Get Out Your Score Cards

Aside from all its activities opposing "bad guys", the CIA ran a coup against a left-leaning, democratically elected leader of....wait for it....Australia. And now, it appears, it is working with....Hezbollah.

Yes, boys and girls, it is very, very difficult to keep track of those we are undermining and those we are aiding.  It will make your head spin to try.

Washington's role in the fascist putsch against an elected government in Ukraine will surprise only those who watch the news and ignore the historical record. Since 1945, dozens of governments, many of them democracies, have met a similar fate, usually with bloodshed.

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The great game of dominance offers no immunity for even the most loyal US "ally". This is demonstrated by perhaps the least known of Washington's coups — in Australia.

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[Australia’s historic subjugation to the US] was rudely set aside in 1972 with the election of the reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam. Although not regarded as of the left, Whitlam — now in his 98th year — was a maverick social democrat of principle, pride, propriety and extraordinary political imagination. He believed that a foreign power should not control his country's resources and dictate its economic and foreign policies. He proposed to "buy back the farm" and speak as a voice independent of London and Washington.

  John Pilger

You can imagine what happened, but treat yourself to an interesting read and check that out.

“In Lebanon, there is a regional and an American consensus to contain the conflict away from Lebanon and in Syria,” explains Faysal Itani, a Middle East expert at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. “The Saudis have an interest in this, the Iranians do—everybody wants things to stay relatively quiet. If you want things to remain quiet in Lebanon, that means you work with the Lebanese army and Hezbollah, because those are the only capable forces on the ground. And given that the Lebanese army is willing and able to take on the Sunni jihadists, but has a very close and cooperative relationship with Hezbollah, then what you have happening is a de facto U.S.-Saudi-Lebanese-Hezbollah-Iranian collaboration in Lebanon.”

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“I’ve heard specific cases of plots disrupted and militants captured based on intel shared between the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia,” says Itani, the Lebanese son of a Sunni father and Christian mother. “I don’t imagine that this would take the form of direct contact between the CIA and Hezbollah,” he added. “I think this is something that would be shared with the Iranians” and then passed to Hezbollah.

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The Americans began reaching out to Hezbollah in the spring of 2012, according to the Washington, D.C.–based Middle East Media Reporting Institute (MEMRI), an Israeli-connected outfit that compiles and analyzes stories in the Arab-language press. “The reports state that at first, the U.S. administration and Hizbullah exchanged intelligence information,” MEMRI said, using another common spelling of the group’s name, “but later expanded the contacts into a diplomatic and political relationship, and even into dealings concerning domestic Lebanese politics.”

  Newsweek

The Obama administration supported [Egypt’s ex-president Hosni] Mubarak right up to the point where his demise was inevitable, and even then, plotted to replace him with Soliman: an equally loyal and even more brutal autocrat, most appreciated in Washington circles for helpfully torturing people on behalf of the Americans.

During the gushing coverage of the Tahrir protests, Americans were [...] led to believe that the U.S. political class was squarely on the side of democracy and freedom in Egypt, heralding Obama’s statement that Egyptians have made clear that “nothing less than genuine democracy will carry the day.”

That pro-democracy script is long forgotten, as though it never existed. The U.S. political and media class are right back to openly supporting military autocracy in Egypt as enthusiastically as they supported the Mubarak regime. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who last year led the military coup against the democratically elected [Sec. of State John] Kerry seemed to praise the coup itself; as The New York Times put it: he “offered an unexpected lift to Egypt’s military leaders . . . saying they had been ‘restoring democracy’ when they deposed the country’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Morsi.”

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Perhaps nothing demonstrates the U.S. commitment to autocracy in Egypt as vividly as the new, coordinated attack in U.S. media and political circles on former U.S. darling Qatar.

  Glenn Greenwald

Okay. I give up.