MORE ON THE CIA AND ITS MORAL COMPASS

This gave me a good laugh.

President Obama will not be able to change the culture of the intelligence community and restore the moral compass of the CIA unless there is a full understanding and repudiation of the operational crimes of the post-9/11 era.

Moral compass? The CIA operates within a “moral compass”?

The above line was taken from: Why CIA Director John Brennan Must Resign, by MELVIN A. GOODMAN,  A Former CIA Analyst, in, of all places, Counterpunch.

I always had my suspicions that the leftie publications in the USA are merely masquerading as lefties. And I think this article proves me right. Because if you think the CIA ever did operate within a moral compass, either you have no understanding of “morals” or else you have swallowed the propaganda of the torture state so deeply you can’t even vomit it out even with a finger stuck down the throat.

Now the furor of the torture report makes it clear that everyone is interested in seeing this report declassified. Primarily because the USA has been out and about torturing people in “black sites” all over the world, and this report is going to implicate a lot more officials in a lot more countries than the good old USA.

 According to the "black site" page on Wikipedia, my favorite source of unbiased information:

Countries that held suspects on behalf of the U.S. include Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Libya, Lithuania, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zambia.^[36]

Suspected black sites

 

 The U.S. and suspected CIA "black sites"

  Extraordinary renditions allegedly have been carried out from these countries

  Detainees have allegedly been transported through these countries

  Detainees have allegedly arrived in these countries

Sources: Amnesty International^[35] Human Rights Watch

An estimated 50 prisons have been used to hold detainees in 28 countries, in addition to at least 25 more prisons in Afghanistan and 20 in Iraq. It is estimated that the U.S. has also used 17 ships as floating prisons since 2001, bringing the total estimated number of prisons operated by the U.S. and/or its allies to house alleged terrorist suspects since 2001 to more than 100.

(Above paragraph from Wikipedia.)

Which means a lot more people than James Clapper and John Brennan are going to be in trouble, shortly, in more than 28 countries.

Basically, the UN better get busy setting up a new organization to deal with the prosecution and conviction of officials in more than 28 countries for the torture of innocent civilians since 9/11. This is going to be big, folks. Call it Nuremberg II.

As to the moral compass of the CIA suddenly being restored with the resignation of John Brennan—surely Melvin A. Goodman doesn’t believe this? I really hope he doesn’t. Because I think the moral compass of the CIA never existed, and I doubt it can be inserted into that institution at this late hour.

Of course, there is always work to be done—how about working on the moral compass of the American people? This might be a more fruitful exercise. First thing might be to get rid of the culture of first names which make people think that everything is excusable, and which often leads down the slow precipitous slope of fascistic excess where checks and balances vanish in the casual nature of public life.

I was at the Berlinale Film Festival in 2007 and I met a Scottish expatriate in Berlin who told me she thought something about the structure of the German language, which had a lot of passive constructions, made it possible for people to avoid responsibility, and which eventually made the Holocaust possible. What is clear is that the same sort of linguistic analysis could be applied to the American case. In my view, the appallingly casual nature of public bureaucracy has led the Americans down this dangerous path—you can’t call people by their first names and then expect them not to blur the boundaries between the allowed and not-allowed.
In the American case, the dangerous romanticization of uber-masculinity has also been a tipping point for what unfolded, from 2001 to now. You cannot fixate on hyper-masculinity with all its attendant technological triumphalism and not expect it to lead down the dangerous path of ceremonial celebration of torture, death and global domination.
I don’t know about Mr. Brennan or his resignation. But what I sense is that the CIA is clearly a defunct organization that will have to be dismantled and consigned to the dustbins of history in approximately 9 months, precisely after the UN holds a Nuremberg Trail II onto its activities since the 1950s. I don’t think the moral compass can be affixed onto this morally defunct organization at this rather late hour.