Republicans make a lot of expedient, disingenuous assumptions, slogans and buzzwords that they often know are not true but you'd be surprised how intelligent some otherwise upstanding citizens who have been brainwashed by
respected conservative news outlets, let alone the familiar cry of the '16 election that goes, "Fox News brainwashed my father!"
A good friend of mine doesn't give them credit for being sincerely hoodwinked.
To him if their actions affect institutions and are harmful to animals and people,
then their motivation or brainwaves behind it are immaterial.
But to be fair, he also believes in free speech, the right to believe as one does, and notably the ACLU has protected hate speech unless it were incendiary. Unfortunately these days there is a fine line between the two. When Sarah Palin had signs with gun targets on tue dem candidates she wanted to lose, and soon after AZ Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head, that was a big inflection point. Ok getting to the point as another friend says my blog is just TMI! This is not Skimm(TM) here! I wish.
The CIA busts its butt to save us from terrorist attacks every day! As well as NYPD. There are many we never hear about although you can hear some if you sign up for NYC alerts by email and I believe you can find out what co,or code alert the USA is on and why. Uncer Obama at least you could. Don't know whether you still can.
The CIA in my experience is less overtly political than the FBI in its culture, at least accordng to my very limited experience of it.
Back to our story and our protagonist, George Tenet the director of the CIA, when Bush was preparing to go to war with Iraq.
Many in the CIA had doubts about the sources that were crying WMD in Iraq. They voiced their doubts. Then Cheney pulled Tenet aside and threaened him with a loss of access to facetime with The President(George W. Bush) unless he knuckled under and went along with the case to the world that Iraq had WMD.
There was no post-battle plan for restructuring the country in the aftermath.
Cut to Hillary Clinton, given only one night alone with a thousand or so-page write up of tue evidence for WMD in Iraq. The first ten pages are all making the case in the summary. If she uad read much further or for example to page five hundred, sue would uave seen that the thousand-page document was riddled with warnings and doubts about said foregone conclusion. And because of that she lost cred with the Left. She is a bit of a hawk(as evidenced by her supoort for the Tomahawk strike on tue Syrian missile base) more than not but no one has proven that the Iraq War was her idea, but everyone acts like it was. Other dems voted for it too and Obama had no vote, although he won largely by saying he was agaist it. Don't get me wrong. He was like the greatest president ever. My only caveat is that he expanded drone warfare and made us more enemies than friends among terrorist families, speaking of winning hearts and minds. How much did he? There are a couple of books which explore this:
'Sudden Justice: America's Secret Drone Wars', by Chris Woods and 'The Drone Memos' by Jameel Jaffer.
Just as credit where credit is due, so with truth and reconciliation.
South Africa had that but we in the US never have. It gives license to dictators like Vladimir Putin to say everybody's doing but Vladimir it's getting old.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Democratically elected governments are so far the least worst solution as befits the wellbeing of the whole world. Trump and Putin and some proTrump or AntiHillary voters were not thinking of Earth best interest.
Anyway, Tenet tried to say no to Cheney but was told to stand down.
Just like my husband is not interested in motivations behind harmful ideation,
my Aunt was also not impressed with a whole Agency of beaureaucrats knuckling down to Cheney. But many of them knew.
So, when Trump tried to discredit the investigation into his Russian business or even FSB ties by saying that the CIA is not impartial, and they were quote Wrong on Iraq unquote...that was just a desperate Hail Mary pass. Just like a student turning around an important behavioral critique aganst the teacher. If you have ever taught you may have been there.
Disclaimer. I do know that the CIA has fought many covert wars in our past, and has done regime change while, interfering in sovereign countries. It's just that
Trump only alludes to that history lesson when it is convenient to his business.
After all this dumbing down and race-baiting of the masses, now is a very odd time to cherry pick the facts and demonstrate that oh-by-the-way you have heard of history, after a whole campaign based on amnesia and know-nothing-ism. There is a book, 'American Amnesia'. Kind of goes without saying but glad someone did.
Ok, thanks for your time and see you next time, weekly reader!
Bibliography: My reading for this post was 'The One Percent Doctrine' by Ron Suskind ca. 2006, about the Run-Up to the Iraq War. I am not referring here to the also good, and more recent 'One Percent Solution' by Gordon Lafer, which is about what the rich and powerful, mostly corporations plan to do now that they have consolidated most of world wealth. Answer is to dismantle the education system. So far it looks like they have dismantled a whole hell of a lot of it already, if you look at things being what they are and how we got here.
Posted by: |