Crandolph’s Barbaric Yawp

Can we please end the ‘liberal’ chorus of voices trying to make some sort of limited, short-term political advantage out of coddling the C.I.A.?  For those who’ve been living in a cave for the past few weeks, I’m referring to the Plame/Rove/Novak flap.

Best excerpt:

While undercover, she had described herself as an "energy analyst" for the private company "Brewster Jennigs & Associates," which the CIA later acknowledged was a front company for certain investigations. …  A $1000 donation was made to Al Gore’s presidential primary campaign on April 22, 1999 under the citation "Ms. Wilson, Valerie E. of Washington, DC 20007, President of Brewster-Jennings & Assoc."

Heh.

Seems you can’t swing a cat the past few weeks without hitting a Democrat who wants the White House to work extra hard to keep the identities of C.I.A. agents secret.  I’m not in this camp.  By all means, let’s expose the bastards.  America needs to have an honest foreign policy run by elected officials, not a national security state run by the cloak-and-dagger types with black budgets and zero regard for democratic process.

Blowing Valerie Plame’s cover?  Totally cool.  It’s a small accidental gift of honesty from the federal government.  Let the rats rat each other out.  If Rove starts doing it on a mass scale for altruistic reasons instead of his short-term advantage I’d almost even start to like him.

Popular joke: What do you call ten dead lawyers?

A: A good start.

Q: What do you call one exposed C.I.A. operative?

A: Another good start.

Never forget:

"From 1945 to the end of the [20th] century, the USA attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the process,the USA caused the end of life for several million people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and despair." - William Blum, writing in Rogue State       

The CIA of course, played an integral role in all of these bloody coups. In 1949 the CIA successfully helped to change the government in Syria, as well as in Greece that same year. They did the same in Cuba in 1952 and Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, South Vietnam in 1955, Haiti in 1957, Laos in 1958, South Korea and Ecuador in 1960, the Dominican Republic and Honduras in 1963, Brazil and Bolivia in 1964, Zaire in 1965, Ghana in 1966, Cambodia in 1970, El Salvador in 1972, Chile in 1973, South Korea in 1979, Liberia in 1980, Chad in 1982, Grenada in 1983, Fiji in 1987, Venezuela in 2002 and Haiti in 2004. And this only represents a list of "successful" US interventions. Many others have failed. Let us not overlook what the CIA has done here in the United States under the guise of "national security."

Well, what have they done here?  They set up domestic psy-ops to influence public opinion.  They lie to us, with our money.  They lie to us to get us to support policies that well-informed, unfrightened people would never condone.  What they do in our names and how much it costs remains hidden from us even decades after the fact.

CIA operatives plant news stories to confuse public opinion and distort fact.  They engage in espionage and sabotage, physical and psychological.  They are not on "our" side.

And the ‘liberal’ press, MoveOn and Congressional Democrats want to establish this standard as a sacrosanct area of enforced secrecy, an important national tradition we need to maintain?  Why?  For the alleged short-term political advantage of having an elected lame-duck president technically fire one advisor he can still just call up and ask advice anyway?  Why anyone interested in a better world still takes these people seriously is well beyond me.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25th, 2005 at 12:15 pm and is filed under Current Affairs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.