Robert Parry
consortiumnews.com

Last week’s grotesque revelation about American public health doctors infecting nearly 700 Guatemalans with venereal disease to test penicillin from 1946-48 marked just the start of the U.S. government’s post-World War II abuse of that Central American country.

Indeed, as troubling as the VD experiments were, U.S. administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan would do much worse, treating Guatemala as a test tube for Cold War counterinsurgency experiments that led to the slaughter of some 200,000 people, including genocide against Mayan Indian tribes.

Guatemala’s special place as Washington’s experimental lab for repression began in 1954 when President Eisenhower authorized the CIA to try out new psychological warfare strategies in destabilizing and removing Guatemala’s democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz.

Arbenz had offended U.S. business and government leaders by implementing a land reform project that threatened the massive holdings of United Fruit and by letting leftists compete within the political process.

The CIA ousted Arbenz with a combination of clever propaganda and armed insurrection, leading to a series of repressive military dictatorships that further radicalized Guatemala’s indigenous poor and urban intellectuals.

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Stephen Lendman

For nearly two centuries, America dismissively called Latin America its "backyard," the 1823 Monroe Doctrine asserting a declaration of regional dominance, stating:

"....as a principle in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any
European powers....we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.... (impossible to) behold....with indifference."

Thereafter, it was all downhill against Mexico, Nicaragua, Cuba, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Grenada, Venezuela, and at one time or another, practically all other parts of the Americas, directly or indirectly.

In 1905, in fact, President Theodore Roosevelt declared Washington to be "the policeman" of the Caribbean and Central America, and by implication, the entire hemisphere. To date, nothing has changed, Ecuador just the latest targeted nation, an earlier article explaining the failed coup attempt, accessed through THIS link.

On September 30, Ecuador's President Raphael Correa was targeted. First elected in November 2006 with a 58% majority, he was easily reelected in April 2009 with a 55% majority against seven challengers. His current term runs until August 10, 2013, and will extend until 2017 with another electoral victory.

Yet, Ecuador's volatile history is now in focus. The country's eighth president in 14 years, Correa's easily the most popular, though less so after earlier imposing austerity measures. Pro-business ones also, including policies favoring oil, mining, and agribusiness interests at the expense of local communities and environmental considerations.

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Jonathan Cook
Palestine Chronicle

Obama's promise to Israel ● US veto of UN Security Council proposals on Israeli-Palestinian conflict ● No further extensions of settlement building freeze ● Permanent Israeli military presence in occupied Jordan Valley ● Permanent Israeli control of Palestinian borders ● US to give Israel enhanced weapons systems, security guarantees ● An increase [in] its billions of dollars in annual aid ● US to create anti-Iran regional security pact

The disclosure of the details of a letter reportedly sent by President Barack Obama last week to Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, will cause Palestinians to be even more sceptical about US and Israeli roles in the current peace talks.

According to the leak, Obama made a series of extraordinarily generous offers to Israel, many of them at the expense of the Palestinians, in return for a single minor concession from Netanyahu: a two-month extension of the partial freeze on settlement growth.

A previous 10-month freeze, which ended a week ago, has not so far been renewed by Netanyahu, threatening to bring the negotiations to an abrupt halt. The Palestinians are expected to decide whether to quit the talks over the coming days.

Netanyahu was reported last week to have declined the US offer. The White House has denied that a letter was sent, but, according to the Israeli media, officials in Washington are privately incensed by Netanyahu’s rejection.

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

A French soldier patrols the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

"The timing of the alert, coming less than a month before a national US election, suggests a political motivation. President Obama’s Democratic Party is trailing in many pre-election polls, and could lose control of the House of Representatives, the US Senate, or both."

The US State Department issued a terror alert Sunday for American citizens traveling anywhere in the continent of Europe, an unprecedented action that seems calculated to spread alarm without actually helping anyone avoid becoming the target of a terrorist attack. The Pentagon imposed a weekend curfew on troops at the US Air Force Base at Ramstein, Germany, ordering soldiers not to wear their uniforms off base “in response to a threat condition.”

Britain, Japan, Sweden and Canada all followed suit, issuing alerts to their own citizens who might be traveling to Europe. In each case, they cited the US alert as evidence that there was an increased danger of a terrorist attack at European transit hubs and tourist attractions.

The actual statement from the US government speaks only of “the potential for terrorist attacks,” without any specifics. “Current information suggests that Al Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks,” the State Department said.

Since this has likely been true of every day since Osama bin Laden issued his “declaration of war” against the United States in 1996, it is not clear that the alert has any objective basis or represents a new threat.

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Philip Giraldi
Campaign for Liberty

["The National Security State uses fascism to protect capitalism while they say they're protecting democracy from communism." ~ Michael Parenti]

It is not far fetched to speculate that the United States has, over the past ten years, been sliding into a form of authoritarianism that retains only some aspects of the constitution and a limited rule of law. America's president can, for example, commit soldiers to combat overseas without a constitutionally mandated declaration of war by congress while it is quite possible to be detained by the authorities and locked up without any prospect of trial or opportunity to defend oneself. The government even believes it can kill American citizens based only on suspicion. I prefer to think of this transformation as the National Security State because it rests on a popular consensus that liberties must be sacrificed in exchange for greater public safety from various threats, international terrorism being the most prominent. It might just as well be called the National Warfare State as it also requires constant conflict to justify its existence.

Three elements are necessary for the creation of a National Security State. First, there must be a narrative that can be sold to the public justifying the transformation. Second, a system of laws and regulations must be created that enable the state to act with impunity and also to protect the government from challenges to its authority. Third, technology must be harnessed to enable the state to surreptitiously monitor and control the activities of its citizens. All of these elements have fallen into place over the past decade.

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