Post by Moses on Nov 5, 2004 11:08:38 GMT -5
Now, former Republican congressman as well as ex-CIA agent and spy-recruiter Goss will bring no less loyal political aides from the House and elsewhere into the Agency's leadership and so simplify matters in a second Bush term. Already, before November 2, Goss's CIA was working hard to suppress crucial 9/11 information, as Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer reported. The CIA will now be but another, ever expanding militarized arm of an administration that will already control Congress (hence no possibility of serious oversight over the Agency), significant parts of our courts and justice system, a media machine, a political machine, a religious machine, a majority of the state governments in our federalist system, and sizeable hunks of the government bureaucracy. The President, in other words, will have his own intelligence arm and secret army at his beck and interventionist call for the next four years, and no one around to take a peek. The ultimate check on the administration was the electorate and it just failed. (Oh, let's not forget that there will at least be angry CIA agents and others still stuck in this highly politicized system, feeling betrayed, and as things begin to go truly off the tracks, leaking like mad.)
Of course, this administration has long been intent on putting much of what it does not only beyond all oversight, but utterly out of sight. After September 11, they put extraordinary effort and legal thought into creating an offshore mini-gulag, beyond the courts, beyond prying eyes, a torture-system beholden only to the President of the United States in his role as commander-in-chief. The CIA was put in charge of the most secret aspects of this system and, as the part of the government best tooled in the arts of offshore interrogation, from Abu Ghraib to a "ghost prison" in Jordan, they have overseen the worst parts of this black hole of injustice.
From the penumbra of the secret world of the Bush administration and the CIA will come future acts sure to outrage Americans. This then is a moment to return to history and remind ourselves of exactly what mayhem and misfortune the CIA has actually caused -- us as well as the rest of the world. That makes the Chalmers Johnson essay below on the CIA and Afghan blowback a must read. Johnson is the author of the prophetic book Blowback, written before 9/11, and more recently The Sorrows of Empire, which explores our military reach in the world. This piece has been slightly adapted from a review that originally appeared in the London Review of Books, a lively English literary/political publication, and that is reprinted with the Review's kind permission.
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1984
Of course, this administration has long been intent on putting much of what it does not only beyond all oversight, but utterly out of sight. After September 11, they put extraordinary effort and legal thought into creating an offshore mini-gulag, beyond the courts, beyond prying eyes, a torture-system beholden only to the President of the United States in his role as commander-in-chief. The CIA was put in charge of the most secret aspects of this system and, as the part of the government best tooled in the arts of offshore interrogation, from Abu Ghraib to a "ghost prison" in Jordan, they have overseen the worst parts of this black hole of injustice.
From the penumbra of the secret world of the Bush administration and the CIA will come future acts sure to outrage Americans. This then is a moment to return to history and remind ourselves of exactly what mayhem and misfortune the CIA has actually caused -- us as well as the rest of the world. That makes the Chalmers Johnson essay below on the CIA and Afghan blowback a must read. Johnson is the author of the prophetic book Blowback, written before 9/11, and more recently The Sorrows of Empire, which explores our military reach in the world. This piece has been slightly adapted from a review that originally appeared in the London Review of Books, a lively English literary/political publication, and that is reprinted with the Review's kind permission.
www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=1984