Monday, February 3, 2025

Yes, USAID is a CIA front. Yes, they will probably kill Trump if he doesn't back off.

Donald Trump with a sniper's target on his head.  This image originally appeared on the cover of the February 2017 issue of the Irish magazine "Village."  It's easy to forget how much people already didn't like him back then.

So, the Donald has been president for less than two weeks, and he's been stirring the pot like mad.  

Never mind the tariffs deliberately tanking the US economy, and the possibility of invading Canada, or Panama, or wherever (but por favor not Mexico - there's some tough hombres in Mexico).

The really exciting move that Trump has made is the war he has declared on USAID, the "United States Agency for International Development."

USAID is the American government's primary foreign assistance program, with more than 10,000 employees and an annual budget over $50 billion.

As soon as he took office, Trump froze USAID's activities.  On January 27, the agency's website went down.  Robert F. Kennedy Jr. then tweeted that USAID is "a CIA front."  

This past weekend, operatives from Elon Musk's (doesn't this guy have anything better to do with his time?) Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were temporarily denied entry to USAID's headquarters.

Musk called USAID "a criminal organization" and a "den of vipers" that "can't be reformed."  He claims that he and Trump are working to shut the agency down.  As of this morning, "Little" Marco Rubio, ostensibly the US Secretary of State, is also the acting administrator of USAID.

On the face of it, this seems like Trump's "America First" agenda in action, but also at warp speed.  STOP giving money to foreigners.    

But there's more to this story.  USAID is not just a nice organization that gives assistance to poor countries in need.  Far from it.  There's some of that, sure.  I suppose.    

Also, other things.

Let's look at a couple of examples of the foreign aid our tax dollars buy, shall we?



The logo of ZunZuneo, a fake Cuban social media company founded by USAID in 2010, in an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government.  In Cuban slang, "ZunZuneo" is the tweeting sound that hummingbirds make.
   

Destabilizing the Cuban Government

To be clear, USAID has been accused of being a Central Intelligence Agency front organization, or working with the CIA for nefarious purposes, since the 1960s. 

Now, the CIA likes you to believe that the very bad things from long ago happened long ago.  It's irrelevant, not even worth mentioning.  They don't do that stuff anymore.  

Of course they don't.

In 2009, a USAID contractor named Alan Gross was arrested in Cuba.  He was charged with secretly bringing military grade communications devices into the country, and distributing them to members of the tiny Jewish community there.  As early as 2004, he was also secretly bringing video equipment into the country.

When he was arrested, the American government, and American media like the New York Times and CBS, denied Gross was doing anything other than delivering humanitarian aid.  Notably, until he was arrested, Gross did not identify himself to anyone as a US government contractor.

A year later, in 2010, USAID founded a fake Cuban social media site called ZunZuneo.  The site was first set up using millions of dollars in diverted humanitarian aid earmarked for Pakistan.

Ownership of the site was hidden behind a maze of Cayman Island-based shell companies.  Executives of the company were recruited without being told they were working for the US government.  The initial target audience was 500,000 stolen Cuban cell phone numbers.  

At its peak, the "Cuban Twitter" had about 60,000 users.  As part of their usage, users were sent anti-communist, pro-USA messages from automated bot accounts, in an attempt to spark dissent, and possibly cause a government overthrow. 

In 2012, the site was disbanded because the original diverted funding had dried up, and the plan wasn't working anyway.


Peruvian indigenous women march, demanding justice for the forced sterilizations that were imposed on them during the 1990s.

Forced Sterilizations in Peru

You thought eugenics were a thing of the distant past?

Well, have yourself another think.

During the 1990s, the government of Peru, under the criminal president Alberto Fujimori, launched Plan Verde, a military program targeting the communist Shining Path rebels.

The program was developed in concert with the United States.  One aspect of the plan was:  "Limiting population growth through the sterilization and total extermination of impoverished Peruvians."

What?!?

Yes.

The idea was to simply eliminate the population base that supported Shining Path - basically rural indigenous mountain people who live in the Peruvian Andes.

Without, by the way, actually mentioning this to them.

From 1993 through 1998, USAID largely took over Peru's national health system, resulting in some 300,000 sterilizations of indigenous women of child-bearing age.  Often, these took place secretly as part of otherwise normal visits to the doctor.

In the 1990s, Peruvian women averaged about four children per woman.  In other words, the program may have erased as many as 1.2 million future people.

This is "humanitarian aid" only in philosophical sense that it's better not to be born, than to be brought involuntarily into this nightmare world.

Not everyone is a fan of that theory, though.

USAID claimed to stop funding the sterilizations in 1998, under a campaign of public embarrassment and pressure mounted by a tiny right-wing organization based in Virginia called the Population Research Institute (PRI).  

Forced sterilizations continued in Peru until at least the year 2000, when Fujimori fled arrest on corruption charges and escaped to Japan.

Of course, this is just the tip of the ice cube.

USAID has been involved in many other scandals and misadventures, which a few moments of Googling should easily reveal to you. 


November 22, 1963, around 12:30 pm.  This is a video still taken seconds before president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.  To Kennedy's left is his wife Jackie.  Just in front of him is Texas governor John Connally.  Sitting duck, wouldn't you say?  Presidents don't ride in convertibles anymore, for reasons that should be all too obvious.


What Happens Next?

If you're a fan of history like Thee Optimist, you probably know what happens next.

Trump suddenly grasps the error of his ways, and reverses course on this whole misguided USAID unraveling thing.

The American "intelligence community" doesn't it like it when you mess with them.

According to an anonymous government source in a New York Times article published three years after the Kennedy assassination, JFK wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds."

Kennedy himself never said that to any reporter, or in any other public way.  But it's clear that after the Bay of Pigs Fiasco, he and the CIA were at odds with one another.

Then he died in spectacular fashion.  And the CIA went right along without him, doing that voodoo that they do.

Kennedy was the last president to do battle with the CIA, either publicly or privately.  Every president since then has been very good at cooperating with them.

Until now.  

Trump is an old man.  His mind is off-kilter.  He is morbidly obese.  He eats hamburgers every day of his life. 

Also, he's under a lot of stress

It won't take a bullet to the brain to finish him.  He could die of something natural-seeming, like a stroke or a heart attack.

Happens all the time.


Words of Wisdom

"My biggest regret was what happened in Benghazi.  It was a terrible tragedy losing four Americans - two diplomats, and now it's public so I can say, two CIA operatives."

- Hillary Clinton


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