Posted on 02/06/2008 3:48:28 PM PST by Richard Poe
| by Richard Lawrence Poe Tuesday, February 5, 2008 |
Permanent Link Past Columns |
IN LAST week's column, I examined the strange case of celebrity blogger Markos "Kos" Moulitsas, founder of the Democrat mega-blog DailyKos. He claims that he spent six months interviewing with the CIA, then turned down the job so he could campaign for Howard Dean. Nonetheless, Kos speaks in glowing terms of the Central Intelligence Agency.
In a radio interview with Gregory Dalton of the Commonwealth Club of California, Kos said of his CIA interviewers:
“Every single one of them was liberal… people who want to make the world a better place… people who are internationalist… That was an eye-opening experience for me.”Kos added, "I’ve never had a problem with the CIA, and... I’d have no problem working for them."
Many leftists savaged Kos for these remarks, saying he had exposed himself as a closet conservative. Kos "is not a 'liberal' and he is not a 'progressive'", charges Francis L. Holland, a disaffected "Kossack" who runs the Truth-about-Kos Web site. Radical scribe Kurt Nimmo denounced Kos as an instrument of the "CIA-engineered controlled opposition", tasked with reducing "the 'progressive' Democrat opposition" to the war in Iraq to "an empty and absurd rhetorical slogan".
It could be argued that Kos exhibits a more sophisticated grasp of intelligence matters than his radical critics. Washington insider and high-level Democrat operative that he is, Kos knows things that scruffy street radicals of Kurt Nimmo's ilk cannot. Kos knows, for instance, that the CIA favors leftwing Democrats, sharing their vision for global governance and democratic socialism.
Since its inception in 1947, the CIA has always leaned left.
British statesman Ernest Bevin declared in 1948, “We cannot hope successfully to repel Communism only by disparaging it… We must put forward a rival ideology to Communism.” What sort of ideology would it be?
Most western economists in the 1940s hailed “democratic socialism” as the wave of the future. Their enthusiasm for socialism prompted conservative economist Joseph A. Schumpeter to lament in 1942, “Can capitalism survive? No. I do not think it can.”
The CIA’s founders agreed. They concluded that America could best fight Soviet influence by offering a superior form of socialism — that is, by creating leftwing movements with a pro-American orientation. “We all felt that democratic socialism was the most effective bulwark against totalitarianism”, explains Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., a former analyst in the wartime Office of Strategic Services who helped launch the CIA.
Thus the CIA set out to recruit members of the “Non-Communist Left” or “NCL” — that is, socialists who opposed Soviet communism and sided with America in the Cold War.
The Agency became a mecca for leftists. “You'll find more liberal intellectuals per square inch at CIA than anywhere else in the Government,” exclaimed one State Department official in the mid-1960s. In his book Never Stop Running, Duke University historian William Chafe writes, “Especially in the 1940s and 1950s, the CIA provided a welcome refuge [from McCarthyism] for progressive, social democratic forces.”
Many NCL operatives in the CIA hated conservatives as much as communists. “The most dangerous thing we can do… is to leave the task of exposing Communist fronts to reactionaries,” warned socialist philosopher and CIA propagandist Sidney Hook in 1949. Fighting communism was too delicate a task to be entrusted to “paranoid” conservatives, NCLs argued.
Frank Wisner led the NCL faction. While heading the CIA’s covert operations division from 1948 to 1956, Wisner recruited hundreds of U.S. journalists at virtually every major newspaper and broadcast network in America. He boasted that he could play the media like a Wurlitzer pipe organ.
Irked by “Wisner’s gang of weirdos”, as he called them, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover slipped Senator Joseph McCarthy some damaging dossiers on Wisner’s people in 1953. Some "weirdos" were fired. But Wisner’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” struck back, unleashing a barrage of anti-McCarthy smears through friendly media.
“As far as most of us were concerned, McCarthy was the domestic enemy,” remarked Wisner protegé Richard Bissell.
National Review co-founder James Burnham — himself a disillusioned NCL recruit — pronounced the program a failure in 1967. “The NCL is not reliable,” he wrote. “A large part of the organizations and individuals nurtured by CIA under the NCL prescription end up undermining the nation’s will and hampering or sabotaging the nation’s security.”
Burnham’s warning came too late. NCL networks had dug in deep, forming a shadow CIA within the CIA, complete with independent funding. Dislodging them would no longer be easy or certain. Indeed, some say they infest the Agency to this day.
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Richard Lawrence Poe is a contributing editor to Newsmax, an award-winning journalist and a New York Times bestselling author. His latest book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Siezed Control of the Democratic Party, co-written with David Horowitz. |
So when anyone claims the U.S. is a “democaracy”, is it code for democratic socialism?
that’s “democracy”
More proof the CIA should be abolished and a new agency started...secretly if possible. It’s not an intelligence agency: there’s practically no feet on the ground, an over-reliance on satellites and info from foreign intelligence sources, and it’s full of State Dept-type morons.
I have regular conversations with a retired CIA operative who worked in the Reagan administration. His take is that the CIA is a communist front supporting radical leftist agendas world wide. The consistent failure of the CIA to undermine the activities of leftist tyrants is symptomatic. They are, however, profoundly effective at subverting budding democracies that are based on constitutional law.
BTW. the term “liberal intellectual” is an oxymoron.
The real Clinton Legacy...
If the CIA really wanted this clown, sorta proves they’re not exactly a cadre of MENSA members.
So this is why Nixon considered the CIA worthless.
It's easy to spell?
“So when anyone claims the U.S. is a ‘democaracy’, is it code for democratic socialism?”
The United States is not a democracy; rather, it is a constitutional republic. At, least, it is now. It will likely cease to be once the Dims march to a landslide victory in November.
“So this is why Nixon considered the CIA worthless.”
So did JFK. In fact, he wanted to dissolve it.
So did JFK. In fact, he wanted to dissolve it.
FYI
>“So this is why Nixon considered the CIA worthless.”
So did JFK. In fact, he wanted to dissolve it.<
I’ve always advocated NOT the dismantling of the CIA but the “weeding out” of traitors in the organization.
I have a family member in the FBI and most of the guys he knows are ex-Marines and ex military guys. When one time he asked why they joined the FBI instead of the CIA, the resounding answer was “they’re (CIA) all a bunch of lefty commie a**holes”.
read later
If you know what SAD is made up of, you are also likely offending the ex-SOF who joined SAD. Are our troops full of commies?
SAD is a totally separate team from the CIA. Just like ABC is full of lefties...ABC radio is right wing from top to bottom based on a friend of mine who works for Disney.
If you do your research on WHERE the FBI counterterrorism squad works..which is everywhere in the world (even in the jungles of the Philippines hunting Al qaeda’s wing: Abu sayyaf), they pretty much do the hunt and kill duties of SAD.
If you believe that any of the facts I have presented are false, please present your evidence.
As for Bill Clinton, it may or may not be true that some people in the CIA opposed his China policy. I don't know about that. However, the people who mattered at the CIA -- the decisionmakers -- most definitely supported Clinton's policy and actively assisted him in carrying it out.
Here's an excerpt from a 1999 column I wrote titled "Chinagate: The Third-Way Scandal":
"According to The Year of the Rat by Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett, the top contributors to the 1992 Clinton campaign were Chinese agents. In 1996, the leading Clinton donors were U.S. defense contractors doing business with Chinese missile manufacturers.
"Where was the CIA in all this? Right in the thick of it. According to the Cox Report, Congressional investigators sought the CIA’s help in probing Hughes Electronics for leaking missile technology to the Chinese.
"But instead of helping, the CIA tipped off Hughes about the probe. It revealed the names of employees slated to be interviewed and told the company what questions they would likely be asked.
"On another occasion, a CIA scientist named Ronald Pandolfi raised the alarm that Hughes might be leaking missile secrets. The CIA killed his report, according to The New York Times (December 7, 1998)."
>>”Why Liberals Love the CIA”
That was funny.
Being serious for a moment...
1. Many of the things the CIA does are not public and when they become public their activities are rarely popular with liberals.
2. The CIA budget has been far eclipsed by the Defense Intelligence agencies. If we are going to examine how Intelligence is doing and who runs it, we need to consider those agencies who get all the money these days.
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