I was watching Adam Curtis' series The Trap today, and it hit me right on the title card: Humanity cannot be trusted, only the numbers can. What a shit idea, even if the masses lie they are the point, right? But what if you are trying to better the world and become myopic? Numbers do lie considerably less as people feel their day-to-day choices are less scrutinized then when they are explicitly asked their opinion. Of course that's true. So how do you know if you are helping Americans or just hammering nails because being a hammer is what you are hired to be? What happens when, across generations, policies become ideological lodestone rather than temporary measures? If you are just running the numbers and analyzing your opponent using game theory, at what point does America stop overthrowing other governments? It doesn't, the math always suggested they carry out their stupidity at the intelligence agencies, that is why we are in this mess.
- In 1903, the U.S. aided the secession of Panama from the Republic of Colombia, engineered by a Panamanian faction backed by the Panama Canal Company, a French–US corporation whose aim was the construction of a waterway across the Isthmus of Panama thus connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
- The Banana Wars occupations, police actions, and interventions on the part of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean between the end of the Spanish–American War in 1898 and the inception of the Good Neighbor Policy in 1934.
- Occupations of Cuba by United States military forces, lasting from 1898–1902 & from 1906 to 1909.
- The United States occupation of Veracruz began with the Battle of Veracruz and lasted for seven months, as a response to nine American sailors arrested by the Mexican government for entering off-limit areas in Tampico, Tamaulipas on April 9, 1914.
- The U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934.
- U.S. marines invaded the Dominican Republic and occupied it from 1916 to 1924.
- On September 8, 1945, the United States government landed forces in Korea and thereafter established the United States Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGK) to govern Korea south of the 38th parallel north. The USAMGK outlawed the USSR approved Korean-led government in their respective half north of the 38th parallel. The military governor Lieutenant-General John R. Hodge later said that "one of our missions was to break down this Communist government".
- Project SHAMROCK, the sister project for Project MINARET, was an espionage exercise started in August 1945, which involved the accumulation of all telegraphic data entering into or exiting from the United States. The Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its successor, the National Security Agency (NSA), were given direct access to daily microfilm copies of all incoming, outgoing, and transiting telegrams via the Western Union and its associates RCA and ITT. NSA did the operational interception, and, if there was information that would be of interest to other intelligence agencies, the material was passed to them. Intercepted messages were disseminated to the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD), and the Department of Defense. No court authorized the operation and there were no warrants.
- The democratically elected government of Shukri al-Quwatli was overthrown by a junta led by the Syrian Army chief of staff at the time, Husni al-Za'im, who became President of Syria on April 11, 1949. Za'im had extensive connections to CIA operatives, although the exact nature of U.S. involvement in the coup remains highly controversial. The construction of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, which had been held up in the Syrian parliament, was approved by Za'im, the new president, just over a month after the coup.
- In Operation Paper, which began in early 1951, secret flights from Thailand to Burma, Civil Air Transport aircraft (CAT, later named Air America), an airline co-owned and operated by the CIA and the Kuomintang in Taiwan, flown by pilots hired by the CIA brought American weapons and other supplies to the Kuomintang. To secretly finance the Kuomintang in Burma, on return flights the CAT aircraft transported opium from the Kuomintang to Chinese organized crime drug traffickers in Bangkok, Thailand.
- CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt Jr. was dispatched by the State Department to meet with Farouk I of the Kingdom of Egypt. American policy at that time was to convince Farouk to introduce reforms that would weaken the appeal of Egyptian radicals and stabilize Farouk's grip on power. The U.S. was notified in advance of the successful July coup led by nationalist and anti-communist Egyptian military officers (the "Free Officers") that replaced the Egyptian monarchy with the Republic of Egypt under the leadership of Mohamed Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser. CIA officer Miles Copeland Jr. recounted in his memoirs that Roosevelt helped coordinate the coup during three prior meetings with the plotters (including Nasser, the future Egyptian president); this has not been confirmed by declassified documents but is partially supported by circumstantial evidence.
- The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup d'état, was the overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953. It was orchestrated by the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project or "Operation Ajax") and the United Kingdom (under the name "Operation Boot").
- In a CIA operation code named Operation PBSuccess, the U.S. government executed a coup that was successful in overthrowing the democratically elected government of President Jacobo Árbenz and installed Carlos Castillo Armas.
- HTLINGUAL (also HGLINGUAL), a secret project of the United States of America's Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to intercept mail destined for the Soviet Union and China, operated from 1952 until 1973. Originally known under the codename SRPOINTER (also SGPOINTER), the project authority was changed in 1955 and renamed. Early on, the CIA collected only the names and addresses appearing on the exterior of mailed items, but they were later opened at CIA facilities in Los Angeles and in New York. The program had the stated purpose of obtaining foreign intelligence, but it targeted domestic peace and civil-rights activists as well. Mail to and from prominent individuals such as Bella Abzug, Bobby Fischer, Linus Pauling, John Steinbeck, Martin Luther King Jr., Edward Albee, and Hubert Humphrey was opened during the course of the operation. A total of 28 million letters were examined, and 215,000 were opened.
- COINTELPRO (syllabic abbreviation derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert and illegal projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic American political organizations.
- Starting in 1962, the NSA had a "watch list" of Americans travelling to Cuba, expanded to include narcotic traffickers. Then, from 1967 onwards, President Lyndon B. Johnson included the names of activists in the anti-war movement. President Richard Nixon further expanded the list to include civil rights leaders, journalists and two senators. The NSA included David Kahn.
- During the summer of 1962 Kennedy took steps, using the CIA, to spy on Hanson Baldwin, the national security reporter for The New York Times.
- From mid-1963, the Kennedy administration became increasingly frustrated with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem's corrupt and repressive rule and his persecution of the Buddhist majority. In light of Diem's refusal to adopt reforms, American officials debated whether they should support efforts to replace him. These debates crystallized after the ARVN Special Forces, which took their orders directly from the palace, raided Buddhist temples across the country, leaving a death toll estimated in the hundreds, and resulted in the dispatch of Cable 243 on August 24, 1963, which instructed United States Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., to "examine all possible alternative leadership and make detailed plans as to how we might bring about Diem's replacement if this should become necessary". Lodge and his liaison officer, Lucien Conein, contacted discontented Army of the Republic of Vietnam officers and gave assurances that the US would not oppose a coup or respond with aid cuts. These efforts culminated in a coup d'état on November 2, 1963, during which Diem and his brother were assassinated.
- Operation Brother Sam was the codename given to Kennedy's plan to "prevent Brazil from becoming another China or Cuba". Kennedy believed Goulart was getting too friendly with anti-American radicals in the Brazilian government.
- From 1967 to 1973 under Project RESISTANCE, many local police departments, college campus staff members, and other independent informants collaborated with the CIA to keep track of student radical groups that opposed the U.S. government's foreign policies on Vietnam.
- Project MERRIMAC was a sister domestic espionage operation to Project RESISTANCE coordinated under the Office of Security of the CIA. It involved information gathering procedures via infiltration and surveillance on Washington-based anti-war groups that might pose potential threats to the CIA.
- The role of the CIA in Gladio—the extent of its activities during the Cold War era and any responsibility for terrorist attacks perpetrated in Italy during the "Years of Lead" (late 1960s to early 1980s)—are the subject of debate.
- Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson published a series of classified documents indicating the Nixon administration, contrary to its public pronouncements, had favored Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971. After the revelations, Anderson and his staff, including Hume and his family, were briefly surveilled by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1972.
- In November 2005, Business Week reported that the FBI had issued tens of thousands of "national security letters" and had obtained one million financial records from the customers of targeted Las Vegas businesses. Selected businesses included casinos, storage warehouses and car rental agencies. An anonymous Justice official claimed that such requests were permitted under section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act and despite the volume of requests insisted "We are not inclined to ask courts to endorse fishing expeditions". This didn't just include financial records, but credit records, employment records, and in some cases, health records.
- Bank of America, the second-largest bank in the country, is coordinating with the government to search people who might have been in the Washington, D.C., area around the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol
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