I think that I posted this a couple of years ago over on pen-l, but what the heck. Here it is again.
Back in the mid-1980s some very right wing adviser to then-President Reagan came to our campus (James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia) and gave a truly revolting speech about how awful it was of the western Europeans to be cutting deals for natural gas from the then-USSR. I noted the hypocrisy of this whining, given the administration's pushing of grain exports to them.
But that is not what this is about. In the course of this guy's talk it came out that he had once been some kind of adviser or flunky for Joe McCarthy during the bad old days, a position of which he was quite proud. Anyway, he proceeded to declare that the CIA was full of "comsymps", and that McCarthy and his crew had wanted to do to the CIA lefties what they had done to the State Dept. lefties. But they could not get at them because of all their hush hush security situations blah blah. I thought that this was a rather curious take on the whole business. Barkley Rosser On Mon, 23 Nov 1998 15:39:02 -0500 "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Hi, Jim Baird:
>
> The times, they haven't changed that much.
>
> Turner is running for President and the baby boomers' anti-establishment
> votes are important. That should shed some light.
> Secondly, this is part of CNN's revisit of the Cold War. Revisionist news
> documentaries are good entertainment that lifts ratings.
> Thirdly, this is part of a campaign to sell the "new, improved" CIA as an
> indispensable agency for the new wars on drugs and international terrorism.
> We don't need dirty tricks any more because now we can kill bad foreign
> leader openly with cruise missiles.
> As you pointed out, former CIA agents are a major part of this movement,
> both out of a need to clear the company name and to contribute the its
> rebirth.
> The irony is that the new CIA's biggest enemy is the new FBI, over a new
> turf war created by blurred national borders in relation to these new wars.
> Problems are no longer divisible into domestic and foreign.
> As for as the Left is concerned, the CIA is much more intelligent (no pun
> intended) and even honorable than the FBI, a good cop bad cop arrangement.
> The analytical section of the CIA is much admired throughout its history,
> even by its opponents. It was the first to promote anti Vietnam War
> arguments with reliable intelligence and data, which the State Dept. was
> unable to do after it was decimated by McCarthyt.
> It appeared that the "company" had a technical professional section which
> was the envy of all other governments.
> And then there was a political, ideological section was uniformly detested.
> This split personality is not unique to the CIA, but rather common with all
> intelligent agencies.
> There is also the continuing saga of the feud between the Kennedy clan and
> the CIA, since the U-2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, that now takes
> the shape of a contest of sensational expose on each other. Turner is a
> confessed admirer of JFK and he is angling for the support of the Kennedy
> clan which will not have a presidential candidate for some time to come..
>
> The CIA now is hiring a lot of economists, including Marxist economists,
> both directly, through placement in think tanks and in the corporate world,
> and planting moles in foreign multinationals and even foreign central banks
> because there is a high stake struggle shaping up in restructuring the new
> global economic order.
>
> The advantage of conspiracy theory is that it hards to disprove it.
>
> Henry C.K. Liu
>
>
>
> James Baird wrote:
>
> > I was channel surfing last night (Sunday) and came across a couple of
> > specials on TBS. The first was called "Inside the CIA" (or something -
> > I may be misremembering the title), the second "Mind control". They
> > really didn't tell me much that I didn't already know, but I was
> > astonished (make that flabbergasted) that they were showing this stuff
> > on commercial TV. (A Turner network, no less!)
> >
> > The first, "Inside the CIA" was a series of "case histories" of former
> > CIA agents who quit and now work against the agency. They went into
> > details about training torturers, overthrowing governments, killing
> > children in Cuba, all the "dirty tricks". And all this with a
> > refreshing lack of "balance": no hemming and hawing about how we were,
> > of course, fighting the good fight, we just went a little overboard,
> > etc. The producers of this show weren't accepting any excuses. I
> > nearly fell off my chair when one the operatives explained, "The CIA
> > isn't really an intelligence agency - its more of a terrorist
> > organization".
> >
> > The second show was a history of MK-Ultra, the CIA mind-control
> > experiments. Now this did tell me some things I didn't know: I knew
> > that CIA gave various kinds of psychoactive drugs to unknowing
> > participants, but I didn't know about the more brutal experiments - like
> > the electro shock therapy to see if it was possible to completly
> > obliterate a person's memory (apparently, it is). Again, all this on
> > commercial TV!
> >
> > The times, they are a changin'...
> >
> > Jim Baird
> >
> > ______________________________________________________
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>
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu