3 July 2007

Fundamentally Repugnant


Guess who said this:
"It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage, and counter espionage services, and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods than those used against us. It may be necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand, and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy."
No, it wasn't Dick Cheney. It was Jimmy Doolittle, a WWII bombing "hero", in a secret 1954 report commissioned to define the role of intelligence. James Carrol says this post-war period was when the CIA was loosed upon the people of the USA.
What if this cryptic system's true enemies are not hostile forces from abroad, but America's own fancied traditions of decency and honor? What if the CIA, that is, has not been protecting us, but has been protecting itself from us?
He says the CIA and the KGB eventually sustained the conditions in which both could thrive.
Each acted as the avant-garde of a burgeoning military establishment.
He forgets to mention that the Dulles brothers, who formed the CIA in WWII, had long been acting as the gateway between US millionaires and Nazi fasicsts, but never mind. Let's fast forward to our present predicament:
When the national security establishment's most heinous acts are laid bare -- whether through the Church Committee Hearings in the 1970s or in the release of the "family jewels" last week -- the revelations are greeted with a national yawn. The monstrous military establishment, which intelligence crimes protect, is not questioned.

Why are the congressional switchboards not jammed with angry phone calls of dishonored Americans? Except for an ineffectual, if passionate, minority of objectors, the people of the United States handle the knowledge of past and present crimes committed in their name quite nicely, thank you.
It couldn't happen here, could it? We brave, independent Aussies would not just roll over and yawn if our PM was a War Criminal, would we? We don't have an intelligence service, and a diplomatic corps, in the grip of the increasingly globalized US military-industrial complex, do we? No way, dude!

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz......?