I Just Don’t Care

FoxNews published an article titled Newly Released CIA Documents Show Agency’s Dark Past which talks about a number of abuses of power on the part of the CIA thirty years ago which are now being declassified.

While some of the abuses are egregious and should never be repeated, quite a few of the listed “abuses” are not abuses at all — but are reasonable tasks which should and must be accomplished to protect our national security and the freedom which we enjoy because of it.

The “two-year physical confinement” in the mid-1960s of a Soviet defector.

Sorry Yuri. We screwed up. Yuri Nosenko was a legitimate defector who would have been able to provide invaluable assistance to the United States — had we believed him. Instead, we thought he was a fake — a KGB plant. David Murphy (Chief of the Soviet Division of the CIA), Richard Helms (Director of the covert side of the CIA) Lawrence Houston (the CIA’s legal counsel), Nicholas Katzenbach (Deputy U.S. Attorney-General) and Robert F. Kennedy (Attorney General) imprisoned Nosenko.

Sorry Yuro, but you were not a citizen. You were a defector. You had very few legal rights. What we did wasn’t “nice” and it was a huge error, but it should not be a crime. I’m glad it was eventually straightened out.

Assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro.

Assassinating foreign leaders who are opposed to U.S. interests should be the job of the CIA. I know that it isn’t currently legal — but it should be.

Right now, it’s easier for us to go to war and kill hundreds of thousands of underlings than it is for us to whack the one bad seed at the center of a rotting country.

We should kill Castro, and Chavez, and Mugabe, and Kim Jong Il, and probably a dozen other murdering dictators. The world will be a better place without them.

CIA wiretapping in 1963 of two columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, following a newspaper column in which national security information was disclosed.

Technically, domestic wiretapping isn’t the CIA’s job. They should have called the FBI, but we all know how poorly the agencies worked together before the Bush Administrations recent reorganization.

Domestic wiretapping for national security purposes. My heart bleeds for the two columnists who endangered U.S. national security to sell more newspapers. Wait, no it doesn’t. I really don’t care that their privacy was invaded and they didn’t even know about it.

The “personal surveillances” in 1972 of muckraking columnist Jack Anderson and staff members, including Les Whitten and Brit Hume

The CIA followed these guys around. Big deal. I could do the same today, and it wouldn’t even be illegal. I can follow anyone I want. There are people who do this for a living. I’m not even talking about private investigators, I’m talking about paparazzi!

The personal surveillance of Washington Post reporter Mike Getler

Ditto. Reporters usually follow people around. Now they get a taste of their own medicine.

CIA screening programs, beginning in the early 1950s and lasting until 1973, in which mail coming into the United States was reviewed and “in some cases opened” from the Soviet Union and China.

Sorry folks, but international mail from hostile nation-states deserves to be opened. We were involved in a cold war where hundreds of millions of lives were are stake. In that context, no one cares about your personal mail. I’m sure that the CIA didn’t tell your wife that you were cheating on her.

Summary

The majority of these actions by the CIA had the net effect of increasing freedom, not decreasing it. Except for Yuri Nosenko, no one’s freedom was limited by these actions. Again, sorry Yuri.

Freedom is the most precious thing that we have in this life, and these actions by the CIA — overall — helped to preserve the freedom which we now enjoy.

Yes, the CIA could have been less aggressive in its defense of our freedoms, but is that really what we want? Do we want milquetoast defenders of our most important rights. I do not believe so.

As Barry Goldwater stated in 1963, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”