Video: Proudly CIA, Proudly Evil
The CIA's Duane Clarridge spat on South America, and believed that it was his American right to do so
“What human price? Give me a break,” scoffs Duane Clarridge, the former CIA chief of Latin America. He was getting frustrated with John Pilger who was interviewing him. Pilger, a journalist of great importance to human rights, remarkably never offered toilet paper as Clarridge continued shitting on South America. “We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national security interests to intervene. And if you don’t like it, lump it.”
This rare honesty, as shown in the video clip above, is from Pilger’s documentary, ‘The War on Democracy’ [link to Vimeo].
Steven S. Volk, a history professor at Oberlin College, described that scene as “absolutely essential viewing. It is rare to capture on film a more honest, combative, and bone-chilling defense of the U.S. policy of destroying 'uncooperative' democracies abroad than Clarridge will provide."
I remembered Pilger’s documentary when reading Trygve E. Wighdal’s Substack article, ‘CIA: A Spider Wasp in Our Belly’. Wighdal aptly describes the CIA as a disgusting parasite laying eggs in our paralysed bodies.
Wighdal further reminds that The Washington Post wasn’t always a CIA asset, and that in 2010 it was trying to keep track of the USA’s rapidly expanding intelligence network. That work, as he points out, vanished… well, almost, but you can read his article for a link to where some of it is archived.
Frontline has an excellent and related documentary, in two parts, called ‘United States of Secrets’. It explores mass illegal surveillance and the relationship between Silicon Valley and the State.
It’s by the same people who made the brilliant and disturbing ‘Money, Power & Wall Street’ (which you can also watch for free).
This jolting of my tired activist’s brain returned me to a bookmark I’d forgotten from earlier this year. HBO has released the docuseries ‘Hostages’. It’s about the 1979 hostage crisis in Iran, when students captured the American embassy. I will view it with the thorny note that, in the 1950s, the USA and UK overthrew Iran’s democracy for better oil prices, another ‘helping hand’ that fucked up the Middle East.
Be entertained and educated about evil this weekend. And be aware that the CIA is in Ukraine.