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From : thefilmarchive
Added: Oct 31, 2009
John R. Stockwell is a former CIA officer who became a critic of United States government policies after serving in the Agency for thirteen years serving seven tours of duty and is the highest ranking CIA agent ever to go public. After managing U.S. involvement in the Angolan Civil War as Chief of the Angola Task Force during its 1975 covert operations, he resigned and wrote In Search of Enemies, a book which remains the only detailed, insider's account of a major CIA "covert action." David MacMichael is a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst. A ten-year veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps, he was a counter-insurgency expert in South-East Asia for four years. He also served as an analyst for the National Intelligence Council from 1981-1983. MacMichael graduated with an MA and Ph.D. in History from the University of Oregon. MacMichael resigned from the CIA in July 1983 because he felt the Agency was misrepresenting intelligence for political reasons. His public resignation from the Agency gave credence and notability to his vocal indictment of the Reagan Administration's policy toward Central America. He was considered the "key witness" in Nicaragua v. United States. The case was heard in 1986 before the International Court of Justice, which ruled that the United States had violated international law by supporting the Contras in their war against the Nicaraguan government and by mining Nicaragua's harbors. MacMichael also testified in front of Congress on this matter. A former investigator for the Christic Institute, he was an outspoken critic of the Institute's reliance on conspiracy theory, arguing that the Institute "was eager, perhaps overeager, to demonstrate that this enterprise [a "secret team" of conservatives] was responsible for everything since Cain slaying Abel." In July 2005, he testified at a special joint hearing of Congressional and Senate Democrats about the consequences of the Plame affair. MacMichael is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), founding member of Association of National Security Alumni and the Association for Responsible Dissent, and an outspoken critic of the Iraq War and the Bush Administration. He has participated in six documentary films from 1988-2003. Journalist John Pilger has described him as a "CIA renegade." The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) was a proposal by U.S. President Ronald Reagan on March 23, 1983 to use ground and space-based systems to protect the United States from attack by strategic nuclear ballistic missiles. The initiative focused on strategic defense rather than the prior strategic offense doctrine of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) was set up in 1984 within the United States Department of Defense to oversee the Strategic Defense Initiative. The ambitious initiative was "widely criticized as being unrealistic, even unscientific" as well as for threatening to destabilize MAD and re-iginite "an offensive arms race." It was soon derided as Star Wars, after the popular 1977 film by George Lucas. In 1987 the American Physics Society concluded that a global shield such as "Star Wars" was not only impossible with existing technology, but that ten more years of research was needed to learn whether it might ever be feasible." Under the administration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, its name was changed to the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and its emphasis was shifted from national missile defense to theater missile defense; and it scope from global to regional coverage. It was never truly developed or deployed, though certain aspects of SDI research and technologies paved the way for some anti-ballistic missile systems of today. BMDO was renamed to the Missile Defense Agency in 2002. This article covers defense efforts under the SDIO. Space-related defense research and testing remains heavily-budgeted to this day, irrespective of the program names, operative/reporting organizations, politics, or reports to the contrary in the press. Although it is difficult to compile actual spending totals across the complete spectrum of space-based defense programs (including classified "off-budget" "black projects"), the U.S. has certainly invested well over $100 billion on "SDI" and follow-on programs, and holds a commanding lead over all current or potential future adversaries in the realm of space technology/warfare. The vast majority of this investment has been made in basic research at National Laboratories and Universities, and these programs continue to be a key source of funding for top research scientists in the fields of high-energy physics, supercomputing/computation, advanced materials, and many other critical science and engineering disciplines: funding which indirectly supports other research work by top scientists, and which would be largely unavailable outside of the defense budget environment.
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