John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA TODAY

 

“The CIA Is Out of Control, Has Been Since the 50’s”

 

No other result is possible given all the circumstances of the organization.

You create a secretive organization which has relatively little oversight.

Its members are given to understand that they can lie, even under oath. Director Helms openly said as much during the Warren Commission’s investigation into Kennedy’s assassination.

You pass laws, pretty much for appearances, about matters like the organization not spying on its own people, but the organization just goes around these laws with various subterfuges, and no one in authority corrects them. CIA has always spied on Americans through one device or another, especially by using other friendly intelligence services to get around the laws.

You give the organization virtually unlimited resources.

You task it with very dark deeds in other countries, great numbers of them, so that they become inured to such activities. As any student of human psychology knows, once people get used to doing things in one area of activity – such as dirty tricks in countries abroad – they will gradually slip into acceptance of using the same methods anywhere. People’s minds are not compartmentalized like a set of laws.

Moreover, on the “operations” side of the house – as opposed to the purely intelligence-collecting side, the CIA having what are almost two distinct businesses under one roof – the nature of the work involved requires the services of very specific types of individuals.

Narcissists and psychopaths, intelligent ones, are both needed by the organization and attracted to the nature of its well-paid work, people pretty well without conscience, as you may well understand by such operations as we do know about.

One, the CIA’s International Torture Gulag, a collection of black “rendition” sites scattered in several countries where kidnapped people are secretly imprisoned. I have no idea if it still operates, but it did for many years. The CIA’s current Director, Gina Haspel, headed up one of these, and her icy smile would have been one of the last things some unfortunates saw.

Two, America’s industrial-level extrajudicial killing operation with drones and missiles and kill lists, where employees sit in secret rooms in front of computer screens to play violent computer games with real humans. They kill people they know nothing about, people who have no legal rights, people who are legally guilty of nothing. They also frequently kill other bystanders in error, but neither bystanders nor targets are guilty of anything.

Three, the plotting against and overthrow of governments in other countries, often even democratic governments if they look like stumbling blocks to American interests. Just a few well-known examples include democratic governments in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran. A whole list of leaders has been eliminated since the 1950s, and an even longer list of countries have experienced destructive black operations.

Four, the utter corruption of many foreign leaders through the use of blackmail, threats, and secret payments. These are methods are used on leaders of “friendly” and allied countries. Talk about interfering in other people’s elections, CIA has been relentless in such activities.

CIA’s ability to do what would be unacceptable things is aided greatly by little accountability and plenty of resources.

In general, we all know what effects power has on people. It corrupts, and the closer you get to absolute power, the closer you get to absolute corruption.

Readers may enjoy these articles about CIA:

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/why-the-cia-always-will-be-a-costly-flop/

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2015/03/13/the-cia-and-americas-presidents-some-rarely-discussed-truths-shaping-contemporary-american-democracy/

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

EXPANSION OF A POSTED RESPONSE TO AN INTERVIEW WITH SYRIA’S PRESIDENT ASSAD IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

I am no great defender of unelected leaders like Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, but in the case of Syria’s current troubles I support him and wish him success against the forces responsible for murder and destruction on a large scale in his country.

The great writer, Graham Greene, said:
“…the writer should always be ready to change sides at the drop of a hat. He stands for the victims, and the victims change.”

Syria is the victim in this case, and the bloody bullies attacking Syria are the United States and Israel, both too cowardly to attack directly and both dishonestly claiming that the Free Syrian Army represents a genuine popular revolt.

The aim of the United States and Israel in all this violence is to wipe Syria off the Middle East chessboard, leaving it a divided society with no central direction.

Their efforts are designed to serve Israel’s drive to dominate the Middle East, just as America’s invasion of Iraq served the same drive. Israel aspires to be a miniature replica in the Middle East of what the United States has become globally, and the United States’ government, compromised by its corrupt election financing system and the central role of special interests in that system, is more than willing to grant Israel the role.

The brutality and hypocrisy involved in creating a pseudo-popular uprising and putting millions of innocent people at risk are breathtaking. The United States and Israel have gathered, armed, and supported a gang of thugs and injected them (through Syria’s border with Turkey, Turkey also offering refuge and re-supply) into what was a peaceful country, the very kind of cut-throats neither the U.S. nor Israel would allow to cross their own borders.

The recent death of an American ambassador in Libya at Benghazi, an event which no American official will discuss honestly, was part of the same dark scheme and involved the ambassador working with the CIA to gather killers and arms for export to Syria. The operation badly backfired when some of the thugs being dealt with turned on the Americans, something American officials will not acknowledge out of embarrassment and the desire to hide the dirty business in which they are engaged.

The world is not the simple place of angels and devils as America’s propaganda efforts ceaselessly proclaim it – great camps of goodness and evil ready to do battle for the soul of humanity. No matter whether a government is democratic in origin or not – and given the utter corruption of America’s politics, its claims to authentic democracy are tenuous – powerful insiders are fully capable of bloody, ruthless behavior in secret, destroying the lives of others.

While the United States loves hearing itself talk about being a bastion of freedom and rights, the fact is that over the last 40 or so years, it has been, quite simply, the most murderous nation on earth, killing 3 million in Vietnam plus a host of victims in Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and in many, many other places either invaded or toppled in bloody coups. It still runs an international torture gulag, of which Guantanamo is only a part.

The world can support a bloody global dictator even less than an individual country can support a local one. So, in Syria we see a stark choice, and the ethical balance favors for once a local dictator.

If you want the rule of law, you must abide by the rule of law, a principle which neither the United States nor Israel makes even a pretense of embracing although they sure like talking about it between bombing runs and terrorist activities.