The
U.S. government may pretend to respect a “rules-based” global
order, but the only rule Washington seems to follow is “might makes
right” — and the CIA has long served as a chief instigator and
enforcer.
by
Nicolas J.S. Davies
Part
2 - The CIA’s Pretexts for War
U.S.
Air Force Colonel Fletcher Prouty was the chief of special operations
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1955 to 1964, managing the global
military support system for the CIA in Vietnam and around the world.
Fletcher Prouty’s book, The Secret Team: The CIA and its Allies in
Control of the United States and the World, was suppressed when it
was first published in 1973. Thousands of copies disappeared from
bookstores and libraries, and a mysterious Army Colonel bought the
entire shipment of 3,500 copies the publisher sent to Australia. But
Prouty’s book was republished in 2011, and it is a timely account
of the role of the CIA in U.S. policy.
Prouty
surprisingly described the role of the CIA as a response by powerful
people and interests to the abolition of the U.S. Department of War
and the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947. Once the role
of the U.S. military was redefined as one of defense, in line with
the United Nations Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use
of military force in 1945 and similar moves by other military powers,
it would require some kind of crisis or threat to justify using
military force in the future, both legally and politically. The main
purpose of the CIA, as Prouty saw it, is to create such pretexts for
war.
The
CIA is a hybrid of an intelligence service that gathers and analyzes
foreign intelligence and a clandestine service that conducts covert
operations. Both functions are essential to creating pretexts for
war, and that is what they have done for 70 years.
Prouty
described how the CIA infiltrated the U.S. military, the State
Department, the National Security Council and other government
institutions, covertly placing its officers in critical positions to
ensure that its plans are approved and that it has access to whatever
forces, weapons, equipment, ammunition and other resources it needs
to carry them out.
Many
retired intelligence officers, such as Ray McGovern and the members
of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), saw the
merging of clandestine operations with intelligence analysis in one
agency as corrupting the objective analysis they tried to provide to
policymakers. They formed VIPS in 2003 in response to the fabrication
of politicized intelligence that provided false pretexts for the U.S.
to invade and destroy Iraq.
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