• Zagorath
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    1 year ago

    I mean we still don’t even know the full extent of what they did through the previous century. There are a couple of very noteworthy acknowledged coup or assassination attempts (and successes), but how many others are there? You’ll still often get labelled a conspiracy theorist for talking about some of the other cases.

    I don’t know how many potential examples there are, but my standout example is Australia. Australia’s 1975 constitutional crisis was set off by a Governor General who had been a member of a secretly-CIA-funded organisation, and the US had just recently sent someone known as “the coupmaster” (for his involvement in other coups) to Australia as their ambassador. A CIA contractor of the time says that the GG had been described within the CIA as “our man”. And there was motive, in the form of the relatively leftist nature of the Australian Government at the time, and their threats to shut down the Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, a jointly-operated CIA/ASIO spy centre. Australian politics has heaved towards the neoliberal in the time since the alleged coup.

    But it has never been formally acknowledged, and it’s still only based on circumstantial evidence. Depending on who you’re talking to, professing to believe there was CIA involvement will get you labelled a conspiracy theorist. I suspect there are probably other countries with similar stories.