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.
Thompson would claim that President Richard Nixon represented "that dark, venal, and incurably violent side of the American character." His obituary for Nixon in 1994 captured Nixon’s political character precisely, as can be seen here.
Yet in 2004, Thompson would write: "Nixon was a professional politician, and I despised everything he stood for-but if he were running for president this year against the evil Bush-Cheney gang, I would happily vote for him." With the spirit of the "evil Bush-Cheney gang" totally internalized now within the Republican party as a whole (and Liz Cheney reentering electoral politics), as well as Hillary Clinton representing the same in the Democratic party, Thompson’s mode of political analysis is needed in 2016 more than ever.
That mode of analysis was summarized by Douglas Brinkley, one of Thompson’s editors, in a tribute published in Rolling Stone in 2005 after Thompson’s death. Brinkley explained: "His take on everything was always the exact opposite of conventional wisdom. It was what he called his 180-degree philosophy. Whatever a U.S. politician or media maven publicly pronounced, the truth, he believed, was 100 percent in the other direction. While not a contrarian, Hunter definitely saw the downside of any cherished plan or organized thought. "It’s never as it seems, Bubba," he used to say. Facts were, to his mind, always weirder than fiction."
Therein lies Thompson’s genius and the genius of what our Constitution was intended to protect, especially during this Orwellian "perpetual war" celebrated by our government officials and militarists of both left and right.
Todd E. Pierce, Major, Judge Advocate, US Army (Ret.), served as Defense Counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions, from June 2008 to November 2012. He was on defense teams representing three prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He continues to serve as co-counsel on the appeal of a 2008 Military Commission’s conviction of a Guantanamo prisoner, in which two of three convictions have been vacated for not constituting "war crimes" subject to trial by military commission under the U.S. Constitution. He writes on legal issues related to Guantanamo, military commissions, and the constitutional “legal revolution" taking place in the U.S. under the influence of a militarist ideology and is a co-founder of the Project for the Study of American Militarism. His articles are available at Antiwar.com, Consortiumnews.com, and Mondoweiss.net.