Prof. Jeffrey Sachs issued another carefully researched article, “How the CIA Destabilizes the World,” on the crimes of a U.S.A. run amok, in an op-ed yesterday for Common Dreams. He reviews the well-known CIA operations around the world over the past 50 years—noting that next year is the 50th anniversary of the 1975 Church Committee, the first (and last) effort to expose “the CIA’s shocking rampage of assassinations, coups, destabilization, surveillance, and Mengele-style torture and medical ‘experiments.’” None of the cases he quotes are new revelations, but all demonstrate that the official role of the CIA is to “subvert the ‘enemy’”—that is, whomever the President or CIA defined as the enemy—using a wide range of measures: assassinations, coups, staged unrest, arming of insurgents, and other means.
He notes the 1961 assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, “thus undermining the democratic hopes for Africa. He would hardly be the last African president brought down by the CIA.” Then there was Seymour Hersh’s exposure of the CIA subversion of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War, followed by the numerous cases of the CIA training and arming “jihadists in Afghanistan … in the Balkans against Serbia, in the Caucasus against Russia, in Central Asia targeting China … [and] to topple Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.” And of course, there was the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine. The media, he notes, quote unnamed officials to cover up all these crimes.
