USAID has a history of working with the CIA as a front operation to help them spread that special kind of “democracy” (read as IMF inspired brutal repression) in nations where we have installed brutal dictators in support of our neoliberal economic agenda.
” In South Vietnam, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)provided cover for CIA operatives so widely that the two became almost synonymous.” Washington Post
As the bodies of labor union reps and dissidents are piling up on the stairwells of Odessa and the streets of eastern Ukraine, today it is reported that USAID needs another couple million to support pro-Western “media outlets” in the run-up to the sham election to be held in the troubled state.
The US Agency for International Development (USAID) has promised to beef up financial aid for Ukraine’s pro-Western media outlets amid a mounting dispute between the West and Russia. Press TV
Two weeks ago it was reported that the agency created a Twitter-like program (ZunZuneo) in Cuba with the express purpose of fostering dissent and creating unrest in the nation with the hopes of setting up yet another regime change color revolution. Turns out their efforts were not limited to Cuba.
“In a number of countries, including Venezuela and Bolivia, USAID is acting more as an agency involved in covert action, like the CIA, than as an aid or development agency.” Marc Weisbrot
It should be noted that USAID’s efforts aren’t limited to White Hat psyops.
“Guatemala: By 1970, USAID trained over 30,000 Guatemalan police to suppress local leftists, according to William Blum’s book “Killing Hope.” Just over a decade later, Guatemalan death squads under US-backed dictator Rios Montt unleashed a genocide on the Mayan peasants.” Pando Daily
— The Vietnam War: USAID trained police and ran civilian jails. USAID also participated in the “soft” side of the Phoenix Program — funding the failed“Land to the Tillers” program granting peasants small plots of land, a program that has a poor track record, but serves some important foreign policy/propaganda purpose every time it’s rolled out because it remains one of the most enduring boondoggles in the USAID kit. Pando Daily
“[I]n the early 1960s agents from the State Department, Green Berets, CIA, and USAID organized two paramilitary groups that would become the backbone of that country’s death squad system.” Greg Grandin
They were even involved in Russia during the neoliberal Yeltsin disaster.
USAID funded Chubais through public-private organizations and a Harvard program that was so patently corrupt, Harvard and its program directors including economist Andrei Shleifer were sued by the US Department of Justice for “conspiring to defraud” the US government (not to mention Russians). USAID also paid public relations giant Burson-Marsteller to sell the disastrous voucher program to the Russian public, in a mass media advertising blitz that promoted Chubais’ political party on the eve of parliamentary elections. It was this USAID funded privatization, and the USAID-backed Russia “democrats,” which soured Russians on market capitalism and democracy (renamed “dermokratsia” or “shitocracy” in Russian). Pando Daily
This USAID effort in Ukraine is nothing new. They’ve been at this trick for years and years going back to a time when President Peace Prize was a toddler at his mother’s side in Indonesia working for another IMF/World Bank creation; one of the most brutal dictators in human history, Suharto (an argument can be made also for our “darling dictator” of Rwanda, Paul Kagame).
(Keep in mind, at that point, ’65, “(USAID) provided cover for CIA operatives so widely that the two became almost synonymous”)
“Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, worked on micro-financing projects for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Ford Foundation, both linked to the CIA, that helped prop up dictatorships in Indonesia and Pakistan. After Suharto seized power in 1965, USAID returned to Indonesia, with Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro as one of its chief employees, to help Suharto create the New Order (Orde Baru) that would usher in decades of fascist and kleptocratic rule.” source
Her exact roll there is questionable at best. The “micro-financing projects” were simply cover for getting people on the ground in the targeted areas of Indonesia to rat-out the local leftists and political organizers. The “loans’ were probably payments for the information which was turned over to the CIA and from there to Suharto’s death squads for the formation of his infamous lists.
Indonesia, 1963-65. U.S. trained unionist spies laid groundwork for post 1965 coup gestapu massacre of leftists by gathering intelligence on leftist unionists. Counterspy, Winter 1979, p. 27
Indonesia, 1965-66. “U.S. officials’ lists aided Indonesian blood bath in ’60s.” U.S. officials supplied the names of thousands of members of Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to the army that was hunting them down and killing them in a crackdown branded as one of the century’s worst massacres, former U.S. Diplomats and CIA officials say. Robert J. Martens, Former member of embassy’s political section said, “it really was a big help to the army…. They probably killed a lot of people…” Martens said. He headed an embassy group of state Department and CIA officials that spent two years compiling the lists. He said he delivered them to an army intermediary. The lists were a detailed who’s who of the leadership of the PKI that included names of provincial, city and other local PKI members and leaders of mass organizations. Ambassador Marshall Green, his deputy Jack Lydman, and political section chief Edward Masters admitted approving the release of the names. Army intermediary was an aide to Adam Malik. The aide, Tirta Kentjana Adhyatman, confirmed that he had met with Martens and received lists of thousands of names…given to Sukarno’s HQs. Information on who captured and killed came to Americans from Suharto’s HQs, according to former CIA deputy chief of station Joseph Lazarsky. Lazarsky said “we were getting a good account in Jakarta of who was being picked up,”…”the army had a ‘shooting list’ of about 4,000 to 5,000 people.” Lazarsky said the check-off work was also carried out at CIA’s intelligence directorate in D.C. By end of January 1966, “the checked off names were so numerous the CIA analysts in Washington concluded the PKI leadership had been destroyed.” Washington Post, 5/21/1990, A5
Indonesia, 1965-66 Indonesian generals approached U.S. for equipment “to arm Moslem and nationalist youths for use in central Java against the PKI.” Washington responded by supplying covert aid, dispatched as “medicines.” Washington Post, 6/13/1990, A 22 Serendipity
So going back to Friday’s slaughter of dissidents and labor leaders in Odessa. Sound familiar?
And now USAID is right there on the ground, coincidentally enough, days after it became known that the CIA and the FBI are in Ukraine aiding yet another unelected brutal IMF-backed dictator on our behalf.
When India was neoliberalized, far-right thugs backed by and even steered by local police, roamed the streets at night targeting the homes of various leftists such as labor leaders, writers and political opposition and dissidents. Countless people were dragged from their homes and beaten to death by the mobs in front of their wives and children while the law stood by and did nothing. This was done too ensure the stability of the new neoliberal system for years to come.
