From: Jasper
Date: 9/13/01
Time: 11:28:57 AM
Miss Marple,
I don't know how much of my stuff you've read but in case you don't already know it, I am not a big fan of the CIA. Some kind of super secret organization dedicated to international information gathering is a necessary evil in an evil world. But any secret organization can be easily misused. If it can be, you can bet your upper lip that it has been and will be used that way by someone with a personal agenda.
It's the international mischief making carried out in the name of "national self-interest" that I worry about. The Viet Cong got its best training from the CIA's WW II predecessor (the OSS) because they were fighting our enemy of the moment, Japan. The CIA has secretly helped in the overthrow of governments that some joker at some time didn't like for on reason or another. It doesn't matter if the reason was political (one "ism" vs. another) economic (unfriendly to American big business interests) or criminal (the drug trade). You can't see what they're doing, you can't know why their doing it and you can even discuss whether or not it should be done. That's why I say a war that should be fought should be fought in the open and we should have the courage to do it.
The necessary "little wars" we refused to fight going all the way back to the compromises that wrote chattel slavery into the Constitution, have ALWAYS made bigger, nastier wars inevitable - wars that we end up fighting because of an "incident" that will allow no other course of action.
All of the above are practical reasons for clearly defining the principles we REALLY stand for as a nation, and then really standing up for them when the time comes to act. That means standing up to the real criminals in the United States and abroad, in or out of government -- not as a matter of political philosophy, economic self-interest or self-preservation - but as a matter of moral principle (Kenya, Tanzania, Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Kuwait, etc.).
If you don't do everything you can as a matter of principle to stop mass murder anywhere, you are inviting an "incident" in your own back yard to move you to action. That question is not whether it will happen. The question is when? The question is where? The question is how? And the question is how many? --Jasper