Rejecting the CIA's Communist Methods

by Jacob G. Hornberger
Mar. 29, 2012

In a series of interviews in 1977, television journalist David Frost asked Richard Nixon about the legality of his actions as president. Nixon responded, “Well, when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.”

That mindset has also long been a guiding principle for the CIA, and unfortunately the American people have gone along with it, in the name of the Cold War, “national security,” and now the “war on terrorism.”

The result has been a life of the lie, a life that purports to constitute “freedom” and “limited government” but that in reality constitutes much of what occurred under communism — state kidnappings, assassinations, military coups, arbitrary arrests, secret prisons, torture, secret detentions, extra-judicial executions — and, most important, the assurance, implicit or explicit, of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution.

The idea, which has long been taught to American students in government-approved schools, has been that when regimes like China and the Soviet Union do these sorts of things, that constitutes communism and, thus, is evil and immoral. But when the CIA does them, Americans and the world are expected to consider them pro-freedom and good and moral.

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