Hugo Turner on the Deep Politics of Iran/Contra

   Hugo Turner on Iran/Contra, WACL, World War 3, and Studying Deep Politics

Participants:
Interviewer: @OurHiddenHistry
Hugo Turner @hugoturner1969

[Audio Length: 00:30:14]
RECORDING COMMENCES:

During my vacation I was lucky enough to be interviewed by my friend @OurHiddenHistry who  shares my passion for studying the covert operations of the 70's and 80's and who has created a fantastic youtube channel full of classic videos on the CIA from people like John Stockwell, Phillip Agee and Michael Parenti. He also has amassed an invaluable archive of written material that I'll link to at the end. Unfortunately there were some technical difficulties with the recording but he was kind enough to make a transcript with a little help from one of his friends. Anyways you'll have to forgive any awkwardness since I mostly only edited my half of the conversation.  In other words I had the luxury of sounding smarter then I did at the time but my interviewer doesn't plus some of what he said was lost or garbled in transcription or clumsily altered by me for continuity purposes. Inspired by the expanded interviews Doug Valentine inserted into his new book "The CIA as Organized Crime" and still as obsessed with the Iran/Contra affair as ever I've decided to greatly expand on the answers I gave at the time.
Interviewer:
Okay. We'll see if this works or not. How are you doing? Thanks for doing this. Hopefully it will be kind of fun and some more people will check out your work. I don’t know. I guess, this is my first time trying to do this. If it's cool, I'll just - I've got a couple sentences I'm going to read then kind of introduce you and go from there.

Hugo Turner:
Yeah cool.

Interviewer:
Okay. All right, cool. All right. We've got Hugo Turner here from Anti-Imperialist U  http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com
We are going to talk about the Iran-contra affair and everything surrounding that because it's a lot more than just - maybe, people think of it as a little set of hearings and a little arm's deal and a little war in Central America, but it's really a lot more. He wrote this kind of amazing, four-part article that uses Iran-contra as the center but really talks about everything from the success of the Vietnamese people in getting the United States out of Vietnam. Then that whole period kind of, I don’t know if you'd say that's the peak of a revolution there. The whole period from 1975 to 1991 when the Soviet Union kind of comes apart and breaks up into all the different countries. I really suggest people read it because there's a lot of really good stuff in there. There's a lot of stuff that I've never heard and we'll go over your sources and things like that because even I had listened to them and a lot of this stuff was New. So, it was really cool. Do you want to start out talking about what Iran-contra was and the more public face of it? Kind of how it got started, the scandal itself.

Hugo Turner:
Yeah. The more well-known aspect of the scandal is that Reagan made a secret deal to sell arms to Iranians in exchange for the release of hostages. Then he diverted that money to fund the war in Nicaragua, which had forbidden by Congress from funding in any way, direct or indirect. Then a plane crashed in Nicaragua and it was revealed. The Iranians were angry so, they leaked the story about that. That arms deal. They told Lebanese Newspaper and it was a huge scandal. The media tried to focus just on that one question of how much money was diverted? Did Reagan know? Trying to keep people from seeing the bigger picture of the long history from Cuba to Vietnam that proceeded the whole scandal that was all closely linked into it. Then you have Daniel Sheehan who’s the person who tried to expose more of the deep history of the Iran-contra affair. He was  the Jim Garrison of the '80s (Who attempted to prosecute the deep state for their role in the murder of JFK) because Sheehan tried to take George Bush and all his CIA friends and have them tried as the gangsters they were. Obviously, it didn’t go well. George H.W. Bush became president in 1988. Sheehan and the Christic institute were ordered to pay 1 Million dollars in damages.

Interviewer:
Yeah. No, that's a great point. How did you become interested in this scandal?

Hugo Turner:
Well I remembered it from childhood it was my first hint that the government was involved in all sorts of sinister stuff behind our backs. Actually before the scandal even broke one of my most vivid childhood memories was being taken by my parents to hear a priest and some nuns describe their torture and mock execution in El Salvador while the CIA looked on. Later I would discover after years of drug war propaganda as an 80's kid that all along the Reagan Administration had been involved in drug smuggling. However my renewed interest was inspired by learning about the the Sheehan investigation.

Interviewer:
Yeah. Talk about that a little bit because he actually has a lot of good stuff on YouTube and he's got a whole channel. That was something that I had not really heard of, but he kind of really did dig - he tried to take this group of people that were in Iran-contra and kind of, investigate their careers all the way back from the '50s up until the '80s. You want to talk a little bit about his case and kind of what he was looking at, some of the people, and what he found?

Hugo Turner:
Yeah. Well, to the public the main figure would be Oliver North. But according to Sheehan the  central figure  would be Theodore G. Shackley. (Who I discuss in a recent article )The reason Sheehan went after this guy is because he had been the Chief of Station in Miami during the JFK assassination. Sheehan had learned about the JFK assassination during the Watergate era because he had worked for this law firm that represented Santo Trafficante, who was the son of this Cuban gangster. His father had gotten in control of the mob in Cuba for like 30 or 40 years before Castro kicked him out.

Interviewer:
Right, right, right. The CIA was all working with them at the time.

Hugo Turner:
Theodore G. Shackley was in Miami and he trained his army of Cuban exiles, to try to overthrow the government or at least wage a terrorist bombing campaign and try to assassinate Castro. This was after the initial Bay of Pigs failed. They tried a second operation called Operation Mongoose. They brought in Special Forces, trained these Cubans, and these same Cubans were involved in Watergate, drug dealing, Terrorism, dirty wars, and then Iran-contra. People like Felix Rodriguez, Louis Posada Carriles and Rafel "Chi Chi" Quintero.

Interviewer:
Yeah. Those were all those guys that were just the same set of people, right? What Sheehan called the Secret Team?

Hugo Turner:
Yeah. They would all work with Shackley. They followed him. From there, Shackley moved to Laos and the CIA guys like Thomas Clines and Cuban exiles from Miami like Felix Rodriguez  followed him there. Then in Laos he was working with the drug dealing Laotian generals and also these tribesman, the Hmomg, who were kind of this indigenous people there that lived in the hills and were excellent at Guerilla warfare and were recruited to be in a "secret army" (Secret only to the US public)  in  exchange their general Vang Pao Got to get super rich off the heroin trade. The same CIA agents that had smuggled drugs and waged a terror campaign in 1st Cuba and then Laos and Vietnam were the same people were recruited to run the Iran-contra operation, which also involved drugs. The Cuban operation also involved drugs because of the Santo Trafficante thing. This actually evolved out of an even earlier generation of the OSS/OPC/CIA in   Asia, during World War II and after World War II with the OSS and Operation Paper and this massive heroin smuggling ring that had gone back before the war, basically. It's like 50 years of "Deep  history". Drug dealing, arms dealing, the mafia, all leading up to Iran-contra. Then you could go into the future. Looking back from our era, you could see that what I call World War 4 (aka The war on Drugs, aka the War on Terror, Cold War 2.0 all different names for what the pentagon calls "the long war) World War 4 grew out of the Iran-contra era. The same players were involved in creating what would later be called Al Qaeda and in the massive heroin smuggling operation being run by the CIA out of Afghanistan. You can see the Origins of the war in Ukraine for example brought on in part through WACL (The World Anti-Communist League a bunch of Fascist terrorists, gangsters, and Death Squads) which was also deeply involved in the Iran-contra affair raising funds for the Nicaraguan contras (Counter-Revolutionaries) and similar groups like UNITA, the Afghan  Mujahideen. As You can see the connections go on and on. That's why I like studying the Iran-contra affair, basically. Syria today is in many ways a replay of what happened to Afghanistan and Nicaragua in the 1980's.

Interviewer:
Yeah. Well, that's what's really interesting about the way that you set it up is because it is kind of - it's not where everything - it just ties so much of history together. It was just a tiny little tip of the iceberg of what people saw. You just mentioned WACL and that's the whole world Anti- communist league. If you want to talk a little bit about - well, I don’t know if you want to talk about their history or how they were tied into Iran-contra, but this kind of worldwide movement that was, when we think about all of these dictatorships in South America and Asia, this is a lot of where they all came from. You wrote a ton about this. You wrote two big articles. If you want to go ahead and kind of -

Hugo Turner:
You can see the roots of WACL actually, going back to World War I basically, when the white Russians, which are were their eras contra forces opposing the communists. They lose and they were sort of protofacist. This isn't really talked about today, but they're the ones that came up with much of what would become the Nazi Ideology. Like the idea that the Jews were behind the bolshevik revolution. The czars ruled thru divide and conquer and thru terror campaigns. They incited Pogroms against the jews and other minorities and massacres against rebelling workers and peasants using these proto-fascists death squads called the "Black Hundreds" especially during and after the failed 1905 Revolution in Russia. They were the ones that actually gave the, the Nazis a lot of their ideas. It was the Czars secret police who created  "The protocols of Zion" plagiarized from a french satire on the regime of Napoleon the III. During the Russian Civil War when 14 western countries tried to crush the Russian revolution they used these "white" Russian proto-fascists as foot soldiers they murdered millions of people and caused incredible destruction but were finally beaten by the Red Army. Later Hitler recruited these people so did the western imperialists like  Britain, France and the US.They were used to wage covert war and run propaganda campaigns vilifying the communists. To name one famous example Alfred Rosenberg the nazis chief "racial theorist and ideologue" was one of these "white Russians"  from the baltic although ethnically german who had been forced to flee the revolution.  British super spy Sidney Reilly  recruited these fascists into his world anti-bolshevik league. Later Hitler created an Anti-Comintern Pact, which united the fascists of central Europe and the world. During the war they would create fascist death squads like the Ukrainian OUN-B and the Croatian Ustashi that committed horrific atrocities and genocidal mass murder through out eastern Europe.

Then after the war, the US just sort of absorbed the Anti-Comintern Pact and eventually transformed it into WACL, which is like a worldwide fascist movement. In Asia, APACL the South Koreans, the South Vietnamese, the Taiwanese. They're the official backers. They were also deeply involved in the global heroin traffic. Then you also have the ABN made up of Ukrainians, the Croatians, all these people that escaped - at the end of World War II, escaped the War Crimes Trials thanks to the OSS, CIC OPC and CIA and went to work for Americans, waging war on the Soviet Union. In Ukraine for example the CIA and the Nazi Gehlen Org backed the OUN-B in a covert war involving terrorism, mass murder and assassination that lasted until 1952. While the CIA was busy driving the world into a panic over the the nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion they were secretly waging covert war on the Soviet Union and China. A typical example of imperial hypocrisy and the power of propaganda since to this day few realized that it was America that was the aggressor during World War 3 not the Soviets. There was also a latin American Branch CAL made up of fascist death squads in places like Guatemala, Bolivia, and El Salvador.

Fast forward to 1980 during the election, WACL was one of the forces that put Ronald Reagan into office. They do illegal campaign fundraising in Guatemala and other WACL countries. Their friends are releasing propaganda in Italy, framing Carter's brother for being in bed with Gaddafi. All sorts of dirty tricks like the infamous October Surprise whereby the Reagan Campaign got the Iranians to agree not to release the American Hostages before the election and in fact to wait until the day of Reagan's Inauguration. Once Reagan gets into power, he totally empowers these WACL forces and goes and speaks in front of them, has his picture taken with Ukrainian fascists and announced "Your Dream is Our Dream" meaning the destruction of the soviet union and the return of the fascist exiles to their home countries. Of course it was George H. W Bush who really ran things during the Reagan Era.

As We all know, the Soviet Union did fall and then these people went in and took over. That is why today there is fascists governments in Croatia, Ukraine, and the Baltic states because during the Cold War, the CIA kept all these forces active through WACL. Alive, influential, well-funded. The children joined up and it's just like, a multi-generational fascist conspiracy that amazingly few people know about considering that WACL is undoubtedly one of the most sinister and scandalous groups ever created. It's also involved with drug dealing, arms dealing, it's members included Apartheid South Africa, Fascist Argentina, the Death Squads of Guatemala and El Salvador. The drug dealing cuban exiles were also members. These are the WACL countries and strangely, Israel was an ally with the top seven WACL countries. Argentina, South Africa, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia Guatemala.

Interviewer:
There were interesting parts of even, there was kind of Israeli Special Forces working in Central America. It really was, all these people were all over the place. There was no geographical center. They were going from place to place and doing all these things. You had a great quote in there and I can't find it-

Hugo Turner:
Yes Israel played a far greater role in both Africa and Latin America then is generally realized they helped train central american death squads and even sent the infamous Mossad Mercenary Michael Harari "The Master of Disaster" to train Medellin Cartel death squads in how to wage a massive terror campaign in Colombia.
As for WACL They would all meet together and they'd have a huge conference of all these terrorists, gangsters, all the fascist people of the world. Also invited would be with these "respectable" conservative politicians from the west like Ronald Reagan who never met a fascist he didn't like. They'd all meet together and it was just this great dirty little secret of the Cold War that nobody talked about.

Interviewer:
Were these public meetings?

Hugo Turner:
Yeah, and after the Cold War they just changed their name to something about freedom democracy instead of World Anti-Communist League. Now they are the World League for Freedom and Democracy. But they do they did the same things as always. They’re still backing the war in Ukraine for example. They are lobbying to have the waffen SS declared national heroes all over Europe.

Interviewer:
So, this still exists?

Hugo Turner:
Oh, yeah.

Interviewer:
Oh, okay. There's an organization now that's kind of the extension of WACL?

Hugo Turner:
Yeah. I forget what the new name is. It's in the article it's something like World League for  freedom and democracy, something like that.

Interviewer:
Yeah. Sounds great. You talked a lot about - I mean, it's an interesting article. People should Read it. You've just got so much packed in here. So many names, so many connections. You're really extending out what Iran-contra is. You really get a whole history of, almost like you said, the last 100 years. I saw you were really careful about listing all your sources, which is really cool. Do you want to talk about some of the sources for where you found some of this information and how you put it all together?

Hugo Turner:
Oh. Well, one of my favorites of course is Peter Dale Scott. He's a major influence on me. He taught literature at Berkley and in his spare time he would write these essays on parapolitics and Deep Politics everything he says is confirmed by at least three sources. He deals with what he calls deep politics, but the media calls conspiracy theories basically. The history of how corporate power, the underworld, and the intelligence agencies are all working together behind the scenes. How the world as we are conditioned to see it by the corporate media and much of academia is a facade. He writes about the world that's going on behind the scenes the world of spies, gangsters corrupt businessman, lobbyists, politicians. The forces that lie behind deep events like the Kennedy Assassination, Watergate, Iran/Contra, and 9/11. I recommend his "Deep Politics and the Death of JFK" "American War Machine" "The Road to 9/11" and "The Deep State"

I first heard about WACL in his book on the Iran-contra affair called "The Iran-contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations In the Reagan Era" which he co-wrote with Jonathan Marshall and Jane Hunter, (who also wrote a great book on Israel called "Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America"). Dave Emory and Nip Tuck also did a great series of radio shows during the '80s on the Iran-contra affair and WACL. He helped me see an expanded version of Iran/Contra like how this relates to the shooting of the Pope and all the other crazy stuff  that happened around this time.

Interviewer:
Talk a little more because Dave Emory, he is One of the great researchers

Hugo Turner: Dave Emory is a Researcher and radio show host who is still going strong. He's probably the worlds leading expert on Fascism from it's origins to the present day. I discovered him thanks to a friend and fellow researcher @arrghshell  Dave Emory was a disciple of Mae Brussell, who's a legendary conspiracy researcher. He was covering all these people before the Iran/Contra scandal publicly broke in the fall of 1986 because Mae Brussell’s was obsessed with Ed Wilson, Shackley, and Clines and other players in the scandal long before the Iran-contra scandal broke. They were following the Ed Wilson scandal and these other interlocking scandals like the failed assassination attempt on the pope by the turkish grey wolves which the Reagan Administration tried to blame on the soviets. In Dave Emory's archive series he provides an excellent history of CIA and military involvement in drug trafficking. He talks about and reads from classic books like "the Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" and "The Great Heroin Coup". Another great series was on the history of fascism in America which saw a surge in the 1980's just like today and he talks about all the crazy stuff that's going on during the 70's and 80's in Italy and the middle east which was Italy's own version of Iran Contra involving drug smuggling and weapons dealing. There's like a whole Italian Iran-contra scandal thing that was connected to the GLADIO the P2 Masonic lodge and the Vatican,  all sorts of crazy scandals that were going on there with funding terrorism, arms dealing, drug dealing in Europe. Forgotten Scandals like SITBAM.

He also covered the Iran-contra scandal itself including the original "pizzagate" scandal involving mafia heroin dealing out of chains of east coast pizza places.  It's like a much wider ranging view of the Iran-contra scandal. Of course Iran/Contra is only a small part of what He discusses he's also done great work on 9/11 but is best known for his encyclopedic knowledge of Fascism 1917-2017 and  what he calls the Underground Reich the postwar fascist movement who's important role in recent history have been completely suppressed because America's love affair with Fascism around the world completely discredits the cold war rhetoric that America was fighting for freedom and democracy. With the war in Ukraine heating up again and of course with the grim rise of Trump now is the time to check into Emory's decades of research available free on his website.

Another of my favorite sources is of course, Doug Valentine. He's the worlds leading expert on the CIA. He also wrote books about the DEA. His books include The Phoenix Program which he wrote by conning his way into the confidence of former CIA director William Colby who vouched for and introduced Valentine to scores of CIA and military people who told him far more then they should have resulting in the definitive book on the CIA in Vietnam "The Phoenix Program". His Next books  The Strength of the Wolf and Strength of the Pack were based on a series of interviews with these old DEA agents and agents of the FBN and BNDD it's predecessors. Their story about what was really going on is wonderfully shocking. They weren't allowed to go after the top drug dealers who invariably turned out to be working for the CIA. It's about how how it was all totally politicized. Some people were allowed to deal drugs, like the "nationalist" Chinese KMT or the Nicaraguan Contras while the government blamed their enemies "Red China" or Sandinista Nicaragua for the Drug  problem.  The war on drugs was also completely racist, too. They would only bust small time blacks and latinos for drug dealing and leave the big time white gangsters alone, usually. Doug Valentine has a new book out called the "CIA as Organized Crime" I recommend people actually start with this book because it provides a great introduction to his Previous work although it is also packed with new information for people like me who've already read his earlier work. For example there is a great discussion of the relationship to the CIA and Media as well as the best discussion I have read about what is going on in Afghanistan.

Interviewer:
Yeah. His Phoenix Program book is really good and it's kind of like, yeah. There's so much about these mafia connections and the criminal - the CIA working with criminals. That's a really great book. You listed Killing Hope by William Blum. How is that one?

Hugo Turner:
If you want to get one book that will tell, in short chapters, many of the coups and covert  wars that took place during the Cold War - a lot of which are totally forgotten - that's a good book to get. American foreign policy works because people are focused on the latest things. They always have "a really good reason" why we need to invade and occupy some country thousands of miles away. We're going in to "help people" to bring freedom and democracy preserve human rights.  Or alternately some tiny country like Nicaragua or Grenada is portrayed as a danger not only to the United States but the entire region. It would be laughable if people didn't fall for the same lies again and again leading to millions of deaths, untold destruction, and misery. They want you to forget everything you know about the past and no, this time it's going to be different. It's about democracy. It's about freedom. If you read a book like William Blum's where you just read about these different interventions, one after another, you realize this has nothing to do with democracy. Obviously since most  of them involves overthrowing democracy and installing  right-wing dictators and helping them wage war on their people. There have been over 70 of these coups and covert wars. Even his book is not a complete list. It doesn’t have Argentina in there. He doesn’t have Mexico and he doesn’t have Other stuff, but he manages to cover 56 different coups and covert operations more if you count the repeating coups in some countries. If you wanted one book that would tell you about all these different covert wars and coups that's the one to get.

Another book that I highly recommend for understanding US foreign Policy is "Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America"  by J. Patrice McSherry who is one of the most brilliant and courageous scholars I have ever read. It tells the horrifying story of the interlocking fascist dictatorships the US set up trained and indoctrinated in their cold war "National Security Doctrine" which trained the military intelligence and police to view their own people as the enemy and to wage a brutal campaign of kidnapping, torture, and assassination that lead tens of thousands to suffer very ugly deaths often after months of torture. She also connects operation condor to the phoenix program and even Operation GLADIO which most scholars would rather pretend didn't exist. I also highly recommend her book "Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina" Which provides a history of the country from the turn of the century thru the dirty war and junta period into the 1990's. It provides fascinating information on the links to GLADIO, fascism and "false flag terror" as the alt-media calls it.

Interviewer:
Nice. Oh, and there was a Sibel Edmonds interview? You said it dealt with Iran-contra, 9/11, and much more. You want to talk a little bit about what's in that one? I'll put a link to some of this stuff.

Hugo Turner:
Sibel Edmonds was recruited as a translator by the FBI and she quickly discovered the whole war on terrorism was complete fraud. Of course, America is protecting these terrorist groups and the Turkish lobby today is like the "China lobby" of the 50's. They are funneling all these heroin profits from Afghanistan to buy members of congress. She tried to blow the whistle on the fact that the CIA is basically protecting al-Qaida and they silenced her and she wasn't allowed to talk. Then the press did cover her, but they only covered that she wasn't allowed to talk and they weren't interested at all about what she had to reveal. She did a series of interviews with this alt  media guy, James Corbett where she tells everything that she wasn't supposed to tell. She introduces the world to the concept of GLADIO B as the FBI secretly began calling Al Qaeda. In the Mid 90's the CIA Switched from supporting the fascist grey wolves to supporting the muslim brotherhood and Al Qaeda. Watching her GLADIO B interviews give you an entire account from inside the FBI where the war on terror and the war on drugs are revealed to be a complete farce.                                      


Interviewer:
She was a translator in the FBI, translating -?

Hugo Turner:
Yeah she translated turkish and Farsi for the FBI. Because these FBI guys don’t know anything about the Middle East and she grew up in Iran, and Turkey she became actually, more of an analyst. They'd come to her with info and Ask what does this mean? She knows way more about it than they did, so she became an analyst too. That's why she knows so much because everyone was coming to her, like can you explain what's going on? She met with these - different FBI guys across the country trying to put away these al-Qaida guys, or their backers and every time they're about to move in, the state department (fronting for CIA) would call 15 minutes ahead of time and call off the raid.

Interviewer:
You cut out a little bit, sorry. She grew up in Iran and she was an analyst there and so, she kind of covers - she was basically saying when the FBI will go find some al-Qaida guys, they would end up letting them go or something, right?

Hugo Turner:
Yeah. They weren't allowed to pursue these people. The funders of Al Qaeda the rich Saudis and the NATO intelligence people. They weren't allowed to pursue them because they're just a tool of our government basically.

Interviewer:
Right. That's what we see going on in Syria, right?

Hugo Turner:
Well, yeah. In Syria we're funding al-Qaida to try to overthrow the Syrian government. Thankfully Russia intervened and the tide of war was turned , but if they hadn't Syria would have ended up like Libya. Libya complete is currently in chaos because it's ruled by al-Qaeda death squads that NATO bombed into power. Our "1st black president" green lit a war that involved attempted genocide of darker skinned Libyans. The Vast majority of the people there supported Gaddafi's government. Libya was a form of direct democracy known as the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya the people received free housing, education, and health care along with a cut of the oil revenues. It had the highest standard of living in Africa. NATO decided to destroy everything and they used Al Qaeda as foot soldiers backed by NATO special forces and a massive Bombing campaign . NATO killed between 250,000 and 450,000 and reduced the country to a chaotic failed state.  Currently there's a green resistance movement to bring back Libya to how it was before the war but almost nobody knows about it. My friend Alexandra Valiente is one of the only independent sources of news on whats going I did some interviews with her on the topic people should check out. Also visit her sites Jamahiriya news, Viva Libya, Libya 360, and Syria 360.

Interviewer:
Yeah, that sounds really cool. I want to kind of read this list of wars that you have in the article. You call the Cold War , World War III. Why do you call it that?

Hugo Turner:
Because from the American perspective it's a Cold War because as long as the nuclear weapons don’t go off and nothing happens to them, it's like we're not at war. For the rest of the world, millions of people are being killed all over the planet, it's was a world war. From a third world perspective, it's World War III. Not just some Cold War that could have happened but never happened. It did happen. It was a very hot war in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Korea, and all these different places.

Interviewer:
Yeah. I'll read some of these on this list you've got. Just in the '80s alone, there's the war in Nicaragua, you have the Iran-Iraq War. The war in Lebanon, Uganda.

Hugo Turner:
Yeah, the Iran-Iraq war was an important backdrop to the Iran-Contra affair which also helped pave the way for the 3 wars the US has waged on the Iraqis.

Interviewer:
El Salvador. Yeah, Iran/Iraq War. That's huge. A million people died there. El Salvador. You listed just practically every country Latin American Country from Mexico to the tip of South America, basically, had some kind of dirty war going on inside of it. Then you mentioned Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, kind of similar to what was going on now. Do you want to talk a little bit about that?


Hugo Turner:
Like today the Middle East was the scene of huge wars. There was an attempt to destroy Syria during the 1980's They tried the same thing that they are doing now with the Muslim brotherhood instead of al-Qaida. They tried to start a sectarian war But fortunately Hafez al-Assad crushed it. Syria was also battling Israel in Lebanon the scene of a viscous civil war thats way to complex to go into here. Then There's  the Iran/Iraq War where the US is giving weapons and advice to both sides. They kill each other and a million people died there, with softened up Iraq for the later Persian Gulf War and the Iraq Invasion and now we're in like, a third Iraq War. In Africa, there was the war in Angola where Cuba was fighting against South Africa and the US, to try to preserve the newly liberated country from becoming a puppet of Apartheid South Africa. South Africa trying to impose its death squad  forces called Unita. In Mozambique there was Renamo, who was just like the contras too, and waging a dirty war on the revolutionary government of Mozambique. Basically the Reagan Era, massively expands these types of wars there were like at least 40 wars going on during the '80s.

Interviewer:
Wow. That's a good thing to call it World War III. Yeah, it's really interesting, all this stuff you put together here. Is there anything else you want to talk about? I mean, you really took this thing, you've even got a part about the pre-Civil War in the United States. The Negro comrades of the crown.

Hugo Turner:
Yes the US had it's own proto-fascist death squads called "Copperheads" before the civil war even started who went around lynching anyone daring to question slavery. After the Civil War there were the KKK and similar groups fascist paramilitary movements that waged war on blacks and progressives. America's home grown fascism that also became incorporated into WACL. It was racist segregationists who often staffed the infamous house un-American activities committees.

People can also checkout my site Anti-Imperialist U where  I study history from a radical perspective. Also, from the perspective of deep politics. I try and combine those two kinds of world views. Gerald Horn is great - if anyone reads wants to read some black history I highly recommend they check out his work. Gerald Horne has written these great books about the true origin of America. How the colonists  rebelled because they were worried Britain might abolish slavery basically. It was actually all done in defense of slavery.  So much for freedom and democracy. I would definitely recommend him. This guy is a genius, he's super prolific. He's written like 20 books. Check out his "Counter-Revolution of 1776" and "Negro Comrades of The Crown"

Interviewer:
He's alive now and writing? Or he wrote a little bit ago or he's writing now?

Hugo Turner:
He's written like 20 books. And is still writing more. I wrote an article on his counter revolution of 1776. You can find that on my site or search for the great lectures he did on YouTube as well.

Interviewer:
Oh, okay. Cool. Cool. I'll post the links to that stuff, too. That sounds great. How often do you - try to write an article a month or how often are you able to write?

Hugo Turner:
Ideally, I write once every week or two. I usually take winter off so I can recharge because I try to read a book a week, write an article a week on current events or history and by the end of the year I'm usually a bit burnt out, or whatever. I've also started taking more time with my history articles. Like the Iran-contra thing took like three weeks for each one. It just depends. I'm on vacation but I'll be back to work soon.


Interviewer:
They're really amazing. Cool.

[Crosstalk]

Hugo Turner:
A lot of the stuff that inspired me to start my site is stuff that you've collected together on your site. Stuff like John Stockwell, Philip Agee, Michael Parenti, and Alternative Views this great show from the 80's and 90's we're both fans of so I'd also like to plug your OurHiddenHistry Youtube Channel.

Interviewer:
Those guys are Amazing.

Hugo Turner:
John Stockwell is the one who came up with calling the Cold war World War III because it was a war on the third world., actually. National Security types people actually called it World War III, too. They loved calling it that and the fascist types in Argentina loved calling it World War III, the War of Ideologies. A global war. A war without boundaries.

Interviewer:
Right, right. The war of civilizations and all this shit. Well, cool, man. It's really something that people have to check out.

Hugo Turner:
Thanks.

Interviewer:
You have a lot of really good stuff.

Hugo Turner:
Thank you for this interview.

Interviewer:
No, definitely. I'll hopefully get it up soon and try to cut some - the links into it and try to make something. Hopefully get a couple more people over to your site because you really do a good job, man. It's cool that you're doing all this stuff.

Hugo Turner:
Thanks a lot.

Interviewer:
Yeah, man. Thank you. I'll see you on Twitter.

Hugo Turner:
Okay, cool.

Interviewer:
Take it easy.

Hugo Turner:
Bye.


END OF RECORDING
Links
Our Hidden History Archive
https://archive.org/details/@altviewstv-fanclub
Doug Valentine's Site
http://www.douglasvalentine.com
Recordings of Doug Valentine's Phoenix Program interviews
http://www.cryptocomb.org/Phoenix%20Tapes.html
Peter Dale Scott Archive
http://peterdalescott.org/q.html

Dave Emory's Site Spitfire List
http://spitfirelist.com
Dave Emory's Anti Fascist Archives
http://spitfirelist.com/audio/afa-complete-audio/

Sibel Edmonds Interviews collected on Libya 360 or search for Sibel eEdmonds  Gladio B on youtube
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2013/04/20/usa-the-creator-sustainer-of-chechen-terrorism/

Sibel Edmonds runs her own independent media site
http://www.newsbud.com

Alexandra Valiente runs Jamahiriya news and other sites
https://jamahiriyanewsagency.wordpress.com

William Blum Author of Killing Hopes site
https://williamblum.org
@arrghshell has a great blog/podcast
https://n0p3.net

And of course you can find my work at Anti-Imperialist U
http://anti-imperialist-u.blogspot.com