Date posted: December 8, 2007 - Saturday
Title: Where are we going?
Current mood: betrayed
In a lot of ways I feel inadequate to comment on these events because I lack the political background. But, the pure idiocy of the situation just screams out for some remarks.
We are engaged in a war in Iraq based at least partially on totally inaccurate information provided by the intelligence community; in particular the CIA.
(SIDE NOTE: I consider the phrase "intelligence community" to be an oxymoron, much like "military intelligence" or "Congressional oversight.")
Now we find out the CIA was wrong about the ability of Iran to develop atomic weapons. And once that came out, the latest revelation says the CIA destroyed videotapes of questionable interrogations performed during the 'war on terrorism' because they were afraid people could face criminal prosecution for these actions.
It has even been revealed someone the Bush administration actually told the CIA it was a bad idea to destroy the tapes. (Much to our shame, no one in the Bush administration ever told the CIA it might be a stupid idea to carry out such questionable practices as 'waterboarding' in the first place.)
A while back I was reading a book on the history of the CIA [A Legacy of Ashes]. I would read only a small bit at a time because the chronicle of blunders, outright stupidity and venial personnel involved would make me frustrated and angry. I finally stopped reading the book altogether.
Based on the latest revelations I think the book should have more aptly been titled "A Confederacy of Dunces" which was the title of a 1981 Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction. The problem is there was little fiction in this book about the CIA; that is if you ignore the fictions they would invent to cover their own mistakes and ineptitude.
I guess I can see the need for gathering intelligence in order to make reasoned, intelligent decisions about how we as a country move in the world and relate to our neighbors on this planet. But we seem so poorly served by the people doing the job today. They seem to have been given pretty much a free hand with the Patriot Act, the use of quasi-legal wiretap authority and the harvesting of information from e-mail records of thousands of unsuspecting people. And yet they seem to stumble at every turn and we see little evidence they are gaining in this struggle against terrorism. Now I am not privy to the inner workings of government so maybe there have been significant victories, but why haven't they been publicized?
But I think the more important question for all of us is, how far do we go in waging this battle? At what point have we surrendered too much in the pursuit of those who would harm us? What do we lose when we accept the justification of questionable practices and the curtailment of individual freedoms?
There is a theory I gleaned from somewhere, maybe from the movie "Apocalypse Now", that says you become like your enemy when you conduct a war against them. Is that where we want to go? Is that where
