Tag: assassinations

The Three Types of US-Led Regime Change

Throughout the long, documented history of the United States illegally overthrowing governments of foreign lands to build a global empire there has emerged three ways Washington broadly carries out “regime change.”

From Above. If the targeted leader has been democratically elected and enjoys popular support, the CIA has worked with elite groups, such as the military, to overthrow him (sometimes through assassination).  Among several examples is the first CIA-backed coup d’état, on March 30, 1949,  just 18 months after the agency’s founding, when Syrian Army Colonel Husni al-Za’im overthrew the elected president, Shukri al-Quwatli. 

The CIA in 1954 toppled the elected President Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, who was replaced with a military dictator. In 1961, just three days before the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, who favored his release, Congolese President Patrice Lumumba was assassinated with CIA assistance, bringing military strongman Mobutu Sese Seko to power.  In 1973, the US backed Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to overthrow and kill the democratically-elected, socialist President Salvador Allende, setting up a military dictatorship, one of many U.S.-installed military dictatorships of that era in Latin America under Operation Condor. 

From Below. If the targeted government faces genuine popular unrest, the U.S. will foment and organize it to topple the leader, elected or otherwise. 1958-59 anti-communist protests in Kerala, India, locally supported by the Congress Party and the Catholic Church, were funded by the CIA, leading to the removal of the elected communist government. The 1953 coup in Iran that overthrew the democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh was a combination of bottom-up CIA (and MI-6)-backed street protests, and top-down conservative clergy and military to destroy democracy and return a monarch to the throne. The US-backed Ukrainian coup of 2014 is the latest example of the US working with genuine popular dissent to help organize and steer the overthrow, in this case, of an OSCE-certified elected president. 

Through Military Intervention.  If a coup is not feasible, the US turns to indirect or direct military intervention. One of earliest examples was the US expeditionary force that invaded Russia in 1918 during the civil war in an attempt to help overthrow the new Bolshevik government.  More recently, in 1983 the U.S. military invaded Grenada to overthrow a Marxist president; in 1989 the U.S. invaded Panama to overthrow former CIA asset Manuela Noriega.

Another hybrid operation was the US bombing of Serbia in 1999 and the State Department funding of the opposition group Otpor!, which led to the ouster of Slobodan Milosevic. The most prominent recent examples of direct military invasion to overthrow governments are the U.S.-led invasions of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Indirect military intervention through proxies to overthrow governments happened in the 1980s Contra war against Nicaragua; and the 2011 to present jihadist war to overthrow the Syrian government. 

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Why Does the Media Keep Blaming the Russians for JFK’s Assassination?

In mid-December, the Biden administration released nearly 1,500 documents related to the John F. Kennedy assassination. Out of all the intelligence agencies memoranda, dossiers, and interview transcripts, the media has seized upon one: a CIA memo about Lee Harvey Oswald’s supposed in-person meeting with Valery Kostikov, a notorious KGB official, in Mexico City in September 1963.  

There’s nothing new about the memo in question. The same is true for most of the JFK records released in December. But as a round of fresh press coverage indicated, the encounter suggests Oswald was working for the Soviets, and that America’s Cold War nemesis was responsible for Kennedy’s killing — not the mob, anti-Castro Cubans, the CIA, or the military-industrial complex.  

The theory that Oswald was a KGB asset has persisted for decades, despite a lack of evidence. Even the CIA concluded that any contact Oswald had with KGB-affiliated Russians was a “grim coincidence.” (A man claiming to be Oswald did contact the Soviets in Mexico City — but that man was an impostor.) 

This most recent recycling of the “Oswald and the Russians” story — the JFK assassination’s very own Russiagate — follows a predictable pattern that appears every time there’s a release of JFK records. It happened in 2017 and during the 1990s.

So, what gives? Why does the media gravitate toward the Oswald/KGB “revelation” every few years rather than any of the other more plausible theories? 

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Did You Know? US Gov’t Found Guilty In Conspiracy To Assassinate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Though the United States government has wrapped Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s legacy in the American flag, waving his words to symbolize racial harmony and patriotic solidarity even as institutionalized White supremacy remains embedded in policies detrimental to the very Black community he tirelessly strived to uplift, very little is spoken of the fact that a Memphis jury found the United States government guilty of conspiring to assassinate Dr. King on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968.

After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a swift unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 that Dr. King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, the NY Times reported at the time.

The King family, who filed the civil suit, was awarded $100. They donated the minuscule amount to charity.

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JFK Assassination: What’s in the Newest Batch of Declassified Documents?

Last month, the Biden administration released a batch of classified documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The National Archives and Records Administration published the new 1,491 documents, of which 958 are from the CIA.

That means 9 out of 10 of the total number of documents are still being withheld from declassification.

“It’s very little and very late,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the president’s nephew, told The Epoch Times.

“There’s only 10 percent of the documents that legally have to be released in that data dump. But even those documents are clearly showing that the CIA lied outright to the Warren Commission about its relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald.”

The 1992 JFK Records Act, signed by Congress into law, mandated that all the documents be released by Oct. 26, 2017.

However, one person had the power to stop it—the incumbent president.

When the time for total declassification finally came, President Donald Trump put a six-month delay on the final declassification. Then he put a three-year delay on it.

Some documents were declassified, however, and by the time President Joe Biden took office, about 15,000 documents were either being withheld or redacted in part.

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FBI arrests main suspect in Haiti president assassination

U.S. authorities have taken into custody a primary suspect in the assassination of the Haitian president. Mario Antonio Palacios is a Colombian national who fled to Jamaica and had evaded arrest for months.

Palacios, 43, was recently deported from Jamaica and, during a layover in Panama, agreed to travel to the United States, according to prosecutors for the U.S. District Court for the South District of Florida. He was taken into custody and was scheduled to appear in federal court in Miami. 

According to the federal criminal complaint unsealed Tuesday, Palacios and others entered the presidential palace in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on July 7, 2021, in a plot to kill President Jovenel Moise. Moise was shot 12 times and died as a result, according to an autopsy and local authorities. First lady Martine Moise also suffered multiple gunshots but survived and was treated in Miami.

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Meta Censors Anti-Imperialist Speech In Obedience To The US Government

Anti-imperialist commentator Richard Medhurst reports that Instagram has deleted some 20 images from his account and given him a warning that he could face a permanent ban if he continues making similar posts. The posts in question are screenshots from a Twitter thread Medhurst made to commemorate the two-year anniversary of the Trump administration’s assassination of renowned Iranian military leader Qasem Soleimani.

Go ahead and read the thread; here’s the hyperlink again. There’s nothing in there that comes anywhere remotely close to violating Instagram’s terms of service as they are written; Medhurst condemns the assassination and the bogus justifications provided for it, and discusses Soleimani’s crucial role in the fight against ISIS and Al Qaeda. The reason for Instagram’s censorship of Medhurst’s political speech is that Instagram’s parent company Meta (then called Facebook) determined after Soleimani’s assassination that anything which seems supportive of him constitutes a violation of US sanctions and must therefore be removed.

In 2019 the Trump administration designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, which was as hypocritical and arbitrary as any other government designating any other branch of another government’s military a terrorist organization. Despite this completely baseless designation, both the Meta-owned social media platforms Facebook and Instagram have been actively censoring political speech about Soleimani, who was the commander of the IRGC’s Quds force when he was assassinated. Medhurst reports that he has been censored on Instagram under the same justification for posting about Hamas as well.

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Lee Harvey Oswald’s Last Phone Call

The man Oswald was trying to call, John David Hurt, was someone whose name had never been mentioned in connection to the JFK assassination in any of the voluminous records — and John David Hurt was an experienced former Special Agent of U.S. Army Counter Intelligence.

As Senator Richard Schweiker had said during the Church Committee Investigations, “”We don’t know what happened, but we do know Oswald had intelligence connections. Everywhere you look with him, there are the fingerprints of intelligence.”

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RFK Jr. Drops Bomb About JFK Assassination – ‘Very Convincing’ Evidence There Was More Than One Gunman

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nephew of the former President John F. Kennedy, is speaking out this week to say that he believes there was more than one gunman responsible for his uncle’s assassination in 1963. He also said that his father, the late Robert F. Kennedy, believed the Warren Commission report was a “shoddy piece of craftsmanship.”

After JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, the Warren Commission concluded Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing the president. RFK Jr., however, said that both he and his father, who was assassinated himself in 1968, were not buying that.

“The evidence at this point I think is very, very convincing that it was not a lone gunman,” he told NBC News, not elaborating further on what he believes happened.

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US National Archives Releases Additional 1,491 Documents on John F. Kennedy Assassination

The US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) said on Wednesday it released an additional 1,491 declassified records related to the assassination of former US President John F. Kennedy.

The US government over the next year will continue to review 14,000 previously withheld records to determine if any additional records should be made available to the public, however, certain records will be withheld if there is a strong reason to do so, according to the release.

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