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Read other letters about this article
Once again kudos to Glenn Greenwald. You are tenacious.
There is a very telling quotation Glenn provides early on in his post, that says a lot about the mentality of the "insiders."
I'm wondering what these CIA insiders think the job is? The beginning of the response to that question by one of the insiders is very telling. Beats me,” said a well-wired former senior intelligence official. “Brennan’s hands were not very dirty at all. . . "
I am wondering what it means, in the dirty hands business, to have not very dirty hands. Since the very inception of the CIA the agency has been corrupt, dirty. The "romance" of the agency is that it does the dirty work that the rest of us need done, but that we are too squeamish to admit. And then we throw up our hands when assassination, subversion of government, torture, illegal harassment and wiretapping, and the whole panoply of extra-intelligence illegal and unethical activity is uncovered. We who insist on rule of law. I hope that the job becomes to end these hideous practices that are done in our name. But I tend to doubt that is what they are asking.
I recall when Clinton, at the beginning of his second term, floated Tony Lake for DCI. Suddenly, Lake's name was dragged through the mud over personal matters. His real sin? He was an old skeptic of the CIA.
