CIA Propaganda?

Propaganda in the form of a TV series: it really sounds/looks as if it comes from the CIA.

Madam Secretary is a made for streaming on Netscape.

The new Secretary, “the Company’s” emergency candidate after the last one exploded near Africa, is a youngish, good-looking blonde, who doesn’t care about her appearance, until it becomes necessary. She cares about “making a difference.” It appears she’s ex-CIA, and still well-connected to it: the diplomatic corps, not at all, apparently.

Action involves a heart-rending kidnapping of two teens in Syria. Her solution, after a failed “extraction” attempt: shady international mafia/CIA connections, $1.5 million, and the two boys are kissing the ground as they arrive back in the good old USA.

You see. Just let the CIA do it. You don’t even need the Pentagon. CIA and its myriad foreign allies and illicit connections can fix everything, and for so little money.

I mean: $1.5 million to get those two American boys out of Syria: you can bet the previous “extraction” attempt cost more.

A few minutes mistake of mine cost our military $10,000, my angry Sergeant told me (in 1963).

So, the CIA solves our problems by cutting corners. But it hasn’t solved our problems in the past. The CIA’s first great triumph was overthrowing the “Socialist” (not Communist) Mossadegh in Iran, and installing the Shah and a pro-western government, that opened up Iran to US exploitation—of its oil. So, why did those ungrateful Iranians rebel and establish the Islamic Republic?

Extreme religion breeds in such instances; it finds fertile ground. The Iranian revolution was part religious, a large part nationalist, as in expel the exploitative foreigners who don’t even know how cultured and sophisticated we are, even as we are good Muslims.

But here’s the point: it was CIA meddling that destabilized Iran enough to make the Islamic revolution happen.

Not that Pentagon meddling in Iraq was even as successful. We’d be a lot better off with Saddam, and the semi-stability he maintained, than the chaos that Iraq is now. So would the Iraqis, except, possibly, the Shia in the south.

CIA disasters are legion: Bay of Pigs, Castro assassination plots, Allende-Pinochet, the Guatemalan coup against Social Democrat Jacopo Arbenz that began civil war lasting a generation. The intel during the Iraq war, perhaps “the best in the world,’ was “tailored.” CIA assessments of Soviet strength was consistently boosted, so Defense expenditures could rise.

Perhaps every major nation has to have intelligence services. Point of disclosure: I was a lowly analyst of radio traffic in places like Sinop, Turkey and Bad Aibling, then West Germany. I found the work rewarding: I was helping to monitor what the Soviets were doing, and possibly all of our work was mandated by international treaties. It was understood they did the same.

To solve problems through these same undercover institutions—and their illicit connections—injects real moral problems into American foreign policy.

Which is what we’re doing with our drone wars, almost none of which are officially acknowledged in the country in which the bombing happens, except for our limping survivor, Afghanistan.

The CIA only conducts about a third of the attacks; they are much less mouthy about them, compared to the Pentagon. The latter will give medals to drone “pilots” in their bunkers, in the Rockies, probably in a poor attempt to bolster morale.

Drone pilots, it seems, can’t stand the work: seeing real people in real time destroyed, graphically, before their eyes, onscreen, by the drones they control 3,000 miles away—and then having to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, because the Air Force can’t train them as fast as they’re leaving. A canker at the heart of the Empire.

Which brings me back to Madam Secretary, and a lot of other “product” available at places like Netflix and Amazon. There is a noticeable (to me) attempt to persuade us that we have to be hard-boiled. We have to use any means, even torture, but only when necessary: we’re the good guys. Morality is… troublesome.

What do we stand for? It’s not at all clear, except, we’re Americans, so we must be good. I don’t think the words ‘democracy,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘liberty,’ were even spoken during the episode I saw of Madam Secretary.