Know The Enemy of Liberty: the National Rifle Association

[Doc In UPlace]

The issue today isn't defense of the US, it is the US projecting power around the world.

It certainly is a huge issue, though of course not the only one. As Chalmers Johnson observed in his excellent book Blowback, a CIA term describing how covert activities undertaken in foreign countries cause unintended repercussions which the general public can't understand (because, of course, the meddling is done in secret.)

So. The people see what looks like an unprovoked attack on the news, which in many cases is a reaction to the covert activities. It would make perfect sense to the viewers IF the people understood the full story of what had happened. Of course, the corporate media and White House are not going to tell anybody what really happened.

A now-famous attack in Libya was the result of this kind of covert meddling; when the US-supported Libyan mercenaries received word that they were being "let go" and would no longer be receiving any more support (read this as "piles of money") they attacked the CIA station in that town which killed an ambassador and three case officers.

The most revealing aspect of this story is the conspicuous absence of any inquiry into what caused the attack, beyond an argument over the lame cover story leaked by the administration in their attempt to conceal the incident as being what it really was, blowback from covert activities. The entire focus (media and political circus) is on what happened during and after, nary a peep about the root cause. And no one seems to notice.

So many of our current messes would have bee avoided had we just minded our own dang business.

For an excellent overview on this topic, Chalmers Johnson's "The Sorrows Of Empire" is highly recommended.

 

[AMProducts]

One of the things that comes to mind in the vein of blowback, is we have a bad habit of making our would be "allies" dependent on our handouts. Look at afghanistan, the entire government does just enough to make sure pallets of money continue falling on them from the sky.

I've heard of some real success stories the CIA was involved in, but most of the bigger ones... ie afghanistan, libya, syria, iraq were wastes of lives and treasure. I think the best CIA story I heard was during the orange revolution in ukraine. When the opposition was going to come in and break the riots with union workers from the east, the CIA delivered pallets of vodka to the train stations, with a sign that said "free for our union brothers". They got so stinking drunk, the violence they had planned never happened.