The Sandspur

Issue date: 3/5/10 Section: Opinions

Yoni's take on the political environment of the nation and the world.

Today, we are in the process of leaving one war and surging into another. The American military has been worn thin and the costs in blood and national funds have been tremendous. We must analyze the reasoning behind these wars and hold our leaders accountable for their actions.

Beginning with Truman's war in Korea, the executive has an unparalleled power in foreign policy. Followed by Johnson and Nixon's war in Vietnam and George W. Bush's war in Iraq, these presidents have chosen to wage wars of choice, often misleading or downright lying to Congress and to the people.

With increasing reliance on mercenary groups like Blackwater (recently renamed Xe Services) and other private firms, we have begun a process of privatizing war. For the blood of our young men and women, the flow of money comes easily to those in the military industrial complex.

Recently, a man named John Perkins, author of New York Times bestsellers, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" and "The Secret History of the American Empire," broke his vow of silence and released books and interviews about the inner workings of American foreign policy. Many of his views are heavily contentious and many in the field discredit him for lack of hard evidence, but his messages are still widely received by much of the public.

His job, hired jointly by the CIA and international corporations, was to act as an economic hitman. Accord-ing to Perkins, economic hitmen, numbering in the hundreds around the world, are sent to third world countries and are told to convince the leaders to accept enormous loans from organizations like the World Bank and the IMF.

Guaranteed in the loans are contracts that go to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel through bribery and threats. Once these countries are loaded with insurmountable amounts of debt, they are forced to privatize their infrastructure (like oil), vote with America in the next international meeting of countries, devaluate their currency, and often allow America to build military bases in their country.

If at any time these countries do not follow the "request" from the economic hitmen, then the jackals are to be sent in. The jackals are CIA specialists trained in a range of "solutions" from propaganda to assassination. In the 1980s, under the pretext of the spread of communism, the economic hitmen and jackals were crucial in placing Central America under the control of the American empire. There is little doubt that the CIA had a major hand in many of the coups and assassinations that were common in places like Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and Colombia in the 1980s.

Continued...

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