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There is no organization on Earth that I abhor more than the Central Intelligence Agency, with the possible exception of Congress. The CIA’s criminal trail [ [link removed] ] has encompassed coups d’etat and assassinations by the dozens, and a torture policy [ [link removed] ] that enabled murder and rape [ [link removed] ] for which no one was ever held accountable.
Now, the entire CIA is reportedly getting purged [ [link removed] ]—by an incoming president whose own history is replete with criminal offenses, fraud, sexual coercion, and every manner of mendacity and tackiness imaginable.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day [ [link removed] ]!
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Out of the frying pan, into the fire?
Trump’s outrageous announcement that he plans to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East [ [link removed] ]” suggests that whoever he finds to staff the soon-to-be-reconstituted CIA will likely be only worse than the criminals who preceded them.
When Trump first came to the White House in 2017, one of his first official speeches [ [link removed] ] was at the CIA headquarters, where he pledged to turn the Agency loose:
The old expression, “to the victor belong the spoils” -- you remember. I always used to say, keep the oil. I wasn’t a fan of Iraq. I didn’t want to go into Iraq. But I will tell you, when we were in, we got out wrong. And I always said, in addition to that, keep the oil….
I believe that this group is going to be one of the most important groups in this country toward making us safe, toward making us winners again, toward ending all of the problems….I can only say that I am with you 1,000 percent.
And the reason you’re my first stop is that, as you know, I have a running war with the media. They are among the most dishonest human beings on Earth. (Laughter and applause.) And they sort of made it sound like I had a feud with the intelligence community. And I just want to let you know, the reason you’re the number-one stop is exactly the opposite -- exactly.
Given Trump’s sensibilities in that speech, or his manic aspirations to annex Greenland and Panama, there is no reason to think that whoever replaces the current batch of CIA criminals is likely to be any better.
When time moves backward
We are living through the retrogression of history, and the abandonment of international human rights outright by the country that once pioneered their development.
As I’ve written before [ [link removed] ], Trump‘s belligerence and mendacity represent not so much a change from the previous baseline, so much as a revelation [ [link removed] ] of a pattern that too many observers—particularly gullible journalists and complicit policymakers—have indulged for the last three generations.
Might makes right. That principle defined the era of colonialism, as well as the genocide [ [link removed] ] that created the United States. It continues to define the era of American exceptionalism.
Gaza may have weathered the storm of the Israeli genocide, only to now confront an even more overwhelming force in Washington under Trump’s so-called leadership. The possibility of coerced expulsion at the hands of America’s military is a terrifying possibility—and nothing is poised to stop it (or whatever will come next), unless [ [link removed] ] the labor movement rediscovers the meaning of solidarity and the capacity to demonstrate it.
Forced expulsion is an international human rights violation, and also a defining element of genocide—of which the U.S. has long been guilty [ [link removed] ]. While the repetition of those gruesome crimes offers a dangerous omen for the future, I find no small measure of solace knowing that at least the last batch of war criminals at the CIA will observe that future without a chance to influence it any further.
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