Censored By The CIA

Some of you might remember my little run-in with my contracting employer a few years ago: the CIA. You know, the old "Waterboarding is Torture, and Torture is Wrong" blog post that got me fired. And for the record, I never wanted my job back. So you can stop bitching about that right now.

I bring up this history to illustrate a point. I wrote a book proposal just after "the incident" as my mother calls it, titled "Torture Doesn't Work". No big surprises. I relied on U.S. Civil War history about Andersonville, history from the Battle of Algiers and the Vietnamese War with the French before American involvement in that conflict. No classified sources. No classified information, as I was not old enough to be working for the U.S. Government during those conflicts. What could be safer? What could be more unclassified?

I have always maintained that the most important information is unclassified anyway.

My sources were all in libraries and computer servers. All were public domain history books. All I added was my analysis about how torture was proven to be ineffective in getting information or winning a war. The terror problems we have now started with the torture of Muslim clerics in Egyptian prisons. Torture didn't work for the French, either.

Have you guessed yet? The CIA is still reviewing my book proposal for classified information over four years later. If I went hog-wild and self-published that book, I could go to prison or be made a pauper by malicious prosecution.

When debating this topic amongst your friends, remember this little story. And then tell me that an intelligence review is not also a political review.

Innocent People at Gitmo

He's right. Many people held in Guantanamo Bay as terrorists are not terrorists at all. But don't worry, they were tortured anyway.

The Bush Administration knew this. They didn't care. All that was important to them was stoking the terror unleashed by Osama bin Laden as a smokescreen for their conservative political agenda. That same kind of fear was also used to justify billions of dollars in government contracting in the Cold War. There's a lot of money in terror for government and military contractors. So you need to keep the old ladies scared.

People ask: how could the CIA miss the fall of the Soviet Union? There was considerable economic and political pressure to build it up. Don't underestimate Congress in this. If the CIA had announced that the Soviet Union was not a threat, Congressmen from all over the country would be calling them up in outrage. After all, spending in their districts might have gone down.

We are spending billions and billions of dollars because the military industrial complex is a fear machine.

Conspiracy Requires Cooperation

For all those 9-11 conspiracy fans out there, a conspiracy requires cooperation between the various parties. It is the observance of Econ-Girl that groups accused of conspiring wouldn't cooperate with each other to get off the Titanic, much less to cooperate to more nefarious and complicated ends.

And that's not even including the whole "keep your mouth shut afterwards" which would NEVER happen, even if both sets of people were operating with brain tumors to the extent they cooperated at all.