MELVIN GOODMAN, goody789 at verizon.net
Goodman is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. A former CIA analyst, Goodman is the author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA and National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism. His latest book is titled A Whistleblower at the CIA.
He just wrote the piece “The Myth of American Exceptionalism” for Counterpunch. Goodman writes: “Like too many nations, the United States likes to think of itself as a chosen nation and a chosen people. …
“An excellent example of our exceptionalism appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post in the form of an op-ed by Tom Malinowski, the former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor in the Obama administration. In a fatuous display of ignorance, Malinowski lambasted Russian President Vladimir Putin for stating that the United States frequently meddles in the politics and elections of other countries. Malinowski argued that it is Russia that interferes in democratic elections, such as the U.S. presidential race in 2016, but that the United States consistently ‘promotes democracy in other countries.’
“One of the reasons why the United States has so little credibility in making the case against Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election is the sordid record of the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency in conducting regime change and even political assassination to influence political conditions around the world. …
“The revelation of assassination plots in Cuba, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam finally led to a ban on CIA political assassination in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, when Libyan leader Muammar Qadafi was killed, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton boasted that ‘we came, we saw, he died.’ In an incredible turn of events, the United States invaded Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, although it was a CIA-sponsored coup against Colonel Abdul Kassem that led to the emergence of Saddam Hussein in the first place.
“Vladimir Putin is certainly aware of CIA intervention of behalf of the Solidarity movement in Poland to destabilize the communist government there in the early 1980s; to bolster the regime of former president Eduard Shevardnadze in the Republic of Georgia in the 1990s; and more recently to undermine the regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine.
“Putin’s intervention in Syria in 2015 was designed in part to make sure that the U.S. history of regime change didn’t include another chapter in the Middle East.”
Background: The Real News reports “Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University looked at U.S. and Russian interference in other countries’ elections since World War II and found that the U.S. was far in the lead, interfering over 80 times.”
See from FAIR: “Media Mourn End of CIA Killing Syrians and Strengthening Al Qaeda.”
