WHO REALLY RUNS THE SHOW?

 

• Years ago I read a book by former CIA agent Miles Copeland who had "retired" and gone to work for oil corporations as their Middle East operative.  He essentially carried on the same covert ops that he had done for the CIA but was working for private interests.  He described, with great pride, how often the local CIA offices in various oil rich nations were the last to know about his activities.  The privatization of foreign and military policy.  A very dangerous but real trend. How can we claim to be a democracy when corporations are running their own spy teams and increasingly corporate mercenaries are hired to carry out various military operations?  In the end the taxpayers are paying in more ways than one can imagine.
• In his book The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's original political operative, Miles Copeland shares many hair raising stories.  Here is one that stands out:  "Naturally, we had some trouble in getting clearance for projects involving the use of Nazis and ex-Nazi, but our difficulties disappeared when our friends in Israel's Mossad admitted that they, too, were using ex-Nazis for a number of nefarious purposes, and for the same reasons that they were attractive to us."
• The Washington Post reported last December that, "Two of the Americans killed in Benghazi [Libya] were members of the CIA’s Global Response Staff, an innocuously named organization that has recruited hundreds of former U.S. Special Forces operatives to serve as armed guards for the agency’s spies....The security apparatus relies heavily on contractors who are drawn by relatively high pay and flexible schedules that give them several months off each year....who often earn $140,000 or more a year and typically serve 90- or 120-day assignments abroad." 
• Active duty service members committed suicide during 2012 at a record pace: more than 349 took their own lives across the four branches, or one every 25 hours, a Department of Defense spokesperson recently confirmed.  One of the darkest undercurrents of the glaring statistics is that one suicide in a family boosts future suicide risks for everyone else inside the home. They can be contagious.