Is American foreign policy so foreign to our values that those who have served at the very pinnacle of the national intelligence agencies have trouble telling the truth?
âHave we ever tried to meddle in other countriesâ elections?â Laura Ingraham, host of Fox Newsâ The Ingraham Angle, asked James Woolsey, director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1993 to 1995, during President Clintonâs first term.
âOh, probably,â Mr. Woolsey replied. âBut, uh, it was for the good of the system, in order to avoid communists from taking over. For example, in Europe in â47-â48-â49, the Greeks and the Italians, we, the CIAââ
âWe donât do that now, though?â Ingraham interjected. âWe donât mess around in other peopleâs elections, Jim?â
âWell . . . urrrrr, yum, yum, yum, um, um, umâ the old spymaster mouthed to laughter from both Ingraham and her studio cameramen.
âOnly for a very good cause,â he added with a sly grin, âand the interests of democracy.â
Interests. Of. Democracy.
I think I hear my cameraman laughing.
Foreign Policy magazine tells us that documents declassified in 2017 âshed light on the Central Intelligence Agencyâs central role in the 1953 coup that brought down [elected] Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadegh, fueling a surge of nationalism which culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and poisoning U.S.-Iran relations into the 21st century.â
It was hardly an aberration. The following year, the CIA covertly bombed Guatemala City and deposed that countryâs elected president. In the 1964 Chile election, declassified documents show the U.S. gave âlarge sumsâ of money to the winning candidate. The CIA admits to planting both true and false stories into Nicaraguan newspapers in 1990.
âWeâve been doing this kind of thing since the C.I.A. was created in 1947,â explained Loch Johnson, dubbed the dean of American intelligence scholars. âWeâve used posters, pamphlets, mailers, banners â you name it. Weâve planted false information in foreign newspapers. Weâve used what the British call âKing Georgeâs cavalryâ: suitcases of cash.â
The U.S. government could not stop itself from interfering in the 1996 Russian election on behalf of then-President Boris Yeltsin. The New York Times carried an illuminating exchange regarding the thinking, or lack thereof, behind our meddling: âThomas Carothers, a scholar at the Carnegie Institute for International Peace, recalls arguing with a State Department official who told him at the time, âYeltsin is democracy in Russia,â to which Mr. Carothers said he replied, âThatâs not what democracy means.ââ
Need more? Dov Levin, a Post Doctoral Fellow at Carnegie-Mellon Universityâs Institute for Politics and Strategy, has compiled a handy database that lists undemocratic and illegal shenanigans going on and on through the â60s, â70s, â80s, up through President Obama to today.
Just how high and low does this go? Well, American Spectator credits WorldNetDailyâs Jerome Corsi with documenting that Barack Obama got in on the game early. Yes, even before he was president, âObama, as a U.S. Senator, illegally used a taxpayer-financed trip to campaign for far-left presidential candidate Raila Odinga in Kenyaâs 2006 elections.â
âBy 2010,â according to the Spectator story, âthis tribal connection resulted in President Obama quietly transferring millions of U.S. tax dollars to Odingaâs government, including $2 million to convince Kenyan voters to vote for a new constitution.â
This time last year, Judicial Watch was finally able to obtain documents in a lawsuit, which showed that since 2012 âthe U.S. government has quietly spent millions of taxpayer dollars to destabilize the democratically elected, center-right government in Macedonia by colluding with leftwing, billionaire philanthropist George Soros.â
The New York Times disclosed that U.S. money and influence has been used to alter elections in both Iraq and Afghanistan. When considering the animosity former Afghan President Hamid Karzai has expressed toward the U.S., remember that former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, in his memoir, described the U.S. attempt to defeat Karzai as âour clumsy and failed putsch.â
Defenders of U.S. overt and covert election-related activities in other countries claim that U.S. interventions have âgenerally been aimed at . . . promoting democracy.â So, why canât the former CIA director address this policy with a straight face?
Well, âgenerallyâ being pro-democracy â except when overthrowing democratically elected officials to install authoritarian regimes â is hardly a robust defense. Plus, Woolsey may not want to embrace such rank hypocrisy on national television. Moreover, what the CIA, State Department and other federal government appendages have done and are doing to interfere in the elections of other nations is not merely unseemly, it is also against the law.
âMeddling in otherâs elections is a violation of international law,â Steve Baldwin wrote recently in The American Spectator. âMore importantly, U.S. law prohibits the use of tax dollars to influence foreign elections.â
In an article last December, the New York Times noted the obvious and ongoing media fail of which they are a large part: âThis broader history of election meddling has largely been missing from the flood of reporting on the Russian intervention . . .â
As American citizens we have every right to complain about Russian government interference in our elections, but our own governmentâs interference in other nationâs elections, including Russiaâs, undermines our moral high ground.
To say the least.
Source: Townhall