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When President Bill Clinton ran into trouble with his last nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Henry Foster, he eventually gave up, and as nearly as I can tell, America has functioned perfectly well without a surgeon general's office.
This time around, he ran into trouble with his nomination of Anthony Lake to run the Central Intelligence Agency. Lake withdrew, and sounded rather disgusted with the senate confirmation process.
Unfortunately, our President displayed his usual amount of backbone -- none -- and went to work finding another nominee who might please Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and the other statesmen the Republican party has favored us with.
If Clinton had only been a little braver a couple of
weeks ago, he would have said You know, the CIA was
established after World War II, at the start of the Cold
War, to counter expansion by the Soviet Union. Well, the
Soviet Union no longer exists. The Cold War is over, and we
won. It's time to demobilize, so I'm abolishing the
CIA.
He could cite a lot of good reasons. For starters, the
CIA's budget is secret. But the U.S. Constitution, which he
and Congress swear oaths to uphold, provides that a
regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and
Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from
time to time.
The CIA gave us a bad reputation in the world when it removed popular leaders and installed American puppets, as with Guatemala in 1954, when the CIA replaced Jacobo Arbenz Guzman with Carlos Castillo Armas. And restoring the shah in Iran in 1953.
And now there's all this whining about foreign campaign donations, which sounds rather hypocritical when we've got a CIA that installs governments in foreign countries.
The CIA doesn't seem especially good at intelligence either. It missed an obvious mole in its own ranks, Aldrich Ames, a fellow living well above his legitimate income. It never predicted Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Nor did it predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead, it provided glowing estimates of Soviet power -- for sound bureaucratic regions. The bigger the enemy, the more resources needed to fight it, and the bigger the budget for the CIA.
There's also the CIA's heroin business in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War and the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Even without the CIA, the U.S. would hardly be blind -- there's the even-more-secret National Security Agency, which measures its computers by the acre and apparently snoops on electronic transmissions, and the clandestine National Reconnaissance Office, which operates spy satellites and analyzes their observations. Each branch of the military has its own intelligence agency, along with a Defense Intelligence Agency.
The CIA clearly isn't needed any more, if it ever was, and Clinton should just push to abolish it, and call on the Republican budget-cutters to join him in eliminating a useless federal agency.
Of course, even if he did so, Congress would balk.
There's not enough money in Washington to feed hungry
children, but Congress can always find enough money to
support a useless intelligence
bureaucracy.
So, to be practical instead of idealistic, and realizing that the CIA is eternal, what work could we find for it?
· Weather forecasts. Thanks to budget cuts, the
National Weather Service has had to scale back, eliminating
things like frost alerts for citrus growers. Handing this
to the CIA could be justified as protecting the security
of the nation's food supply.
· Along the same line, the CIA could inspect produce. The current hepatitis epidemic from tainted strawberries produces exactly the same results as if a foreign power had attempted germ warfare against the American public. Put the CIA to work defending us.
· Border patrol. Everybody seems to be complaining about illegal immigration, and nobody has been able to stop it. So the CIA couldn't do any worse than the INS and the Customs Service.
· Wilderness enforcement. Was or wasn't Bobby Unser inside the San Juan Wilderness with a snowmobile? Most people might be glad to be rescued from the horrors of a mountain winter, and figure the $75 fine was a nuisance at best.
But hey, if he wants to make a case out of it, put the CIA to work figuring out exactly where he was at every time. They've probably got it all on film from their satellites, anyway.
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