Against Machiavellianism
by Barton Wong

There are many famous urban legends regarding the Central Intelligence Agency. One, perpetuated by Oliver Stone's JFK, blames it for the Kennedy assassination. An even more absurd legend was that the CIA deliberately and systematically supplied inner-city black neighborhoods with "hard" drugs such as cocaine and heroin, all in the effort to keep blacks in poverty.

Throughout the 1990s, Americans were fed a weekly dose of suspicion about secretive government agencies from The X-Files with its twisting, labyrinthine conspiracies, truly monstrous villains and "Trust No One" attitude. It made paranoia chic and exposed the up-to- then closed world of hardcore conspiracy-mongers (represented on the show by the Lone Gunman) to a wider audience in suburbia. Big-budget films with major stars like Enemy of the State and Conspiracy Theory became commonplace. Not that anyone really cared what the CIA or even the FBI were really up to.

After all, that was imagination. It was assumed reality must have been far blander; more filing reports and wire-tapping tax evaders than engaging with aliens to take over the world. The CIA was even up for an image upgrade this season with a new drama, "The Agency," which is supposedly so positive with the spooks that the real-life agency actually helped in its making and let the producers use its buildings. But September 11th changed all that for good.

There is understandably a great deal of rage and an "anything goes" determination in fighting these terrorists on behalf of the American people, so perhaps it explains the moral ambiguity that appears to have now taken hold of certain high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. This became most clear on Sunday when Vice President Dick Cheney ominously suggested on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the CIA must change its policy of not using operatives with ties to terrorist groups when working to uncover schemes against America.

"If you're only going to work with officially approved, certified good guys, you are not going to find out what the bad guy are doing," Cheney said. "You have to have on payroll some very unsavory characters. This is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty, business. We have to operate in that arena."

No one can deny that there is a certain truth in Cheney's statements, nor can someone who has not had any experience in intelligence or special operations really comment on the realism of not using all the sources at hand in defending America, but the methods proposed cannot but be morally repugnant to those who still believe in the ideal of Americans fighting "fair" against its various enemies.

Whatever the virtues or flaws America's so-called "dirty wars" in places such as Chile or Nicaragua, and whether they were any dirtier than the regimes they were fighting or that of other country's covert operations, remains a matter of dispute for future historians. And no matter what extremists like Pat Robertson or Noam Chomsky have to say, the nation manifestly did not deserve to have some 5,000 of its citizens killed and its heart ripped out of its financial center.

In the end, the attack was self-defeating, merely destruction for destruction's sakes. The anger and outrage that Americans feel is righteous and just, but the Bush administration proposes to throw away the moral high ground by essentially resorting to terrorist methods.

What exactly does Cheney mean by "unsavory characters?" Does this mean that the CIA will now be forced to work with and protect murderers, rapists, drug dealers, even war criminals, much as the Truman administration imported German scientists to aid with the US nuclear weapons program after the Second World War? Back then, the saying was "Better red than dead." Is the operating motto for CIA now, "Open for business to all except Islamic fundamentalists?"

How are Americans going to feel when they realize that much of the agency's budget is being spent on these "unsavory characters?" And how exactly are we going to parse the difference between "unsavory" and too "unsavory"? Perhaps Cheney should remember the Iran-Iraq war, in which the United States supplied weapons to Saddam Hussein because he was judged the lesser of two evils. Or the Dayton Peace Accords, where Slobodon Milosevic was the Clinton administration's "partner in peace." Today, he's on trial for war crimes at The Hague, after that same administration's bloody air offensive during which the Chinese Embassy was bombed and over 500 innocent civilians were allegedly killed. Surely Cheney, who was defense secretary during the Gulf War, knows better than to try to make value judgements between evil and morally bankrupt people.

Then there is the proposal to lift Gerald Ford's 1976 executive order against assassinating enemies of the United States. Cynics will no doubt point to the US bombings of the hideouts of such diverse antagonists as Mohamar Gaddafi, Hussein, Milosevic and Osama Bin Laden to prove that such a moratorium was merely a symbolic gesture. That may be, but now the Bush administration is considering publicly renouncing the moratorium, making it the announced policy to target individual "enemies."

How we would decide how dangerous and evil an enemy would have to before we liquidated them remains unknown, but the implication would be that the "arsenal of democracy" approved of using such methods in its defense. But if America took such a stance, what would stop a Muslim extremist from assassinating, say, President Bush, and justifying it by saying that Bush was an enemy of Islamic fundamentalism? To use such methods would put the government on a long, slippery slope towards Machiavellianism until it would become little more than a Western equivalent of the terrorists over whom it claims moral superiority.

Kipling once wrote bitterly of people "makin' mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep," that must be how many in the Bush administration, the military and the intelligence community feel right now regarding people who have moral scruples about these proposed policies. In the light of the casualties and the sheer horror of Tuesday's events, such an attitude is fully understandable. But this administration and those that follow can never give in to the temptation to resort to terrorist methods. It is simply not worthy of America; it is not worthy of any civilized nation. As someone has said during the last few days, "Justice, not revenge."

E-mail Barton Wong at bartonwong at hotmail dot com.