Dr. Kirk Murphy (With A Little Musical Help From The Black Eyed Peas): The Real CIA In Our Midst

The other day someone pointed out that you can't spell "Walter Pincus" without a "C," and "I" and an "A." Yesterday Wally turned his Washington Post column over to his pals at Langley so they could make a case for being left alone to run the world without interference from politicians or anyone else. And far right CIA-shill and spooky former Bush lackey Michael Gerson-- creator of the "smoking gun/mushroom cloud" and "Axis of Evil" metaphors-- was even worse today.

Since I'm one of a tiny minority of Americans positive and without the slightest doubt that the CIA killed President Kennedy, I figured I'd find someone more dispassionate and rational to write about the dagger pointed at the heart of American democracy. I know Kirk James Murphy from the brilliant work he does at Firedoglake. He's an MD and a psychiatrist and his measured, grounded and well-researched posts are always a joy to read. With the CIA campaign to dislodge Nancy Pelosi as Speaker as a backdrop-- or even just show Democrats their fangs-- I asked Kirk for a little background on the CIA so people can contextualize what they've been up to this month in regard to their attempt to stage a coup d'etat in the House of Representatives. Dr. Kirk Murphy:

Aww, the CIA's poor little heads are worried about torture and war crimes inquiries.  Worried about their victims?  Nope.  They're worried about their precious bureaucracy.

Gosh, I don't know what we'd do without them. 

The nonexistent "missile gap." Failing to perceive, much less anticipate, the Sino-Soviet estrangement for years. Failing to predict the small matter of the collapse of our purportedly existential enemy, the Warsaw Pact. Failing to conceptualize, much less predict "blowback" from destroying popular rule throughout the Arab world (goodbye, Mossadegh, hello Shah. And ayatollahs. Rinse, repeat with Saudis), or from arming Afghanistan (hello, Bin Laden).

On enviro issues, reliably lagging even EarthFirst!, as well as more prominent eco-sources, by one to two decades.

Hey-- the expenditures from Plan B's deliberate invention of Soviet capacities to keep the gravy train rolling to war contractors were only measured in trillions, right?

And the indirect domestic costs of: maintaining the unneeded war economy after 1989; plowing the "cold war dividend" into Raytheon rather than reading; gutting public health, rather than rebuilding it; defunding basic science for decades....?

Priceless.

Who cares if two generations and their educations were beggared so long as those patriots at Langley delivered the goods for Lockheed and General Dynamics?

Between standing by in silence when Reagan claimed our mighty military was imperiled by a bunch of Marxists south of Mexico; deliberate complicity in launching a war of aggression, an international war crime, in Iraq; actively funding, training, and supervising generations of torturers in Latin America; operating a global torture Gulag....

Importing Nazi war criminals from the Gehlen Org into the OSS and America starting before the crematoria were cold; Mossadegh in Iran; Arbenz in Guatemala (civil war deaths: 250,000 - some from CIA death squads); Suharto in Indonesia (500,000 dead); Goulart in Brazil; mass murder (over 70,000 civilians) in South Vietnam as the policy and objective of William Colby's Phoenix Project; Allende in Chile; organizing, training and supporting El Salvador's death squads (100,000-200,000 war deaths).  Hey, and providing the false intel used to deceive Congress (low bar, that) and launch war of aggression upon Iraq (750,000-1,000,000 dead).

Anyone who chooses to work for that employer as an analyst knows the organization they've chosen to work for is in the business of military dictatorship, sabotage of civil authority and the rule of law, as well as torture and mass murder. If they claim they don't know, they're either very incompetent liars are too incompetent to be even a CIA analyst. Given the organization's track record, that takes some doing.

Anyone who chooses to work for the CIA's clandestine operations chooses to work for a shop with a documented fifty year history of fomenting mass murders, torture, and war crimes. Whether they acknowledge that or not does not change the fact of their willingness to take up with an organization notorious for murder, mayhem, and torture on every continent save Antarctica.

Good fucking riddance. I'm willing to believe there are some decent people in the CIA-- just as there are some in the bowels of major health insurers. Their individual decency doesn't change the fact they've chosen to hitch their careers and economic futures to a war crimes machine.

If we wake up tomorrow and the CIA's intel analysis is rolled into some new spook analysis agency, policy-making based on that intel's in DNI or the equivalent, and the hideous war criminals of the clandestine service are sent to the Hague, we'd have shed the machinery of paramilitary control over our foreign policy and national interest.

That may worry the hell out of Langley's torture and mass murder shop. Great! Hope they never know a night's rest.

I know that Michael Steele, heading up a party with no vision and no ideas, may find this without the degree of classiness he expects in political discourse so I recommend he not watch: