The Washington Post “revealed” today, as their headline read: ‘Eyewash’: How the CIA deceives its own workforce about operations. This would not come as news to anyone who pays attention to CIA pronouncements and reads Antiwar.com or Consortiumnews.com. But it begs the question of why the Post limited their article to the CIA and did not mention the many other so-called “national security” agencies who routinely engage in “eyewashing” with their every pronouncement? “Common sense” should tell us that the CIA isn’t the only national security agency which engages in deception, either of their own workforce, their Congressional “watchdogs,” or of the public.
“Eyewashing” agencies include the DOD and its subordinate branches of the military, particularly the NSA and the Special Operations Commands, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the many other agencies, known and perhaps unknown, engaged in “protecting” the U.S. But the greater blame for failing to keep the public informed so they can, hopefully, override disastrous and self-damaging policies cooked up in the hothouses of national security agencies might better be placed upon the journalists, lawyers, etc. who were intended by the framers to form a part of the system of checks and balances as obstacles to policies pursued by incompetent, negligent, derelict, and/or odious officials.
So I would suggest a better model than the obsequious commentators and “experts” of today who fawn over “national security” officials of whatever administration and further disseminate their lies would be the deceased journalist Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson wrote the only insightful analyses of the 1972 Presidential campaign, as published in Fear and Loathing On the Campaign Trail ’72. McGovern’s campaign manager would later note, the book represented “the least factual, most accurate account” of the election. It is required reading for anyone paying attention to American politics today, with the proviso that anything Thompson wrote then, must be amplified at least 100-fold with political changes since that time.