Christopher Lee Quotes
I was attached to the SAS from time to time, but we are forbidden - former, present, or future - to discuss any specific operations.
Lee, Christopher. Lord of Misrule: The Autobiography of Christopher Lee. Orion Publishing Group, 2003, p. 95.
This instruction referred to the illegal COINTELPRO program whereby FBI Director Hoover not only ordered the FBI to illegally spy on African American organizations, but actually interfere with their operations and by leaking personal sexual information and trying to ruin the reputations of numerous Black leaders including Rev. Martin Luther King. See {584581}. This illegal program actually specifically named and targeted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Congress of Racial Equality, and the Nation of Islam. Hoover ordered that the program be kept secret. However, in what is a humorous historical twist, a civil rights organization organized a “black bag” burglary—the same kind of illegal break in that the FBI had been practicing against Black groups and others—broke into an FBI field office and stole this and other documents which they then made public. Otherwise the contents of this program might never have come to light.
This radical reform did not make much headway. The “need to know" standard used specific knowledge to signify the status of different officials and was intended to minimize the likelihood of intelligence leaking as few people saw the whole picture and understood the implications. But that was the great weakness in that the major purpose of intelligence is to analyze the information and guide the nation’s policies and responses to events and situations. Without all the information available so many intelligence and other officials are unable to ‘connect the dots’ and see the picture emerging. The attack of September 11 was a classic example where much of the information that was known never was conveyed to most people and so no one had a big enough picture. By the time one could establish a ‘need to know’ it was too late to utilize the conclusions even if they were reached in time.
The TPP was the first Trade Agreement that had ever been classified as “Secret” when it was being negotiated. This was one of the most hotly debated policies of the era. Even Congress could not get a look at what was being negotiated although the Senate would have to ratify it when finished for it to become effective. .On the surface, it is outrageous that a non-military or defense activity should be secret in a democracy. What could be wrong with the Congress and the public being aware of a trade negotiation while it was being formulated and negotiated? Kirk and other apologists for the secrecy policy argue that because of the trade-off relationships among different clauses and facets of a trade treaty, there are many proposals that are made just to initiate a bargaining position, and the negotiators themselves neither expect nor intend those proposals to be a part of the final treaty. To then have groups of Americans get upset and start a lobbying position against a treaty when what they object to is not ever going to be in the treaty poisons in the public mind the entire treaty which then could be killed for something that was never real to begin with. A similar thing happened with the Obamacare legislation. Congress drafted the various clauses and many were included as part of the bargaining process or misunderstood because of poor first drafting. Opposition to those clauses set a tone of animosity against the bill as a whole. After the bill was passed, the clauses that were most unpopular or misinterpreted were the main reason that citizens gave for opposing Obamacare even though they were not in the legislation. Advocates of secrecy point out that the original Constitutional Convention was entirely secret with all the delegates agreeing that if each and every proposal that was debated were public, there would develop so much opposition that the result could never be ratified later. Yet it is hard to argue against transparency of government processes in a democracy.
Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ was an English actor, singer and author. With a career spanning nearly seven decades, Lee was well known for portraying villains, gaining recognition for appearing as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films. His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002–2005), and Saruman in both the Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and the Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014).
