As Mickey Nardo points out today at 1boringoldman.com, the CIA has asked for another two months' delay in releasing the report of the CIA's own Inspector General's investigation into the torture authorization in order to continue redacting the report of classified information. The ACLU has sued for release of the report, and a judge has ordered it.
Mickey and I agree, that the CIA should not be allowed to withhold evidence of its own wrong-doing. That is not the way we do things in a democracy.
But it goes deeper than that. It calls into question the whole matter of having a government program that operates on the margins — and sometimes beyond the rule of law. Everyone knows the CIA does things we can’t really condone.
We’ve closed our eyes to assassinations and the fomenting of coups in other countries on the grounds that sometimes “you just have to do what has to be done.” Or, as dick cheney would say, “you have to go over to the dark side.”
Do we really need/want to have such a unit operating in our name?
It’s easy to sit here at my keyboard (in the past, I would have said “in my armchair”) and say no way, it’s not moral or ethical and I don’t want us to do bad things in the name of good.
But I have not had the responsibility of trying to keep us safe in a hostile world.
On the other hand, maybe the world wouldn’t be so hostile to us if we had not time and again gone into other countries and worked to change their governments.
Think Iran in 1953 and Chile in 1973. In both cases, the CIA was instrumental in helping overthrow democratically elected leaders that we didn't like because they were socialists. And the result was that they were replaced by repressive dictators: the theocrats in Iran and the military dictator Pinochet in Chile. And those are only two examples of our nefarious interference in other governments.
The fact that they both brought into power dictators that made things worse is beside the main point: should we interfere in this way in another sovereign nation, even to install a better form of government -- as McCain and the conservatives want us to do in Iran? Are we not doing so because of Obama's ideology or because we don't think we could make it happen?
We almost had a debate about that with the question of going into Iraq. And the "no" answer would probably have prevailed -- except that bush/cheney justified it by fabricating a story that Iran was an imminent threat to our security.
Whoever was the genius who thought up the slogan "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" deserves an award for most effective phrase used for an evil purpose. I honestly wonder if we would have gone to war without those fear-mongering words.
Personally, I do not want our nation dealing "on the dark side."
Ralph
Bravo!
ReplyDeleteThere is a dramatic difference between the "gathering of intelligence" which is a protective or defensive function, and clandestine interference with world affairs.
Our track record with the manipulation of world affairs hasn't been so hot. I suppose that this function arose during the Cold War when the real war was off the table as a way to fight with Russia without provoking mutual thermonuclear destruction. But our manipulations in Central and South America or the Middle East haven't relly gotten us anywhere - or at least not that I know about.
The logic is always the Cheney logic - we have to work on the Dark Side because they do. We torture people because they do. We fund the people on our side because they do.
It would be an interesting academic exercise to actually look at our history and objectively evaluate what the long term outcome has been. We funded both bin Laden and Hussein, for example. And then there was the Shah in Iran.
Exactly. Because it operates in secret -- and I realize that you can't really do spy work out in the open -- but because the whole thing operates in secret, we neve discuss whether we should be doing the things they do.
ReplyDeleteWe supposedly have Congressional oversight and the CIA is required to report to them, but it's all classified, of course, so we don't know if even they discuss such questions.
And we're now learning that the CIA is way less than forthcoming when they do report.
There have to be a lot of agents or retired agents that absolutely dispised Cheney for the bullying he did at CIA headquarters to get what he wanted while he was going back and forthfrom the White House and for outing agent Valerie Plame to punish Wilson for exposing the lie about yellowcake uranium. The scariest excuse to take us to war and the biggest lie. I know that most agents don't want to reveal what their agents did but there have to be more than a handful like the retired former CIA employee Ray McGovern who is baring his soul to expose the evil doings in the Bush White House.
ReplyDeleteRight -- at least to the Intelligence Committee. It shouldn't be impossible to get to the truth, at least for non-CIA government officials who have oversight responsibility. They don't have to reveal all to the public, but they can introduce laws to forbid certain practices in the future.
ReplyDeleteAnd whatever Congress can't know, the President should be able to find out. If that's impossible, we're really in a very risky position.