The violent death of anyone is so sad and regrettable. And in mourning, one always remembers the good deeds and kindnesses of those who have left us.
However, puzzling and annoying is the uncomfortable, yet automatic, thought that insinuates itself inappropriately in such a solemn moment, agonizingly impossible to dismiss, clear away, obliterate from one's mind. The long, famous, and embarrassing past history of the employer of the deceased.
The best way to try to erase this dismal thought is to remember that last week's fallen secret service men were U.S. government officers diligently following orders, and to assure ourselves that they were honorable men that had nothing to do with the CIA declassified acts of treachery and homicide we have become burdened with.
We denounce their commander-in-chief's announced decision to continue hunting down all Afghanis who fight the U.S. and NATO military occupation of their country, despite the unequivocal fact that no Afghani ever attacked America or any other place. For this order given by President Obama following that of President Bush II is what ultimately led to the death of these CIA agents.
It is all the more absurd that these agents have lost their lives fighting the leaders of the former U.S. supported Taliban government which came to power as an answer to the corruption, brutality, and the incessant fighting of the largely non-Pashtun Mujahideen warlords originally backed by CIA and neighboring CIA friendly secret services of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and even China. The Taliban initially enjoyed enormous good will from Afghans weary of devastation, rape, thievery and racketeering, and within a few years in power had practically eliminated the poppy heroin production forbidden by the Koran. The name Taliban means students of Islam.
And it is bizarre that a heretofore person known as kind Jordanian physician gave his life to take these American lives precisely in answer to a previous "successful' assassination by CIA drone in Pakistan.
When will be the final CIA chapter be written of the thirty year CIA effort that funded, armed and trained fundamentalist warlords of hill tribes in a civil war against a women-liberating, socialist, Kabul government attempting teach girls in schools; an effort that also successfully baited a likewise murderous eight year Soviet attempt to save that Kabul government?
The January 2010 mourning for the CIA operatives and hundreds of other American lives and the thousands upon thousands of Afghani mourning in a once mystical land, made desolate, is the other side of the coin of the great CIA success of 1979 that Secretary of Defense Gates wrote of in his memoirs, "Out of the Shadows," and which Presidential Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1998 bragged to a French magazine of causing the demise of the USSR.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BRZ110A.html
Actually, though, that result is little consolation to the families of the CIA officials for the deaths of their loved ones and the past thirty years of death in Afghanistan, and the deaths in the blowback of 9/11. These were the results of pressure and "suggestions' given to a number of U.S. presidents by a gray eminence of "practical collusion" within the banking world, passed on to military and accepted by corporate media to becloud.
The world is still in its capitalist phase. As British economist John Maynard Keynes confessed, "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
The nature of capitalism and the necessary practical amorality forced upon capitalists tends to place the accumulation of ownership and power above the value of life itself, even above the value of the lives of capitalists themselves and the lives of their countrymen, and most traditionally above lives in the foreign countries they buy up, or end up invading, whenever propitious. (This is not entirely different from the priorities of the nobility during the preceding feudalism.)
So, love CIA agents, all potential Buddhas, love the bankers and their military and media personnel. The disreputable CIA, giant investment banks and media organizations are abstract terms without these potential Buddhas.
All death and dying is a result of previous cause and effect in no-fault Buddhist thinking. All of us actors on the stage of life playing out our destined role as Shakespeare wrote, and most of us in ignorance of why.
The same goes for the CIA. The people that is.
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