area, if one person shoots at you, kill everybody."

former U.S. specialist Darrell Anderson, about U.S. policy in Iraq

THE ENDGAME

PERPETUAL WAR = PERPETUAL PROFIT AND POWER

"The need for human drudgery, and therefore to a great extent for human inequality, had disappeared... But it was also clear that an all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction... But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
... The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare."

Winston Smith in George Orwell's book "1984"

"The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful."

Vice-President Dick Cheney - West Point lecture, June 2002

"'Military Keynesianism' is the determination to maintain a permanent war economy and to treat military output as an ordinary economic product, even though it makes no contribution to either production or consumption."

Chalmers Johnson, 2008

"Winning wars is not in the interest of the Pentagon and those who feed on it. Wars generate profitable contracts for all manner of supplies and equipment. Either winning or losing ends the gravy train. For example, the war on Afghanistan of almost two decades has become an entitlement program for the arms industry, accomplishing nothing, killing countless peasants, and lacking purpose other than maintaining an unneeded empire and funneling money to the Complex."

Fred Reed, 2018

"Liberty cannot flourish is a country that is permanently on a war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of government."

Aldous Huxley

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real."

General Douglas MacArthur, 1957

"The America of wealth and privilege is hooked on war, without regular and ever-stronger doses of war it can no longer function properly, that is, yield the desired profits. Right now, this addiction, this craving is being satisfied by means of a conflict against Iraq, which also happens to be dear to the hearts of the oil barons. However, does anybody believe that the warmongering will stop once Saddam' scalp will join the Taliban turbans in the trophy display case of George W. Bush? The President has already pointed his finger at those whose turn will soon come, namely, the "axis of evil" countries: Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, North Korea, and of course that old thorn in the side of America, Cuba. Welcome to the 21st century, welcome to the brave new era of permanent war."

Jacques R. Pauwels, 2003

"War with Russia will be nuclear. Washington has prepared for it. Washington has abandoned the ABM treaty, created what it thinks is an ABM shield, and changed its war doctrine to permit US nuclear first strike. All of this is obviously directed at Russia, and the Russian government knows it."

Paul Craig Roberts, 2014

"How does continuous war act to keep the Lows "stupefied by poverty" and thereby assure the maintenance of the social structure? The goal of the wars is to enable the economy to be kept going for the benefit of the High, its military, and its bureaucracy and control personnel (the Thought Police, etc.), but at the same time to assure that any excess production capacity is prevented from producing consumer goods for the lower classes. That excess capacity is instead directed to producing excess military goods which will ' ultimately rust away or be destroyed in warfare; that is, the excess capacity is deliberately wasted in order to turn it away from the production of goods which would result in added leisure or well-being for the lower classes. Those classes are instead continually forced into group activities expressing hatred toward the current enemy (any enemy) and dependency upon and love toward their benevolent rulers for protecting them from that enemy. They are thereby led to accept the consumer shortages, the poverty, and the other privations to which they are subjected. Their economic status is kept at the subsistence level, forcing their priorities to be focused on simply acquiring basic food, clothing, and shelter. They are thus denied either the time or the inclination to question the fairness or permanence of their societal condition, or to otherwise evolve into a threat to the established hierarchy."

George Orwell in his book "1984"

"I don't believe anyone will consciously launch World War III. The situation now is more like the eve of World War I, when great powers were armed and ready to go when an incident set things off. Ever since Gorbachev naively ended the Cold War, the hugely over-armed United States has been actively surrounding Russia with weapons systems, aggressive military exercises, NATO expansion. At the same time, in recent years the demonization of Vladimir Putin has reached war propaganda levels. Russians have every reason to believe that the United States is preparing for war against them, and are certain to take defensive measures. This mixture of excessive military preparations and propaganda against an "evil enemy" make it very easy for some trivial incident to blow it all up."

Diana Johnstone, author of "Queen of Chaos"

"It would be some time before I fully realized that the United States sees little need for diplomacy. Power is enough. Only the weak rely on diplomacy. The Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States."

Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1992 to December 1996

"A new insanity has been unleashed upon the world. An unlimited war that our leaders counsel could go on indefinitely. A war against enemies in the "shadowy networks," which means we will never know when the shadowy enemy is vanquished. This is quite possibly the policymakers' shot at the final, and permanent, militarization of U.S. society."

Robert Jensen in his book "Citizens of Empire"

"The primary aim of modem warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living. [The "machine" is society's technical and industrial capacity to produce goods.]
... An all-around increase in wealth threatened the destruction ... of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motorcar or even an airplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction .... Such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
... The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent."

George Orwell in his book "1984"

"The American citizenry has no say over the military-industrial complex, which is autonomous and out of control. If the Complex wants war with Russia or China, we will have war with Russia or China."

Fred Reed, 2018

"Four sorrows, it seems to me, are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."

Chalmers Johnson in his book "Sorrows of Empire"

"There is a special breed of international financiers whose success typically is built upon certain character traits. Those include cold objectivity, immunity to patriotism, and indifference to the human condition. That profile is the basis for proposing a theoretical strategy, called the Rothschild Formula, which motivates such men to propel governments into war for the profits they yield... As long as the mechanism of central banking exists, it will be to such men an irresistible temptation to convert debt into perpetual war and war into perpetual debt."

G. Edward Griffin in his book "The Creature from Jekyll Island"

"The professional soldiers and sailors don't want to disarm. No admiral wants to be without a ship. No general wants to be without a command. They are not for disarmament. They cannot be for limitations of arms.
There is only one way to disarm with any semblance of practicability. That is for all nations to get together and scrap every ship, every gun, every rifle, every tank, every war plane."

General Smedley Butler, 1933

"In a closed society, one party or despot has control over the instruments of mass communication and the power to enforce its will. Something very similar, however, can happen in a democratic society under specific conditions that are recognizable only in hindsight, although Orwell recognized one of the most important, namely, when a government wages a "perpetual war" that keeps people terrified, focused in their hatred against external and internal enemies, and "patriotic" in the Orwellian sense."

Drew Westen in the book "What Orwell Didn't Know"

"What better economic stimulus than a foreign policy of perpetual war?"

Justin Raimondo, 2009

"In 1957 President Dwight Eisenhower commissioned a panel of scientists to study the issue of overpopulation. The scientists put forth "Alternatives" advocating both the release of deadly viruses and perpetual warfare as means to decrease world population."

Dean Henderson in his book "Big Oil & Their Bankers In The Persian Gulf"

"When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded."

George Orwell in his book "1984"

"Three steps must be taken to smash the war racket.
We must take the profit out of war.
We must permit the youth of the land who would bear arms to decide whether or not there should be war.
We must limit our military forces to home defense purposes."

General Smedley Butler, 1933

WEBSITES TO VISIT

BARBARIANS IN SUITS

BEYOND THE MEDIA MATRIX

DISINFORMATION NATION

EMPIRE OF CHAOS

GLOBAL KLEPTOCRACY

HOW THE WORLD REALLY WORKS

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

PATHOCRACY: THE GLOBAL ORDER

ROTHSCHILD WORLD ORDER

THE PLUTOCRACY CARTEL

THIRD WORLD TRAVELER

TRUTH-TELLERS