It should come as no surprise that I am not a big fan of the FBI or the U.S. "intelligence" services. Historically, the FBI has been an instrument of oppression of leftist and progressive organizations, movements and individuals. The FBI murdered Fred Hampton, a man I greatly admired. They tried to murder Martin Luther King Jr. and it's just possible that they actually did. They infiltrated progressive organizations with provocateurs and disrupted their operations. They blackmailed people and they even ratfucked the Hillary Clinton campaign and helped make TFG president.
As for the CIA, they repeatedly engineered military coups to remove governments that were unfriendly to U.S. corporate interests. They allowed themselves to be used by Dick Cheney to produce fraudulent justification for the invasion of Iraq, and they tortured prisoners at his orders. The National Security Agency unlawfully spied on U.S. citizens. I could obviously go on at some length.
Nevertheless, the U.S. does need to keep some secrets. It's a dangerous world. Secrecy is often abused. Much information is classified to save the government from embarrassment -- in other words the people they're keeping the secrets from are us. (A good example is information about the Tonkin Gulf incident, LBJ's phony justification for escalating the Vietnam war.) But it's obviously both a legal and ethical responsibility of government officials to respect the classification system and follow the protocols for viewing and handling sensitive information.
So I'm experiencing vertigo right now, as the Republican party, which for a century or more has been claiming to be the champion of strong national defense and national security, suddenly decide that state secrets are a joke, propose repeal of the Espionage Act, and claim that the FBI is the agent of a "Deep State" that exists to undermine conservative policies and politicians. They even go so far as to threaten violence against FBI agents. The party has degenerated into a personality cult with no principles whatsoever. I find this utterly baffling, but also very frightening.
1 comment:
Yep. Cults are scary as shit. Death-oriented. Following a charismstic nut always leads one place: over a cliff. I figure the "Don" has a whole bunch of shit on a whole lot of people. I can't find any other other explanation for the obsequious behavior of people toward him. But he is also the laziest motherfucker I've ever seen. So who is performing his blackmail for him? And why? I figure it's all being done by Putin and his agents. Trump is a completely corrupted Russian agent. I mean, the motherfucker met in secret with Putin? He is the greatest traitor the country has ever known.
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