America’s dark side

Re: Trump: You think U.S. is ‘so innocent?’ Feb. 6

For once Donald Trump is telling it as it is, with regards to Russia’s Putin and the dark side of U.S. covert operations worldwide.

In a declassified (2009) diary entry, president Dwight Eisenhower stated: “The things we (CIA) did were covert, if the knowledge of them became public, we would not only be embarrassed ... but our chances to do anything of like nature in the future would almost totally disappear.’’ Ike was referring to the overthrow and, in some cases, the brutal assassination of democratically elected governments such as: Iran’s PM Mohammad Mossadegh in 1951, Guatemala’s president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, Congo’s first elected president, Patrice Lumumba, in 1960, as well as many others. Likewise the CIA’s well-known failed plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro and the unthinkable backing of a military coup against a close ally, president Charles de Gaulle of France, in 1961. The shameful list goes on and on ...

Trying to take the moral high ground this week, Nebraska’s Republican Senator Ben Sasse said on ABC that “he thinks there is no moral equivalency between the U.S. and Russia.’’ To that effect, during the Cold War, president Eisenhower said that: “he feared his own ‘boys’ in the CIA and the military more than he did the Soviets.’’

This is not “fake news.’’ The truth is, in this era’s mandatory spirit of White House triumphalism, we must for once believe Trump and Ike are telling it as it is. Albert LeBeau, Ottawa