They're all unsavory
In 1995, because of popular disgust with massacres carried
out by U.S. "assets" in Central America, Congress put some
legal restraints on the use of thugs and murderers by the
intelligence community. Now the U.S. government wants to again
openly embrace a foreign policy of dirty tricks.
Since Sept. 11, the knives have been unsheathed. Vice
President Dick Cheney said: "You have to have on payroll some
very unsavory characters. This is a mean, nasty, dangerous,
dirty business. We have to operate in that arena."
John Negroponte is just the first of the unsavory characters
the Bush administration is officially putting on payroll.
Pressure to openly use criminal elements in the CIA has been
building for some time. In 1998 at the Hoover Institute, a
conservative think tank connected to Stanford University,
former National Intelligence Council Chair John C. Gannon said,
"I think when our nation's interests are involved we also need
to take risks and deal with unsavory people."
Last Oct. 19, the Christian Science Monitor reported that in
recent years the CIA had been unhappy that it was not free to
hire whomever it wished. "Analysts complain that efforts have
been hampered by a 1995 CIA directive that prevents agents from
using informants who have been involved in human rights
abuses--a condition that could apply to almost any informant
within a terrorist ring."
The Monitor continued, quoting Mike Wermuth, a terrorism
expert at the Rand Corp. in Washington, "We've tended to
hamstring ourselves ... by preventing [the use of] unsavory
characters as insiders to infiltrate foreign terrorism
organizations."
Even with restraining legislation in place, U.S. officials
have operated in cahoots with criminals in the Balkans,
Colombia, Afghanistan and elsewhere. They've been dealing with
gangs conducting assassination, rape, drug trafficking and sex
slavery for a long time.
If Cheney has his way, Negroponte won't have to hide his
work with the thieves, murderers, drug smugglers, rapists and
arsonists with whom he worked in the past.
--Heather Cottin
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