The CIA Destroys Tapes...(What's New?)

 

 

 

 

    As news agencies and politicians express shock and awe over the destruction by the CIA of videotapes recording the interrogations of suspected numbers of Al Qaeda, I can't help but be surprised - by the surprise.

 

    We like to think (or pretend to think) that the CIA is merely an intelligence (or information gathering ) agency, which dutifully reports back to the government on events transpiring around the globe.

 

    Instead, they are more like the Praetorian Guard of Rome, who did anything and everything they were told to do.

 

    And I do mean everything.

 

    As noted by investigative journalist John Kelly, in his article, "Crimes and Silence: The CIA's Criminal Acts and the Media's Silence" [published in Kristina Borjesson's (ed.) Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of the Free Press. {Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 2002} pp.311-322] the agency doesn't engage in occasional lapses of judgment, but commits thousands of crimes a year all over the earth. Kelly cited as his source the CIA itself, as it reported to the House Intelligence Committee.  A committee staff study on the CIA report found, " The CS (Clandestine Service of the CIA), is the only part of the IC (Intelligence Community), indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world. "

 

    The staff study went on to estimate that these actions occur "several hundred times every day," or several hundred thousand times a year (p.311)

 

    What was the government's legislative response when such news saw the light in House Intelligence Committee documents?

 

    The Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a mass immunization bill for CIA employees, that would make the commission of crime legal.  Kelly wrote, "This is the Nazi rationale, plain and simple." On Dec. 27, 2000, then president Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, as the Intelligence Authorization Act.

 

    Under the law, the CIA could violate international law and treaties, as long as they were following orders.

 

    In the past, according to intrepid journalists, researchers and former CIA officials themselves, the agency has toppled governments, staged assassinations, supported terrorists who unleashed waves of violence against their people (they called them 'contras'), bombed people, undermined national economies and democracies, and a host of other crimes - because they were told to do so.

 

    In this context, compare that they destroyed tapes - even tapes of torture! Why is this objectionable, yet all else that they do isn't even worthy of reporting?

 

    That's because the major corporate media doesn't seriously question what the government does.  We saw this when the government sold the People a bill of goods to start the Iraq war.  At a time when the American people really needed their press, they were compliant, quiescent, and servile.

 

    The US media hasn't yet come to terms with what the CIA either does, or actually is.

 

    They are Praetorian Guards, obeying the Emperor, whose word is law.

 

    Why should we be surprised?  Weren't they 'chust followink Orders?'

 

--(c) '07 maj