America's gulag

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Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:55:31 -0700 (PDT)

America's gulag

 

 

 

 

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_725.shtml

 

America's gulag

By John Chuckman

Online Journal Contributing Writer

 

 

Apr 24, 2006, 01:43

 

 

Often small things provide the most disturbing evidence for

world-changing events, as when naturalists observe the quiet

disappearance of some little known species. The CIA's firing of senior

officer Mary O. McCarthy is a political event of just this nature.

 

Ordinarily, the firing of some middling CIA officer is not an event to

interest many, other than John Le Carre fans and those who linger over

cappuccino at the CIA's Langely cafeteria. Not just conservative

throwbacks recognize the need for secrecy in many intelligence matters.

 

Ordinarily, the fact that some CIA agent has broken his or her oath of

secrecy would not cause much disturbance outside the unhinged James

Angleton types who make up some portion of any intelligence community.

Surely, out of tens of thousands of employees, this is something that

happens with regularity.

 

But Ms. McCarthy's case is different, and it is of interest to the

world. She is responsible, reportedly by her own admission during a

furious round of polygraph tests, for information supplied to The

Washington Post concerning the CIA's vast secret prison system.

 

This CIA-run gulag, and there is no name more fitting, does not

resemble the case of a new secret weapon or of a mole planted

somewhere abroad. The existence of a secret gulag goes to the heart of

democratic values.

 

Is the population of any democratic country not entitled to be

informed of so vast and creepy an enterprise? To exercise their

franchise based on facts? At some point, any secret operation, if it

becomes large enough and affects the lives of tens of thousands, risks

undermining the very legitimacy of the government running it.

 

The reputation of the United States abroad has suffered perhaps

irreparable damage from the excesses and stupidities of Bush's War on

Terror. So much so that Americans are now advised by their own State

Department to guard their behavior and even identity when traveling

abroad. Are Americans not entitled to be informed of what has caused

this? Of what has been done in their name?

 

If you can keep tens of thousands secretly locked away and subject to

torture, what prevents this number from becoming millions? Where are

the limits without public information? The inherent integrity of

American government officials, you say? Three-quarters of the world's

people today would laugh caustically at the suggestion.

 

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