Kissinger Does His Best to Do His Worst
NOVEMBER 5 IS THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY of a fateful meeting between then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and President Nixon, during which Kissinger successfully lobbied Nixon to agree with Kissinger’s extreme hostility to Salvador Allende and his brand-new progressive Chilean government.
Kissinger wanted the U.S. to “oppose Allende as strongly as we can,” instead of following the State Department’s plan to establish a modus vivendi with Allende.
There was no question, as Kissinger acknowledged, that Allende had been elected in a free and fair election and his claim to power was legitimate, which was why the State Department was in favor of treating the Allende government coldly but correctly and not attempting to subvert it.
Kissinger convinced Nixon that because Chile was in the U.S. “sphere of influence,” the U.S. had the right to use all possible covert methods to get rid of the anti-imperialist Allende. Later that day, when the State Department and Kissinger debated the question at a National Security Council meeting, Nixon settled the matter by taking Kissinger’s side. Less than three years later Allende was overthrown by a bloody coup that had the full, but covert, support of the U.S. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/20597-national-security-archive-doc-1-white-house#
Rubin “Hurricane” Carter Exonerated
NOVEMBER 7 IS THE 40TH ANNIVERSARY of the federal court ruling that freed Rubin (“Hurricane”) Carter, who had been framed for a murder he did not commit and imprisoned for more than 18 years.
When Carter was arrested in 1966 he was a successful middleweight boxer, never a champion but widely considered to be a contender.
Each of Carter’s two murder trials (the second occurred because the first verdict had been thrown out) was full of contradictory and confusing testimony, none of which clearly indicated Carter’s guilt or even his presence at the crime scene, but both ended in his conviction.
Eighteen years after his arrest, a federal court judge ruled that “The extensive record clearly demonstrates that petitioners’ convictions were predicated upon an appeal to racism rather than reason, and concealment rather than disclosure.”
After his release, Carter devoted the rest of his life to freeing the wrongly convicted from prison. He wrote two autobiographies, was the inspiration for a Bob Dylan hit (“Hurricane”) and was the subject of a movie, “The Hurricane” in which he was played by Denzel Washington. He became a symbol of racial injustice and the penal system.
Carter founded a nonprofit organization, Innocence International, to work to free prisoners it considered wrongly convicted. To learn more about Rubin Carter’s life, visit the Zinn Education Project’s https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/rubin-hurricane-carter-dies/
Four Months of Broad-Daylight Treason
NOVEMBER 8 IS THE 165TH ANNIVERSARY of the day when enough of the votes had been counted so the people of the United States knew that Abraham Lincoln had won the bitterly fought presidential election that had been held two days earlier. It was also the first day of a 17-week-long episode of what might be called “daylight treason,” a long series of sinister acts designed to to prevent the success of Lincoln’s anti-secession government, which had to wait nearly four months before it could take office.
The main culprits in the treasonous plot were the President of the United States, James Buchanan, and his cabinet, all of whom had been fiercely opposed to candidate Lincoln and who remained steadfast in their antagonism to President-elect Lincoln and the Republican Party, which might have won an election but who would not be in power for nearly one-third of a year.
As Ulysses S. Grant, who would become a hero of the Civil War and then President of the United States, recalled in the memoir that he published in 1885, “The winter of 1860-1 will be remembered by middle-aged people of to-day as one of great excitement. South Carolina promptly seceded after the result of the Presidential election was known . . . Meanwhile the Administration of President Buchanan looked helplessly on and proclaimed that the government had no power to save its own life.”
Grant’s memoir continues that Buchanan and his cabinet “scattered the army so that much of it could be captured when hostilities should commence [as they did in April 1861], and distributed the cannon and small arms from Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them. [Emphasis added by xxxxxx] The navy was scattered in like manner. The President did not prevent his cabinet preparing for war upon their government, either by destroying its resources or storing them in the South until a de facto government was established with Jefferson Davis as its President, and Montgomery, Alabama, as the Capital.”
Grant’s accurate recollection of one of the roughest political periods in U.S. history might be regarded today as a quaint historical footnote. But it also might augur events of the not-too-distant future.
For the source of the Grant quotation: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4367 Chapter XVII
CIA Outlaws in Charge
NOVEMBER 9 IS THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY of the CIA’s 2005 decision to flout the law and feloniously destroy 92 videotapes it had made of hundreds of hours of CIA interrogations, some of which involved torture, including waterboarding.
When the tapes had been created in 2002, their existence had been a major bone of contention within the CIA, because they were thought to include incontrovertible evidence that CIA agents or CIA contractors had committed very serious war crimes. When they were not destroyed and the White House became aware of their existence, the White House ordered that they not be destroyed without White House instructions. If the tapes were evidence of a crime, then their destruction might also be a crime.
The debate over the fate of the tapes began to come to a head on Nov. 4, 2005, when the Washington Post first reported the existence of secret CIA interrogation sites in Asia and in Eastern Europe. As reports of the tapes’ existence multiplied, on Nov. 8 the CIA chief of operations ordered that they be destroyed, which took place the next day.
No one was ever disciplined or charged with a crime concerning either the tapes’ creation or their destruction. One person who was known to have been directly involved in ordering their destruction, Gina Haspel, was promoted to become the seventh director of the CIA in 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_CIA_interrogation_videotapes_destruction
United Fruit Plays for Keeps
NOVEMBER 10 IS THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of the election that resulted in Jacobo Arbenz taking office as the President Guatemala. Almost all observers declared the 1950 election had been conducted fairly, and that the outcome was not unexpected, because Arbenz, who was a colonel in the Guatemalan Army, was the favorite of the popular outgoing president, who had a solid history as a supporter of social and political reform.
Before Arbenz took office in March 1951, no one could be sure what kind of president he would be, because he was a soldier who had never before been elected to anything. He surprised large numbers of people by taking up the cause of social and political reform with unanticipated enthusiasm. With the support of the Guatemalan legislature, Arbenz pushed through a radical agrarian-reform law that expropriated hundreds of thousands of acres of land owned by the Boston-based United Fruit Company.
The expropriated land was singled out because the United Fruit Company was holding it unused, in order to limit the size of the banana crop and keep prices up. The expropriated acreage was enough to provide farmsteads to more than a half-million landless Guatemalan peasants, nearly one-sixth of the country’s population.
Arbenz’s unwillingness to give into the threats of United Fruit was a surprise to almost everyone, but he insisted that Guatemala was a democracy and the government would pursue a policy to benefit the masses and not the tiny class of landowners, many of whom were not even Guatemalan citizens.
His staunchness was unacceptable to both the landowners and the U.S. State Department, which was more interested in the demands of Boston investors than it was in the needs of Guatemala’s population. Accordingly, in June 1954 a force of 480 men, trained, funded and armed by the CIA, invaded Guatemala and began a 10-day battle that ended in the overthrow of Arbenz and the country's entire democratically elected government. The expropriated land was returned to United Fruit, and much of it remains in corporate hands to this day. https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/jacobo-arbenz-guzman-deposed/
500 Years Too Many for Angola
NOVEMBER 11 IS THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY of the establishment of an independent Angolan government in 1975, which brought an end to almost 500 years of Portuguese colonial exploitation of what is now the seventh-largest African country.
The Angolan defeat of the Portuguese Army required more than 13 years of fighting, which was then followed by a civil war that continued for nearly a quarter of a century. https://media.un.org/photo/en/asset/oun7/oun7539888#:~:text=10%20November%201975,independence%20on%2011%20November%201975.
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