Monday, July 27, 2009

Hooray for Quixote Holt

After years of examining CIA operations of dubious legality, an important member of the House intelligence committee is exploring an option that many in the intelligence community view with apprehension: a comprehensive investigation of all intelligence-community operations over years and perhaps even decades.

[...]

Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), a progressive who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and chairs a special oversight panel that helps write the intelligence budget, has been increasingly comfortable talking about a new “Church committee.”

[...]

“I’d like to see something on the scope of the Church committee,” Holt told TWI in a Friday phone interview. The congressman said that it had been a “few decades” since Congress took a comprehensive inquiry into the intelligence community’s impact on “the relationship between the individual and her or his government, as well as the role that the U.S. plays in other countries around the world, outside of declared military activities.”

[...]

“An awful lot of people have not really thought about how many unanswered questions there are or unresolved issues there are out there about how we do intelligence in the United States.”

  Washington Independent

Nor do they want to.

I’m with you, Holt. Actually, I'm surprised a progressive politician still has a seat.

I don’t think enough of our fellow citizens would find illegal or immoral CIA activity a problem, nor get too exercised about either our government’s relation to us or the rest of the world, like we did in the 70’s.

I think it’s more likely in today’s climate that you are risking being the first one hauled up to answer to a committee more like one we had in the 50’s: the House UnAmerican Activities committee.


....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.


5 comments:

  1. I think Representative Holt might want to be careful about getting on airplanes for awhile.

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  2. Oh, and welcome back. Just noticed you'd returned. Can't keep away from it, eh?

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  3. i've been at it for a while, but not to the extent i used to before i went to mexico. honestly, i have become too jaded to even get excited about any of it. now it's just notes to track the decline.

    cheers. and welcome back, yourself.

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  4. I'm jaded as well, but desperately hoping to simply become numb, so that I can just go back to enjoying life in ignorant bliss.

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  5. i can look at my posts from a few years ago and not even recognize them. soon i'll be totally consumed with bodily aches and pains and only be thinking about what to eat next. i find that the more years i get behind me, the less i am able to retain, and the less time i am able to hold on to any one particular mental state. so i think your success at blissful ignorance probably depends in large part upon your age. brain death has its blessings. in the meantime, thanks for the messages.

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