Gloria Naylor Quotes
The intelligence community, for the most part, has no accountability at all; to the Congress, to us the American people, and so they feel that they above the law.
Naylor, Gloria. "Gloria Naylor's '1996'." Interview by Ed Gordon. News & Notes, NPR, 23 Jan. 2006.
Jefferson and many others thought the original drafting of the Constitution was deficient in not explicitly protecting rights from the government. See {586024}. When it came time for ratification, it was clear that ratification would not take place unless that was remedied and the Bill of Rights made the ratification possible by satisfying many critics of whom Jefferson was but one. Note that the protection sought was from the President and the Congress.
We tend to be hard on our intelligence agencies for a combination or reasons. Because much of their activity is secret and many of their successes are not known to the public. If they have a great success, the politicians generally take the credit. But if the intelligence agency makes a big error that causes a failure of some kind, a the politicians often violate the secrecy and blame the intelligence agencies. The Iraq Invasion of the George W, Bush administration was a good example. The President had received intelligence that Iraq was developing nuclear weapons. He invaded to prevent their being used. It turned ouit that there were no nuclear weapons at all, and the President and leaders of hs cabinet had misled, the people, the Congress, the UN and world opinion and started a war on false pretenses. The administration then went public about the intelligence failure. There was a great deal of intelligence that indicated that there were no Iraq nuclear program but these never reached the President, the military or the public. In addition, the intelligence agencies have missed some really major events, like the fall of the Soviet Union or the Chinese Communist victory in the Chinese Civil war. But intelligence is not an exact science; mistakes are inevitable, The politicians using the intelligence tend to think that intelligence estimates are more certaini than estimates can be. However the CIA in particular has had periods of rogue and illegal activities just which cause many citizens ro distrust them. They have illegally investigated Americans, actually conducted experiments with chemical weapons in American cities without any permission or authority, violated American law in the way they treat prisoners,and destroyed evidence, broken the law by conducting activities that Congress and the President had explicitly forbid. The FBI has also broken the law and spied on Americans who were critical of the government, and slandered the reputations of some Americans by “leaking” information that oftn was not even true. So the current intelligence have to bear the burden of their predecessors, but because of the secrecy, cannot take advantage of all the wonderful accomplishments and great sacrifices of many members of the intelligence agencies.
Americans had never had the opportunity to see this committee in action before. While many Americans were intimidated, many were also very distressed to see how a Congressional Committee was abusing its power. And although the frightened Hollywood and network executive executives were intimidated into blacklisting Lawson and others, more and more Americans were lining up against this committee and Senator McCarthy’s committee in the Senate. This culminated in the Senate sanction of McCarthy and the discrediting of HUAC which never again had the influence that they had before this hearing.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had released an unclassified Summary of the Committee Report on the CIA using torture and perverse treatment of suspect terrorists in the aftermath of the 9-11 attack on New York. Most Republicans argued vehemently that the Report should be classified and kept secret as the CIA behavior was so egregious, unpalatable, and morally reprehensible that there would be negative consequences including perhaps demonstrations and attacks against Americans in foreign countries. Moreover, Terrorist organizations would use the heinous CIA behavior as a recruiting tool for anti-American terrorists. McCain, who had himself been the victim of North Vietnamese torture cited the moral and ethical reasons to prohibit torture but also explained what has been proven over and over again that torture victims will tell the torturer any nonsense that they think the torturer might believe just to get obtain relief from the agony of the torture.
Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Linden Hills (1985) and Mama Day (1988).
