Pretty much conservatives are very pro-CIA. I've a more varied view of the spooks but before I get to that I do think it's a terrible terrible mistake for Obama's AG Eric Holder to decide to prosecute any CIA officials for authorizing or using certain interrogation techniques of terror suspects that liberals have felt went too far. You might make the case from a technical moral standpoint that the methods were somehow wrong but what I for the life of me don't get is this apparent soft spot among the leftie community for those who wish to do us great harm and for Obama to approve of this prosecutorial approach merely cements his repuation as a liberal. From stimulus to health-care to this, it ain't hard to figure. It's not a centrist or moderate pattern at all, it obviously masturbates his base but to point this out you risk the ire of folks like Bill Moyers who, how do I put this? you're engaging in hateful mythology even though you're merely connecting the dots and highlighting the truth. Anyway to balance out my view of the G-men found this under the Wikipedia link for LSD:
"Beginning in the 1950s the Central Intelligence Agency began a research program code named MKULTRA. Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors, other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general public in order to study their reactions, usually without the subject's knowledge. The project was revealed in the US congressional Rockefeller Commission Report."
Yeah so Bill O'Reilly is not a big fan of those Matt Damon/Jason Bourne movies because it casts a bad light on the CIA, liberals can't bash the CIA enough and so perhaps BB can shed some light. Perhaps the late Bob Novak had the best take on politics in general: "Always love your country but never trust your government."
CIA? A necessary program. Originally meant to gather intel,
ReplyDeleteIMO, it became a policy tool and yes, experiments with various James Bond stuff..poison bullets, back alley assasinations, payed
thugs etc. Politicians worry it can become a world unto itself:
hard to control. Kind of interesting, when I was a very young Lieutenant WMD wunderkind,
I addressed a CIA group on then
current chem/bio weapons research.
They all looked normal..like you, Beth and Soap. (after all, Julia Child was in the precurser OSS) I suspect much of the agency consists of linguists, analysts and paperpushers. We can only surmise the real operatives..and the relations with NSA and FBI.
Would guess there is a history of
rough interrogation, assasination and the like, but I'm no conspiracy theorist and once
'in from the cold' they don't tell.
No question it takes a certain
spook toughness to go one on one with the KGB, dontcha think? Hardly a dainty business....
I agree completely about the CIA and posted something about it early this morning.
ReplyDeleteHey, "intelligence" in this sense of the word is supposed to be murky. It's perfectly OK with me.
A world unto itself, well that's the main criticism of the CIA BB. Around JFK's time many people wanted to disband the CIA entirely and start over. They were making their own foreign policy and stuff like that. Agreed there are alot of pencil-pusher and egghead types there but like the Council on Foreign Relations many folks feel there's more than meets the eye.
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