INSIDE THE AMERICAN EMPIRE:
Confessions of an Economic Hitman

From Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: You're actually called economic hit men --e.h.m.’s?

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves e.h.m.'s. It was tongue-in-cheek. It was like, nobody will believe us if we say this, you know? And, so, we went to Saudi Arabia in the early seventies. We knew Saudi Arabia was the key to dropping our dependency, or to controlling the situation. And we worked out this deal whereby the Royal House of Saud agreed to send most of their petro-dollars back to the United States and invest them in U.S. government securities. The Treasury Department would use the interest from these securities to hire U.S. companies to build Saudi Arabia–new cities, new infrastructure–which we’ve done. And the House of Saud would agree to maintain the price of oil within acceptable limits to us, which they’ve done all of these years, and we would agree to keep the House of Saud in power as long as they did this, which we’ve done, which is one of the reasons we went to war with Iraq in the first place. And in Iraq we tried to implement the same policy that was so successful in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam Hussein didn't buy. When the economic hit men fail in this scenario, the next step is what we call the jackals. Jackals are C.I.A.-sanctioned people that come in and try to foment a coup or revolution. If that doesn't work, they perform assassinations. or try to. In the case of Iraq, they weren't able to get through to Saddam Hussein. He had -- His bodyguards were too good. He had doubles. They couldn’t get through to him. So the third line of defense, if the economic hit men and the jackals fail, the next line of defense is our young men and women, who are sent in to die and kill, which is what we’ve obviously done in Iraq.

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The Saudi royal family governs both corruptly and brutally. There are no free speech rights in Saudi Arabia, and torture is practiced in their prisons and jails regularly. Dissent is crushed with an iron fist. The only criticism tolerated by the house of Saud comes from the nation's puritanical Wahabi clerics, so if you are a Saudi subject and you want to criticize the government, the only avenue for doing this is within a religious context. In other words, the home of hotbed extremism in Saudi Arabia is the mosques, and this all results from the fact that the US, for economic purposes, has been keeping the Saudi royal family in power for three decades.

Are you starting to see a pattern here?

All but two of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi subjects. Osama bin Laden is from Saudi Arabia. Massive sections of the Congressional report on the 9/11 attacks were censored by the White House, and these sections are presumably about Saudi Arabia's connection with the terrorists.

And about our connection with Saudi Arabia.

This is what I have been saying here at Real Art for almost two years now: the only way to end terrorism is to stop treating the nations and peoples of the world as resources to be exploited, to start using our wealth and might to help people live better lives. Military action only makes things worse. Obviously, the people most responsible for 9/11 were the hijackers and their leaders. However, our leaders, from both government and business, who send "economic hitmen" to meddle in the affairs of other nations for their own profit, share that responsibility.

The people of America did not deserve to be attacked the way they were three years ago, but our leaders most certainly did.

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