Bill Hicks Quotes

The meeting was about the Congo. Patrice Lumumba was an extremely popular Congo leader who had just led the independence fight against Belgium and been elected Prime Minister and one of the few African leaders at the time who was not corrupt but he was a socialist. The mineral rich Katanga Province then seceded just a few weeks after Independence. Lumumba asked the UN. for supplies and trucks to allow him to keep the country together but the UN was bogged down in debate where the US thought that he might become, Russia then unilaterally offered the aid. Thinking that the Congo might become part of the Soviet Bloc, President Eisenhower called the meeting. Lumumba had not only claimed that he was not a communist but stated that Communism was just as bad as colonialism. A few weeks later the CIA engineered a coup of the Congo Military which had previously been organized and led by Colonial Belgium. The coup deposed Lumumba in favor of a corrupt incompetent Army Officer, Joseph Mobuto. Lumumba was arrested, and the UN Secretary General demanded that he be treated properly while Russia demanded that he be released as he could not have committed any crimes as he had been in office such a short time. While under "arrest" Lumumba was mysteriously murdered. The United States denied that America had anything to do with the murder. Johnson gave similar testimony under oath before the Senate Church Committee Investigating the Intelligence Agencies.

See {637464} for the trigger for the FBI to write this report. It was the report that verified that the CIA had hired the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro which President Johnson had heard but the CIA never revealed it to Johnson or the Warren Commission investigations JFK’s assassination. The full document was kept secret and was not yet declassified in 2014 when this quotation was entered in the collection.

The motivations and willingness to die of the suicide bomber is not unique to Islamic terrorists. On occasion our CIA has used the technique. Official CIA instructions on “lost assassination” were distributed within the agency and sometimes to our “allies” who we were training.

It was later disclosed that some in the CIA had, working with some Cuban exiles, arranged with American organized crime for them to assassinate Fidel Castro. They failed, and the CIA then tried to cover up the truth. They even lied to the Warren Commission investigating John F. Kennedy’s murder. See {642341}.

See Banjamin Disraeli for an earlier expression of this idea.

Chile under Pinochet was the center for Operation Condor, and in addition it included Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay. These countries all were committing wholesale murders and disappearances of, in Scherrer’s words, “leftists, communists and Marxists”. The Condor agents assassinated many abroad who just opposed their methods including a Chilean national in the Untied States and an American friend. Scherrer discovered the identity of some of the Condor terrorist criminals. The US government was very ambivalent as an innocent American had been murdered together with a visiting foreign visitor in Washington DC, by being blown up by a car bomb. At the same time the CIA and others in the government had been aiding the Condor governments but generally did not realize how far these right wing governments were going although some Americans knew, For example, the military through the School of the Americas {588838} taught the South Americans interrogation techniques including torture methods that were illegal in America. The desire to keep the extent of the atrocities secret and the extent of American support of the governments conflicted with the desire to find and punish the terrorists who were killing Americans and others on American soil.

This was the reason that the FBI withheld information from the Warren Commission investigating JFK’s assassination. J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI Director was concerned that some people might conclude that the FBI bore some of the responsibility for the assassination for losing track of him. The CIA also withheld information to the commission to cover some of their misdeeds.

This quotation would not be memorable but for the fact that one of the other “passengers” on that Central Intelligence Agency “train” was Saddam Hussein, who later became the dictator of Iraq and the enemy of the United States. This was a classic example of unintended consequences of covert operations. The Cia covertly put the Baath Party in power in Iran, and some years later, the Iraqi Baath Party became a major enemy of the United States.

Yitzhak Rabin was the extremely popular President of Israel. At the time of his assassination his party controlled the Knesset (Parliament) and he was moving to make a two state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli problem. An ultra Orthodox Jewish fanatic shot Rabin so what there would be no settlement that would give up Israeli control of Judea and Samaria—the Biblical lands that literal believers in the Bible know that God consecrated that land for the Jewish People. To make a settlement compromise was needed on both sides and Rabin was strong enough to persuade most of the Israelis to take that risk. His successors never had the trust and confidence of the Israeli people that Rabin had as he had led the Israeli armed forces to victory and had also proved that he was a brilliant politician on domestic affairs. The unity that Rabin was able to create among Israelis has never been duplicated by any Israeli politician since.

Many Americans use this opinion to justify our Drone program. Others use it for other targeted killings or assassinations. However, Alston is opining about International Law. When a killing takes place in another country, the biggest problem is the laws of the country where the killing takes place. See {637113}. When a foreign diplomat is assassinated in America, we go after the killers because they have broken U. S. law even if the assassinating nation has convicted the target properly. Whenever we kill someone with a Drone Airstrike, we have the required conditions stated and have not violated International law. However, according to the Pakistani’s for example, we have broken their laws. However, in many occasions, there is little the country where the killing takes place can do anything other than making diplomatic protests unless they want to go to war and use force. Also, targeted killing is perfectly legal if the target is a combatant at war with the killing country, and this is the reason that most of the American Drone killings are legal from a U. S. point of view.

He was not referring to economic corruption but intellectual and moral corruption. Regan who appointed many excellent key officials picked a very unfortunate choice to lead the CIA. William J. Casey had many faults and weaknesses—See {637472}, {636743} and {637469}. But the worst of his damage was imposing his ideology on the agency and having the intelligence analysts shape their intellectual product to conform with a particular world, political, and religious view. See {634408}. This became acceptable and as future administrations took power their ideologies were considered by the CIA professionals and reports were edited and shaped accordingly. Reform was instituted by some of the future CIA directors but there were precedents from the Casey days for years. One particularly bad manifestation of this intellectual corruption occurred when Vice President Richard Cheney imposed a neocon world view on the agency with a pliant CIA director and the agency gave the President a totally inaccurate assessment of Iraq nuclear capability and intention which triggered the disastrous Iraq war, made all the worse when there were not only no nuclear weapons in Iraq as had been reported, but there was not even a single laboratory trying to develop nuclear weapons or even nuclear power.

talks toward normalizing relations with Cuba One of the many alternative theories about the assassination of President Kennedy, was that it was done by fanatic Cubans who resented Kennedy for not sending more military assets to support the Bay of Pigs operation, for not supporting the Cuban militants to make another invasion attempt. If they had found out that Kennedy was secretly negotiating with Castro, they would have seen this as a betrayal. Attwood had secretly met with the Cuban Government Representatives and was to have briefed President Kennedy, but the president was assassinated first. His death ended the mission to normalize Cuban relations, so if that was the motivation for an assassination, the Cuban exiles might have been successful in derailing relations with Cuba. However, there has been no direct evidence found for this speculative theory.