The 35-year war on the CIA
What is it about the CIA that makes liberals and Democrats lose their common sense?
Arthur Herman asks this important question in his long piece in Commentary Magazine.
Herman does a fine job of presenting the 35-year home-grown assault on the Central Intelligence Agency by liberals, Democrats, some Republicans, film makers, and writers.
From President Carter’s mass firing of CIA operators during the Cold War to President Obama’s investigation of CIA interrogators in the current war on terrorism, CIA officers have been under attack from their own government. Also, many film makers and writers have falsely portrayed CIA officers as immoral or amoral free-wheeling killers and plotters.
While doing security work for the U.S. Navy and the Defense Department for many years, I received CIA briefings and training and I worked with CIA officers. As a writer, I’ve met and interviewed a good number of current and retired CIA officers. They are dedicated, hard-working and patriotic. They don’t deserve the unfair and harsh treatment their own government and some American citizens give them.
Read Herman’s piece.
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Even more interesting is that we know more about the CIA, the government agency responsible for keeping secrets, than the Federal Reserve.
Misplaced liberal outrage, don’t you think?
I think people’s contempt for the CIA comes from their skepticism about the national security state in general — their confusion as to how it’s made us safer and what the purpose is for giving so much power to a government body, like the CIA or the DOD, which seems to have had little positive public impact at home and almost categorically negative impacts abroad.
But this article certainly was eye-opening, particularly about the ways in which the CIA has been watered down over the years. Unfortunately it takes as granted the national security consensus, that 9/11 was an attack that intelligence needed to predict, when anyone with a sense of the ways in which the United States and Israel have controlled the Middle East at the point of a gun over the last 60 years could have predicted something like 9/11 happening.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d much prefer a strong and effective CIA as the core of our foreign policy over what we have now: blunt and extrme force–kill as many American troops and foreign civilians as we can until something good happens. I don’t think that’s working very well. But I think the CIA is just conflated with the overly bloated national security state in the US, something that a large number of Americans disapprove of… and it’s hard to blame them for that. Also, as the article outlines, the CIA has had its share of legitimate scandals and extremely poor errors in judgment.
I certainly wouldn’t disagree that we have too strong a military, and that we’re too much of a police state, either. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t intend to sound pro-CIA.
I just think there are much bigger fish to fry.
Bank credit drives me up the wall.