Will the CIA Kill or Oust Ecuador’s President?

[Peter Webster]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19790.htm

Will the CIA Kill or Oust Ecuador’s President?

By Jacob G. Hornberger

23/04/08 "fff" -- -- Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa may not be long
for this world, both in a political sense and in genuine life-or-death
sense. He recently fired his defense minister, army chief of intelligence,
and commanders of the army, air force, and joint chiefs.

Why might those firings cost Correa his job or even his life? Because the
reason he fired them was that Ecuador’s intelligence systems were
“totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA.” As other rulers around
the world, including democratically elected ones, have learned the hard
way, bucking the CIA is a real no-no that sometimes leads to coups and
assassinations.

What’s the CIA doing infiltrating Ecuador’s military intelligence systems?
Good question! Maybe it’s because the CIA still fears the threat of
communism. Don’t forget that that was the apparent rationale for the
U.S. government’s support of Operation Condor, the campaign of
assassination and torture co-sponsored by the brutal regimes in Chile,
Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru during
the 1970s. Don’t forget also that many of the brutal military personnel in
those regimes received their training at the U.S. Army’s infamous School
of the Americas, famous for, among other things, its torture manuals.

To make matters worse for Correa, he promises to throw the U.S.
military out of his country when the U.S. government’s lease at its base
in Manta expires in 2009. The U.S. government spent $60 million to
build the base in 1999, securing a 10-year lease that provided no rent
to be paid to Ecuador.

So, why does the U.S. military have a $60 million military base in
Ecuador? The base is part of the U.S. government’s much-vaunted 30-
year-old war on drugs, one of the U.S. Empire’s never-ending wars
around the world. The base houses Awacs surveillance planes whose
purported mission is to search for international drug smugglers.

What irked President Correa is that apparently his CIA-infested
intelligence services fed classified information to Colombian officials that
led to a Colombian military attack on a Colombian rebel camp that was
located inside Ecuador. One big problem was that when Correa’s
intelligence services leaked the information to Colombia, they left Correa
(their boss) out of the loop.

The final nail in Correa’s coffin might be the fact that he is an ally of
Venezuela’s Marxist president Hugo Chavez, who himself is a likely
target of CIA ouster or assassination.

The good news for Americans in all this is that the Ecuadorian people
are doing their best to rid their country of the CIA and the U.S. military.
Maybe the Ecuadorans will start a trend in which all other countries will
do the same. While it would obviously be best if the American people
were to dismantle their government’s overseas empire themselves,
having foreigners do it instead by throwing the CIA and the Pentagon
out of their countries would be just as effective and beneficial — to both
the United States and the people of the world.

Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom
Foundation. Send him email.