number of gross atrocities committed by the armed forces,45 The US support came from the Carter administration, heralded as human74 rights advocates. Said a State Department spokesman: Our situation, for better or worse, is that Korea is a treaty ally, and the US has a very strong security interest in that part of the world. 46

In February 1981, Chun was honored by being invited to the White House as President Reagans first state visitor; the US and South Korea engaged in the first joint military exercises of the new administration; the administration asked Congress to delay publication of the annual worldwide report on human rights while the South Korean president was still in Washington, to avoid embarrassing him; and Reagan, in his toast to Chun, was moved to declare: Youve done much to strengthen the tradition of 5,000 years commitment to freedom. 47 In 1996, a Korean court convicted Chun of treason and murder, and sentenced him to death, for his role in the Kwangju massacre.

Chad, 1981-82

The Reagan administrations obsession with Moammar Qaddafi of Libya knew no limits: geographical, legal or ethical. Libya maintained a military force in neighboring Chad at the request of that government-which was faced with armed insurgents-and to serve Libyas desire for a friendly government on its border. The United States wanted to replace the Chadian government with one not very friendly to Libya, at the same time giving free rein to anti-Qaddafi Libyan exiles in Chad to mount attacks on Libya from across the border.

Thus it was that the US, along with France, the former colonial power in Chad, employed bribes and political pressures to induce the Chad government to ask the Libyans to leave-which Libya reluctantly did-and to replace them with forces of the Organization of African Unity. The OAU was given a vague mandate to maintain security in Chad. This proved to be a sort of Trojan horse. The CIA rebuilt an opposition Chadian force in the Sudan and provided it with money, arms, political support and technical assistance. Then, as the OAU stood by doing nothing, this army, led by Hissen Habre, succeeded in overthrowing the Chadian government in June 1982.48 With US support, Habre went on to rule for eight years, during which his secret police reportedly killed tens of thousands, tortured as many as 200,000, and disappeared an undetermined number. In 2000, some of his torture victims succeeded in having him indicted in Senegal, where he resided, calling him Africas Pinochet .49

Grenada, 1979-83

How impoverished, small, weak or far away must a country be before it is not a threat to the US government? In a 1979 coup, Maurice Bishop and his followers had taken power in this island country of 110 thousand, and though their actual policies were not as revolutionary as Castros, Washington was again driven by its fear of another Cuba ,

particularly when public appearances by the Grenadian leaders in other countries of the region met with great enthusiasm.

Reagan administration destabilization tactics against the Bishop government began soon after the coup, featuring outrageous disin-formation and deception. Finally came the invasion in October 1983, which put into power individuals more beholden to US foreign policy objectives. The US suffered 135 killed or wounded; there were also some 400 Grenadian casualties, and 84 Cubans, mainly construction workers. The invasion was attended by yet more transparent lies, created by Washington to justify its gross violations of international law.

Suriname, 1982-84

A plot was hatched by the United States to overthrow the govern-ment because it allegedly was falling into the Cuban orbit . It was to be an invasion by some 300 men, half US and South American and half Surinamese. The CIA had actually informed Congress of its plan to use a paramilitary force, which President Reagan had authorized. Congress was not enthused, but William Casey and his CIA cowboys went ahead with their planning anyway, and were induced to call it off only after the scheme was discovered by the internal security agency of the Netherlands, the former colonial power in Suriname when it was known as Dutch Guiana.

Libya, 1981-89

The official reason for the Reagan administrations intense antipathy toward Moammar Qaddafi was that he supported terrorism. In actual-ity, the Libyan leaders crime was not his support for terrorist groups per se, but that he was supporting the wrong terrorist groups; i.e., Qaddafi was not supporting the same terrorists that Reagan was, such as the Nicaraguan Contras, UNITA in Angola, Cuban exiles in Miami, the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala and the US military in Grenada. The one band of terrorists the two men supported in common was the Moujahedeen in Afghanistan.

On top of this, Washington has a deep-seated antipathy toward Middle East oil-producing countries that it cant exert proper control over. Qaddafi was uppity, and he had overthrown a rich ruling clique and instituted a welfare state. He and his country would have to be put in their place. In 1981, US planes shot down two Libyan planes in Libyan air space. Five years later, the United States bombed one of Qaddafis residences, killing scores of people. There were other attempts to assassinate the man, operations to overthrow him, economic sanctions, and a major disinformation campaign reporting one piece of nonsense after another, including conspicuous exaggera-tions of his support for terrorism, and shifting the blame for the 1988 bombing of PanAm 103 to Libya and away from Iran and Syria when the Gulf War campaign required the support of the latter two countries. To Washington, Libya was like magnetic north: the finger always pointed there.

Fiji, 1987

Prime Minister Timoci Bavrada was ousted in a military coup only a month after taking office in April following a democratic election. Bavrada, of the Labour Party, made Washington officials unhappy by identifying himself with the Non-Aligned Movement, and even more so by taking office with a pledge to reinstate Fiji as a nuclear-free zone, meaning that nuclear-powered or nuclear-weapons-carrying ships could not make port calls. When Bavradas predecessor, R.S.K. Mara, instituted the same policy in 1982, he was put under great US pressure to drop it. Said the former US ambassador to Fiji that year, William Bodde, Jr., a nuclear free zone would be unacceptable to the US given our strategic needs...the US must do everything possible to counter this movement. 50 The following year, Mara dropped the policy. Bavrada would clearly not be so easily swayed. He had taken office as part of a Nuclear-Free-Pacific Coalition.

Two weeks after Bavrada took office, American UN Ambassador Vernon Walters visited the island. The former Deputy Director of the CIA has had a history of showing up shortly before, during, or shortly after CIA destabilization operations. Walters met with Bavrada, ostensibly to discuss UN matters. He also met with Lt. Col. Sitiveni Rabuka, third-in-command of the Army. Two weeks later, Rabuka led a military coup which ousted Bavrada.

During Bavradas month in office, a multi-layered Libyan scare campaign suddenly and inexplicably broke out in the Pacific area. The Reagan administration had already been exposed for its phoney Libya-scare campaign in the United States. When the Fiji coup took place, Rabuka and his supporters pointed to the Libyan threat as justifying the coup. 51

There are more of such coincidences in this drama, including appearances in Fiji before the coup of the National Endowment for Democracy (q.v.) and its funding, some of the CIAs labor mafia, and units of the US military in the Pacific.52

The day after the coup, a Pentagon source, while denying US involvement, declared: Were kinda delighted.. .All of a sudden our ships couldnt go to Fiji, and now all of a sudden they can. 53

Panama, 1989

Less than two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the United States showed its joy that a new era of world peace was now possible by invading Panama, as Washingtons mad bombers struck again. On December 20, 1989, a large tenement barrio in Panama City was wiped out; 15,000 people were left homeless. Counting several days of ground fighting between US and Panamanian forces, 500-something natives dead was the official body count-i.e., what the United States and the new US-installed Panamanian