Finished reading

"Legacy of Ashes
The History of the CIA"
By Tim Weiner © 2007
Tim Weiner is a New York Times reporter who has written on American intelligence for twenty years. He was awarded a Pulitzer price for this work on national security programs. He has traveled to Afghanistan and other nations to investigate CIA covert operations first hand. This is his third book.

On page 411 in the book is an interesting passage on William Casey. {Casey was the OSS chief in London during WWII. He was a Wall Street operator who made his money selling tax-shelter strategies. He was Reagan’s campaign manager.}

He was the director of the CIA at the time.

December 15, (1986) Casey had a seizure in his 7th floor office. He was wheeled out on a stretcher before anyone grasped what had happened. At Georgetown University Hospital, his doctors determined that he had an undiagnosed, central nervous system lymphoma-a malignant spider’s web spreading in his brain, a rare disease, difficult to detect. It often led to inexplicably bizarre behavior in the twelve to fifteen months before it was discovered.

{ So Reagan sleeps through briefings and the director of CIA has some weird cancer in his brain. Iran-Contra anyone? }

There’s a passage on page 510 that left me with my mouth hanging open:

The clandestine service began to abandon the techniques of the past - political warfare, propaganda, and covert action - because it lacked the skills to conduct them. The agency remained a place where few people spoke Arabic or Persian, Korean or Chinese. It still denied employment to patriotic Arab Americans on security grounds if they still had relatives living in the Middle East as most did.

Huh? Who’s security does this protect? The security of Americans? The relatives still living in the old country? So I guess deaing with liars, cheats, thieves and drug dealers has proven to be a more efficient way to gather intelligence. Yeah, tell that to all the families of the foreign CIA recruits that got killed upon discovery. Mmmmmm hmmmm, OKaybee.

On page 512 a now familiar lament from anyone with three brain cells left:

At he end of Dwight Eisenhower’s years a president, a few days after he lamented the legacy of intelligence failures he would pass on to his successors, he gave his farewell address to the nation and famously warned" "We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplace power exists and will persist." Little more than a half century later the surge of secret spending on national security after 9/11 had created a booming intelligence-industrial complex.

Corporate clones of the CIA started sprouting all over the suburbs of Washington and beyond. Patriotism for profit became a $50 billion-a-year business by some estimates-a sum about the size of the intelligence budget itself. This phenomenon traced back fifteen years. After the cold war the agency began contracting out thousands of jobs to fill the perceived void created by the budget cuts that began in 1992. A CIA officer could file his retirement papers, turn in his blue identification badge, go to work for a much better salary at a military contractor such as Lockheed Martin or Booz Allen Hamilton, then return to the CIA the next day wearing a green badge. After September 11 the outsourcing went out of control. Green-badge bosses started openly recruiting in the CIA’s cafeteria.

…Lockheed Martin posted help wanted ads for "counterterrorism analysts" to interrogate suspected terrorists at Guantánamo prison.

So this book mentions some local hotshot names of people who are in hot water, and then mentions Blackwater USA. This company wants to set up a training camp a few miles from Tecate, Mexico in a tiny little place called Potrero. I was listening to the only local progressive talk radio show in San Diego this morning and a listener called in to say that she was at the protest yesterday in Potrero. She said that she felt like the Blackwater goons were trying to intimidate the Blackwater protesters. They were filming and one of these goons was pointing his finger at the protesters and making it look like a gun. I wasn’t there because I figured that something like that would happen. I've tangled with right-wing idealogues before. They're so stupid and brainwashed that reasoning with them is a waste of time, but they're kind of like cornered badgers, you don't want to fuck with them, they're nasty little shits.

Three hundred against Blackwater, and fifteen for Blackwater at the protest:

Blackwater foes begin fight with their feet

The right-wing brainwashed morons who commented on the Fishwrap article just crack me up. I wonder if any of them have ever looked up the word 'liberal' in a dictionary.