We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Saturday, July 21, 2012

The Terrifying Background of the Man Who Ran a CIA Assassination Unit

Click here to access article by Conor Friedersdorf from The Atlantic.

The author uncovers evidence that the CIA and President Bush Jr. secretly set up and authorized private assassination teams to serve their policies in order to shield them from any accountability. 

This reads like an exposé, but in fact it is old news--at least 50 years old. The CIA has a long history of outsourcing assassination to organized crime and criminal elements beginning, as far as we know, with hundreds of assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. This latter target furnished years of training in assassination techniques under the control of the CIA in collaboration with criminal organizations which were ultimately used against President J.F. Kennedy. Following this success secret government agencies went on to use similar methods to dispatch Malcolm X, ML King, Robert Kennedy, and other lessor known people. See this, this, this, and this.) US secret agencies rarely, if ever, use official members of their own agencies to assassinate people. Although one might dispute that given that the president is getting in on this action with his Tuesday morning sessions assigning people to a kill list for drone attacks.