Commentary
Back in January 2017, in his alacrity to undermine then-President-elect Donald Trump, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) may have inadvertently told us everything we need to know about the CIA.
Mr. Schumer was responding to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow criticizing President-elect Trump for questioning—100 percent correctly, as it turned out—the emerging Russiagate narrative.
“You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” the senator said. “So even for a practical supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this.”
Either that or doing a public service for the citizens of this country.
Since 2017, we have become increasingly aware of the CIA sticking its nose into practically everything from health care to the private lives of Americans in a manner that is more than arguably illegal.
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Mr. Schumer was underestimating in saying they have “six ways from Sunday” to accomplish their goals. It’s more like six hundred, six thousand, or even sixty thousand, considering the number of cutouts: NGOs; tech, defense, and media companies big and small; educational institutions; and so forth, working with them or being funded by them that the agency employs to manipulate society for its own aims behind the scenes.
Those are aims, it should go without saying, that may have little to do with yours or mine, but much to do with theirs, meaning that their own power and expansion, not to mention their own vision of how the world should be, largely, at this point, decided internally by them.
This makes the intelligence agency, in essence, the Deep State beyond the Deep State. We might call them the Deeper or Deepest State.
Revelations From Insiders Shine Light on CIA
Two recent truth-tellers have stepped forward to explain how this works.One is Mike Benz, founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online. He is, according to his website, “a former State Department official with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.”
He explicated at length the depths of early CIA involvement (and massive expenditure) in Ukraine, including links to the Bidens and various dubious financial connections, in a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Feb. 26 well worth watching titled “How you knew the CIA was in Ukraine (without needing today’s NYT article).”
This detailed—and disturbing—analysis is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg compared to what is on offer from two recent interviews of Mr. Benz, one a two-parter here at The Epoch Times by Jan Jekielek of “American Thought Leaders” and one by Tucker Carlson.
Both are also more than worth your time if you are interested in how our world really works, the one that almost all of us are unable to effectuate, even in a democracy.
But an equally if not more disturbing analysis of the CIA comes to us in a brilliantly written, truly riveting recent (Feb. 25) article on Tablet, “My Mother’s Secret” by Justine El-Khazen. It begins:
“My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.
“We were watching footage of hostages being paraded around Gaza when she said it. ‘I worry about them,’ she murmured, her eyes fixed on the TV. ‘It’s too dangerous a religion,’ she told me. ‘I don’t want that target on their backs.’ I couldn’t tell what she was asking of me: Did she want me to skip the few traditions my family has held onto? Hanukkah candles and meager Seders? Or was she saying I shouldn’t tell my kids that they were Jewish at all? I didn’t ask. I was too afraid of what she would say.
“‘I told Dad I didn’t want to raise you Jewish,’ she said a few days later. The Gaza war had begun in earnest by then. Moonscapes of leveled buildings and dust: images of military prowess that colored her view and, until Oct. 7, my perception of Israel. ‘He wanted to, but I was afraid of what might happen to you if you identified that way.’”
The mother mentioned here as working for the CIA was no mere employee but something of a superstar in the agency, the author tells us later in her article, a second-generation CIA analyst with an aunt in the OSS (World War II intelligence) and “also the model for the blond bombshell in the pulp thriller ‘The Fifth Horseman.’”
It’s not altogether surprising then that Ms. El-Khazen had access to a number of CIA officials as high as former Director John Brennan as she went about trying to ascertain their true feelings about the Palestinian–Israeli conflict.
The results are appallingly in favor of the Palestinian side.
Not only that, the rising anti-Semitism in the world that her dying mother so feared is uniformly ascribed by these supposedly knowing CIA-types virtually exclusively to right-wing extremism, to President Trump and company.
You don’t even have to know much of what’s going on at Harvard and elsewhere in our culture, such as the almost daily “river to the sea” demonstrations on the streets of our cities, to realize how absurd that view is.
You only have to look around you.
And yet that is the unquestioned opinion in our CIA, as demonstrated in several interviews by Ms. El-Khazen. Even psychotic rapes and baby burnings are rationalized in some instances as justifiable, almost normal, expressions of political protest.
Whether this blindness is deliberate is unclear, but what is clear is that many in the agency have lost their moral compass.
The amount of money we paid for this kind of analysis, and the policies that may ensue, was a stupendous $71.7 billion in 2023, a number that is the reverse of the cliché that you get what you pay for.
The CIA began in 1947 as a seemingly rational response to rising Soviet power. Over the years, however, like so many unchecked bureaucracies, it has metastasized into something completely different. Time to dismantle it.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
