Julie Levesque: Freedom Fighters: The Foot Soldiers of America

Since the end of World War II, the Anglo-American Empire has covertly supported the deployment of foreign and domestic "foot soldiers", including terrorists and paramilitary brigades to bring about regime change and further its agenda of World domination. One of the earlier examples of such a modus operandi, still widely ignored, is Gladio, "NATO's European stay behind army", active during the Cold War. Controlled by the CIA and Britain's MI6, Gladio members orchestrated terrorist attacks in Western Europe, which were blamed on Communist entities. Gladio was falsely presented to key European state officials as a stand by secret army, ready to counter a possible communist take over. The ultimate goal of Gladio was to demonize the Communist and Socialist parties and encourage European citizens to endorse their governments' commitment to "National security". American citizens were not exempt from such scheming. As Prof. James F Tracy explains: "The string of still unresolved US political assassinations throughout the 1960's suggest how such practices were not restricted to foreign countries, nor were they solely the terrain of intelligence agencies. Along lines similar to Gladio, in the early 1960s the US Joint Chiefs of Staff proposed Operation Northwoods, where terrorist attacks would be initiated against US civilians in American cities, and the violence blamed on Cuban combatants to justify war against the island nation. The Kennedy administration rejected the proposal. While Northwoods exhibited the capacity for government to conceive and propose such plans, Gladio was demonstrably carried out against Western civilian populations in multiple locations over many years." The recruitment of paramilitary armies and death squads played a key role in the conduct of US foreign policy.