"ruthless and lawless" compared to their counterparts elsewhere in the world
Sorry, meaning MI5 elsewhere, not the others you mention, who, you are quite right, have zero regard for human life. Wright was shocked at the US intel regime from Bill Donavan onward during its post-war ascendancy, acceptance of the use of torture and what LBJ later called a "Murder Inc." political strategy, as well as the involvement in domestic politics, a violation in both Britain and the US. It's only gotten more entrenched, with people like Reich and Armitage (who was renown in Vietnam for how much he actually enjoyed killing)
Z.B.'s "Grand Chessboard" disregards the goal of preserving human life, emphasizing only on ascendancy, with the groundrules that are blatantly unconstitutional: no accountability and permanent secrecy from the American people.
Re: your comment on secrets and confirming published speculation -- certainly is is very difficult keeping anything secret, and certainly there are secrets to be kept, especially in technical weapons development. I can agree on that score, and on protecting intel assets. But the millions of pages FOIA releases show CYA rather than need-to-know.
However the biggest danger to civilization, outside of Big Brother fascism now emerging from Washington, is IMO what Bill Joy referred to in "The Future Doesn't Need Us" a couple years ago -- technology creates the ability for smaller numbers of people to do greater damage to the world. His solution is to clamp down on technology. I asked him at a lecture if it weren't better to see technology as irreversible, and to go top-speed towards countermeasures for this century's greatest technological dangers. His response was, "no, but go for it, contact the DOD, they are funding these efforts".
FWIW, that's my intention for the rest of this decade, as a semi-retired tech/financial type, while vigorously protesting political reversals of the Bush cabal type, to work w/in the system to see where the most good can be done to develop countermeasures. There's a long discussion on that, but I'm getting a bit OT here... |
