"They used the strongest drugs... - sex, power & money - to win me over."

[scottxyz]

If you want to understand how the US empire rips off the world, assassinates foreign leaders (and why we invaded Iraq), read this book, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" by John Perkins. It reads like a thriller, but it's a real-life story.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1576753018/103-5543605-0264627

Interview with John Perkins:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/09/1526251

JOHN PERKINS: "When the National Security Agency recruited me, they put me through a day of lie detector tests. They found out all my weaknesses and immediately seduced me. They used the strongest drugs in our culture, sex, power and money, to win me over.

I come from a very old New England family, Calvinist, steeped in amazingly strong moral values. I think I, you know, I’m a good person overall, and I think my story really shows how this system and these powerful drugs of sex, money and power can seduce people, because I certainly was seduced. And if I hadn't lived this life as an economic hit man, I think I’d have a hard time believing that anybody does these things.

And that's why I wrote the book, because our country really needs to understand, if people in this nation understood what our foreign policy is really about, what foreign aid is about, how our corporations work, where our tax money goes, I know we will demand change."

AMY GOODMAN: "You're actually called economic hit men -- EHMs?"

JOHN PERKINS: "Yeah, it was a tongue-in-cheek term that we called ourselves. Officially, I was a chief economist. We called ourselves EHMs. 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."