It’s Cold in the Shadow of the Cold War

Egads:

The effort President Bush authorized shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, to fight al Qaeda has grown into the largest CIA covert action program since the height of the Cold War, expanding in size and ambition despite a growing outcry at home and abroad over its clandestine tactics, according to former and current intelligence officials and congressional and administration sources.

The broad-based effort, known within the agency by the initials GST, is compartmentalized into dozens of highly classified individual programs, details of which are known mainly to those directly involved.

GST includes programs allowing the CIA to capture al Qaeda suspects with help from foreign intelligence services, to maintain secret prisons abroad, to use interrogation techniques that some lawyers say violate international treaties, and to maintain a fleet of aircraft to move detainees around the globe. Other compartments within GST give the CIA enhanced ability to mine international financial records and eavesdrop on suspects anywhere in the world.

…"Everything is done in the name of self-defense, so they can do anything because nothing is forbidden in the war powers act," said one official who was briefed on the CIA's original cover program and who is skeptical of its legal underpinnings. "It's an amazing legal justification that allows them to do anything," said the official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issues.

GST? Fair enough; I guess KGB was already taken.

The interesting thing about this administration is that the majority of its members are leftover remnants from the Cold War—VP Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, and National Security Advisor Condi Rice all got their respective starts in fighting the Red Menace, hawkish apparatchiks of the military-industrial complex one and all. (Tellingly, Rice’s most relevant credential when chosen as National Security Adviser was having served as a Soviet expert in Washington during the collapse of the Soviet Union.) For a little fun, you can trace the Neocon trajectory from Cold Warriors to Bush administration hacks here, which starts with roles in the Nixon administration and moves forward through six subsequent administrations.

And yet, these people whose political careers were built around defending democracy against the horrors of dictatorial communism seem resolutely determined to turn the American democracy into something as ugly and corrupt as that against which they once fought. They’ve become what they hated—which, considering their Cold War methodology seems a just fate. Unfortunately, they’re taking the rest of us down with them.

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