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OpEdNews Op Eds    H1'ed 10/31/17

What Have We Become? Pompeo & Pence Cause Us to Look in the Mirror

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Who are we as a nation? What have we become? The answer to those questions should scare the hell out of us. Evidently, we've become an absolutely brutal, soulless people -- frightening beyond belief.

This time I'm not referring to our "leaders'" moronic denial of climate chaos that menaces the lives and futures of our children, grandchildren, and the entire planet. I'm referencing instead our status as a blatantly terrorist nation that on religious principle (in North Korea) casually threatens to wipe more than 25 million people off the map in a single instant as early as tomorrow. TOMORROW!

Three revelations of the last week evoke that alarming conclusion. One was a statement on October 26th by Mike Pompeo, the director of the CIA. The second issued the next day from the mouth of vice president Pence. The third came the same week with the release of the 50-year-old Kennedy Assassination Papers that put flesh on both statements making them mind-numbingly terrifying.

Consider Pompeo and the assassination revelations first.

At a forum convoked by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Pompeo who has proudly supported torture, and who heads an agency that has sponsored coups, assassinations, and omnipresent black-hole prisons declared that the CIA has to become "a much more vicious agency."

Those were his exact words! And shockingly, they represent acknowledgment on Pompeo's part that the CIA has always been vicious. (If it has to become "more vicious," I guess, in Pompeo's eyes, it was merely less vicious previously.)

According to Webster, Pompeo's term means "dangerously aggressive." Its synonyms are brutal, ferocious, savage, violent, dangerous, ruthless, remorseless, merciless, heartless, callous, cruel, harsh, cold-blooded, inhuman, fierce, barbarous, barbaric, brutish, bloodthirsty, fiendish, sadistic, monstrous, murderous and homicidal.

As descriptors of an extremely prominent agency of the U.S. government, those adjectives could apply to our entire D.C. apparatus, couldn't they? They could describe us!

Is that what we want to be in the world?

And just how vicious has the CIA been? It's here that the assassination disclosures come in. They clearly show that from its birth in 1947, THE CIA HAS BEEN A FULL-FLEDGED TERRORIST ORGANIZATION that could hardly be more vicious. In fact, because of its reach and resources, it clearly surpasses the vice of any terrorist group or crime syndicate in the world -- including ISIS.

The papers show that in the past the agency has stood ready to kill indiscriminately by downing airplanes, sinking ships, setting off bombs, and murdering heads of state as its routine modus operandi -- all the while covering its tracks and leaving clues that implicate designated enemies like Russia and Cuba.

If the CIA has stood ready to engage in such mass false-flag atrocities 50 years ago, and if now Pompeo wants its cadres to step it up, where do you think they will set their limits? Will they fly airplanes into tall buildings? Will they assassinate presidents? Have they?

In other words, Pompeo's assertions and the assassination papers lend credence to conspiracy theories of all kinds. Fact is, the CIA is a conspiracy factory!

That there are no limits to the brutality housed in Langley, the White House or in American souls was made clear by the earlier-referenced statement of Vice President Pence. This self-proclaimed man of God, who had previously identified himself as "a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican -- in that order," recently disclosed the true object of his faith. And it's certainly not God, love, or the Prince of Peace. It's nuclear weapons! Speaking at Minot Airforce Base in North Dakota, Pence declared "... there's no greater force for peace in the world than the United States nuclear arsenal."

What have we become as a people? What have Christians become?

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Mike Rivage-Seul is a liberation theologian and former Roman Catholic priest. Retired in 2014, he taught at Berea College in Kentucky for 40 years where he directed Berea's Peace and Social Justice Studies Program. His latest book is (more...)
 

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