Will the real James Bond please stand up.
007
for release 07-29-05
Washington D.C.
Picture this scenario. Nineteen foreign agents slip into your country with the intent of committing a crime. They are incognito but well organized and financed. No, I'm not talking about the 9/11 hijackers, I'm talking about the nineteen CIA agents for which the Italian government has issued arrest warrants for kidnapping a Muslim cleric from the streets of Milan and spiriting him away to Germany and then to Egypt to enjoy a little extreme interrogation.
By now this government thinks it can do just about anything it wants with impunity. It can cook the intelligence that helped lie the American people into two pointless foreign wars, It can turn the management of our environment over to those who seek most to pollute it. They have, in the name of the mythical war on terror, detained people without charge or counsel. They have sponsored torture. They have restricted our access to the courts and sold it to us as 'tort reform.' They have sold our health care to their clients, the drug and insurance companies Hell, what's a little kidnapping?
It's nothing new for the CIA to conduct clandestine operations in foreign countries. The ostensible purpose of these operations is to accomplish the agency's mission to collect and analyze intelligence. But too many times, because these activities are shrouded in secrecy, human frailty or greed or zeal takes over and what should be information gathering becomes vigilantism or outright crime. I'm reminded of Allende's CIA sponsored demise in Chile, the Company designed coup that reinstalled the Shah in Iran and the shennanigans in several Central American countries (notably Panama and El Salvadore) where CIA agents became provocateurs and gun runners instead of information gatherers. I won't even mention the Air America escapade during the Vietnam war where The Agency became a smack dealing Mafia.
So, yeah, what's a little kidnapping? We're the biggest bully on the block, we should be able to send a gang of thugs into another sovereign country and let them stay in five-star hotels and eat expensive food before they commit a crime, snatch somebody off the street and remove them from the country for the purpose of torture. I mean you've seen enough 007 movies to know that this sort of thing goes on all the time. Anyway, it's the war on terror, right? Anything is legal.
The CIA kidnappers obviously thought that the Italian authorities were simpatico because they used regular cell phones to communicate during the heist. This allowed the Italian police to trace the movements of the gang. By triangulation between cell towers, the authorities can determine within several yards where a cell phone is located. Consider the implications of this. It means that if you have a cell phone and it's turned on, your every movement can be monitored. You are on the same tether as Martha Stewart wearing an ankle bracelet. Not only can your calls be monitored, they can tell exactly where you are at any given time. But you must remember that this is for your own safety. How can we protect you unless we know every move you make?
I think that the very existence of the CIA is an affront to The American Ideal. We should dismantle it. It has historically shown that it is an organization dedicated to mischief, much more equipped and adept at causing trouble in the world than at gathering intelligence. I think that the fourth estate should handle intelligence. Then we could all just read about it in the papers and see it on TV or the internet. If BushCo really wants to spread freedom, first they need to spread truth because truth is the soil in which freedom grows.
Talk of the CIA inevitably leads to Plamegate.
After I had gotten over the irony of Judy Miller, who was probably on the White House payroll as minister of propaganda during the run-up to our invasion of Iraq, sitting in jail, and after my native disgust for Mr. Potato Head Karl Rove (where did his neck go?) settled down, I began to think about what this whole thing is really about. It's not about who leaked what to whom. It's about whether or not we launched a war that has cost thousands of lives and a big black eye for the image of the U.S., under false pretenses.
Nobody in this administration wants to see the ugly eight hundred pound gorilla that is sitting squarely in the Oval Office, But The Poet's Eye does. Mr. Bush, you lied to us and committed crimes in our name, either through your minions or from your own mouth. Be a man. Take responsibility. Resign. And take your CIA with you and retreat into the remote mountains of Pakistan where you can take bubble baths with Bin Landen.
Beware of pretty faces that you find
A pretty face can hide an evil mind
Ah, be careful what you say
Or you'll give yourself away
Odds are you won't live to see tomorrow
Secret agent man, secret agent man
They've given you a number and taken away your name
---Sloan/Barri, Secret Agent Man
