Robert Parry, Consortium News, April 8, 2008
When future historians look back at the sharp decline of the United States in the early 21st Century, they might identify the Achilles heel of this seemingly omnipotent nation as its lost ability to recognize reality and to fashion policies to face the real world.
Like the legendary Greek warrior – whose sea-nymph mother dipped him in protective waters except for his heel – the United States was blessed with institutional safeguards devised by wise Founders who translated lessons from the Age of Reason into a brilliant constitutional framework of checks and balances.
What the Founders did not anticipate, however, was how fragile truth could become in a modern age of excessive government secrecy, hired-gun public relations and big-money media. Sophisticated manipulation of information is what would do the Republic in.
That is the crucial lesson for understanding the arc of U.S. history over the past three decades. It is a central theme of a new book by former CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.
As a senior Kremlinologist in the CIA’s office of Soviet analysis, Goodman was on the front lines of the information war in the early 1980s when ideological right-wingers took control of the U.S. government under Ronald Reagan and began to gut the key institutions for assessing reality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/***Team_B
Remove the asterisks to follow the l*nk above
cut and paste into the browser window sans asterisks.
Basically the GOP wanted Tip Oneils congress to raise defense spending and help out their buddies in the aerospace/defense industries
with lucrative no-bid contracts just like the ones we have today,but the CIA analysts would not play ball and do as they were told.
Team B for those not familiar with the circumstances of the times was an alternative to
accurate unbiased intel. i/e they lied to congress and the American People.
Sound familiar?
Comment by Rainlander — April 10, 2008 @ 12:53 am