Saturday, March 10, 2007

Is there a culture demanding Rogue intelligence operations?

Look at the article by David Kurtz over at TPM. David reads Sy Hersh has suggesting that the alumina of the Iran-Contra Scandal have been using what they learned there and running "off-the-books" operations around both the CIA and the Pentagon in order to avoid Congressional scrutiny.

This is much like the numerous crimes under Nixon, especially the Plumbers unit. It is also like the way the conservatives ran the wars in Latin America under Reagan, although they let the CIA in there. But it came out of the National Security Counsel under Admiral Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver North.

Abrams determined that the lack of tight, central control let too many details of Iran-Contra escape, so this time they had their man in the Office of the Vice President, and they have had him run things from there. With Rumsfeld at DoD, many of the operations that should have gone through the CIA were instead transferred to DoD and run out of the Pentagon. To top it off, the Republicans who ran Congress never permitted any Congressional oversight.

In short, the Republican Party has run the federal government like a Mafia organization would, or like the Communist Party in the USSR ran the USSR.

So my question: Is the Bush administration the last of the extremist Cold Warriors trying to hold onto and even expand their power here in the U.S.? Has the war in Iraq been little more than an attempt to shift the resources of the United States towards a new set of enemies now that the Soviets and Communism are gone?

Sure is what it looks like to me.

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