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The US not only often installed, but in each case protected, both politically and militarily, and supported with arms, cash and military training, the corrupt dictatorships of:
Abacha, General Sani ----------------------------Nigeria
Amin, Idi ----------------------------------------Uganda
Banzer, Colonel Hugo -----------------------------Bolivia
Batista, Fulgencio -------------------------------Cuba
Bolkiah, Sir Hassanal -----------------------------Brunei
Botha, P.W. ---------------------------------South Africa
Branco, General Humberto ------------------------Brazil
Cedras, Raoul ------------------------------------Haiti
Cerezo, Vinicio ------------------------------Guatemala
Chiang Kai-Shek ---------------------------------Taiwan
Cordova, Roberto Suazo -------------------------Honduras
Christiani, Alfredo ---------------------------El Salvador
Diem, Ngo Dihn ----------------------------------Vietnam
Doe, General Samuel ----------------------------Liberia
Duvalier, Francois --------------------------------Haiti
Duvalier, Jean Claude-----------------------------Haiti
Fahd bin'Abdul-'Aziz, King --------------------Saudi Arabia
Franco, General Francisco -----------------------Spain
Hassan II----------------------------------------Morocco
Hussein, Saddam --------------------------------Iraq
Khan, Yahya-------------------------------------Pakistan
Marcos, Ferdinand -------------------------------Philippines
Martinez, General Maximiliano Hernandez ----------El Salvador
Mobutu Sese Seko -------------------------------Zaire
Noriega, General Manuel --------------------------Panama
Ozal, Turgut -------------------------------------Turkey
Pahlevi, Shah Mohammed Reza -------------------Iran
Papadopoulos, George ---------------------------Greece
Park Chung Hee ---------------------------------South Korea
Pinochet, General Augusto -----------------------Chile
Pol Pot------------------------------------------Cambodia
Rabuka, General Sitiveni -------------------------Fiji
Montt, General Efrain Rios -----------------------Guatemala
Salassie, Halie ----------------------------------Ethiopia
Salazar, Antonio de Oliveira ----------------------Portugal
Somoza, Anastasio Jr. ---------------------------Nicaragua
Somoza, Anastasio, Sr. --------------------------Nicaragua
Smith, Ian --------------------------------------Rhodesia
Stroessner, Alfredo ------------------------------Paraguay
Suharto, General --------------------------------Indonesia
Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas --------------------Dominican Republic
Videla, General Jorge Rafael ----------------------Argentina
Zia Ul-Haq, Mohammed --------------------------Pakistan
And what about the quality of these newly-installed dictators? Well:
Trujillo in the Dominican Republic was a convicted rapist.
In El Salvador, the US installed Roberto D'Aubuisson, whom a US Ambassador called a "pathological killer".
Of Somoza in Nicaragua, Franklin Roosevelt said, "Somoza may be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's our son-of-a-bitch."
An estimated 50,000 killed during the Nicaraguan "revolution", 120,000 exiled and 600,000 made homeless, and this was only the beginning. Nicaragua was one of the few cases where international pressure on Jimmy Carter's government forced the US to abandon military and political support for one of their favorite dictators.
Alfredo Cristiani of El Salvador was famous worldwide for his motto - "Be patriotic-kill a priest".
Ferdinand Marcos - Phippines
The US candidate for Philippines dictator, under President Lyndon Johnson, Ferdinand Marcos began his career in prison at age 21 for the murder of the man who had beaten his father in the local election.
Starting in 1950, the US CIA funded several decades of academic research into “the relative usefulness of drugs, electroshock, violence, and other coercive techniques” to discover a new method of psychological torture - perhaps the most significant revolution in this cruel science during the past four centuries. Instead of a simple physical brutality, these units practiced a distinctive form of psychological torture with wider implications for the military and its society.
The CIA's thousand-page torture manual, distributed to military regimes in Latin America for over 20 years, taught psychological tactics to break down what the Agency called a victim's “capacity to resist”. Through “persistent manipulation of time,” the interrogator can break a victim's will, driving the victim, in the CIA's words, “deeper and deeper into himself, until he is no longer able to control his responses in an adult fashion.”
The CIA created in the Philippines "a closed, tight-knit, psychotic club of martial-law enforcers, and few could rival their psychopathic interrogations."
in 2008, lawyers for Philippine victims of human rights abuses under CIA-supported Marcos said Friday they regretted a U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning lower court rulings that gave the victims the right to money stashed by Marcos in the United States.
Mohammad Reza Pahlevi - Iran
With the support of US President Eisenhower, Allen Dulles used the CIA to topple the elected government of Dr. Mohammad Mossadeq and install the Shah. With Dulles' encouragement, he forced all people to join his party or go to jail. Thousands were imprisoned or murdered. His agents raided a religious school and hurled hundreds of students to their deaths from the roof.
His secret police agency, SAVAK, was created in 1957 and managed by the CIA at all levels of daily operation, including the choice and organization of personnel, selection and operation of equipment, and the running of agents. Torture methods included:
electric shock
whipping
beating
inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum
tying weights to the testicles
the extraction of teeth and nails.
Iran under the Shah became a devoted US ally and a base for spy operations on the border of the Soviet Union.
In 2000, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright stated: "In 1953 the United States played a significant role in orchestrating the overthrow of Iran's popular Prime Minister, Mohammed Massadegh. The Eisenhower Administration believed its actions were justified for strategic reasons; but the coup was clearly a setback for Iran's political development. And it is easy to see now why many Iranians continue to resent this intervention by America in their internal affairs."
No Kidding.
P.W. Botha - South Africa
Reagan significantly increased military expenditures and support, but Botha had some bad habits that Reagan ignored:
(1) Cutting off the ears, noses, and limbs of civilians
(2) He would:
round up 10 year old boys
kill their parents in front of them
rape young women while they watched
then recruit them to fight in his army
Mobutu Sese Seko - Zaire
Zaire's first President, Patrice Lumumba, seemed to be too socialist and US companies feared they might lose control of Zaire's cobalt, copper and diamonds.
So the CIA assassinated Lumumba and replaced him with Mobutu, who had been the US's main man in Central Africa. He imprisoned and tortured, but the US Congress continued to reward his work against communism and his warm reception of American corporations.
General Suharto - Indonesia
Suharto was one of the most brutal dictators in history. He ruled for 32 years and continued his savage atrocities under the support of 7 US presidents: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton.
President Lyndon Johnson authorised a CIA-organized coup that brought Suharto to power in 1965, and the CIA then supervised while Suharto exterminated three million Indonesian communist party members.
They hacked the alleged subversives to death with machetes. Entire populations of towns and villages were herded to central locations and massacred. Children would be asked to identify communists who would then be executed on the spot.
In addition to the half million people who were killed outright after the coup, another 750,000 were arrested and tortured. Ultimately, one million people died in one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history. The US continues to this day to train and arm the Indonesian military with the latest high-tech equipment. The US has also recently opened a new "black" "Peace Medicine" installation in Indonesia that is almost certainly a torture laboratory.
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