Philip Agee, maybe the most famous whistleblower of the modern era, died the other day at the age of 72. Agee was an obscure CIA agent for 12 years before he quit the agency in the late 1960's in protest of American foreign policy, which Agee helped execute in Latin America. Agee's primary focus was the terrorism that the CIA was practicing in "promoting" American interests around the world in pursuit of our bipartisan foreign policy.
Agee said working as a case officer in South America opened his eyes to the CIA’s Cold War goal in the region: to prop up traditional elites against perceived leftist threats through political repression and torture.“It was a time in the 70s when the worst imaginable horrors were going on in Latin America — Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Guatemala, El Salvador — they were military dictatorships with death squads, all with the backing of the CIA and the U.S. government,” he wrote.
“That was what motivated me to name all the names and work with journalists who were interested in knowing just who the CIA were in their countries,” he said.
To this day, Agee's message is confused by people who freely call him a traitor for speaking out against the CIA and naming CIA agents in an effort to stop the agency's violent and lawless practices. That's because Americans continue to labor under the illusion that our goverment means well around the world and tries to promote democracy and peace and that any deviations from that objective are unintentional. It's actually the other way around: our government rarely promotes real democracy and usually tries to destroy nationalist movements that reject American dominance around the globe.
Once you recognize that our governmnet has for decades subverted democracy around the world in pursuit of creating favorable investment and labor climates for American corporations, all of the so-called deviations from our good intentions make sense. Why did we support Manuel Noregia, the Panamanian killer? Why did we support Ferdinand Marcos, the Filipino dictator? The Apartheid government in South Africa? The fascists throughout Latin America? Saddam Hussein? The list goes on forever.
No one will answer the above questions in polite discourse. The New York Times won't, and neither will any "respectible" news agency in the U.S. That's why even liberals think that American foreign policy fundamentally seeks to promote democracy and freedom. The evidence does not bear that out. But the concept of "American exceptionalism," which holds that our government is the most enlightened and loving force on God's green Earth, allows us to gloss over the unjust wars, the terrorism and violence practiced by Democratic and Republican administrations alike.
I came to realize this around the time that Philip Agee spoke at my college in the late 1980's. It was a big deal to have a CIA defector speak on campus, and Agee's speech opened a lot of eyes that night, as he recounted crime after crime in the name of American foreign policy. Agee's credibility was enhanced by his career with the CIA and his detailed denunciation of our foreign policy. As I educated myself on these issues I wondered why the Democratic Party did not challenge Republican authority in highlighting the vicious crimes of the Reagan administration around the world. The answer, I came to learn, was that on foreign policy, the Democrats were not much better than the Republicans and, of course, while some Democrats knew the truth about our foreign policy, raising these questions in seeking the presidency was too risky. Too many Americans would not understand this critique because they have not intellectual foundation to understand it. Most Americans do not read honest history or critical studies of American foreign policy. A comprehensive challenge to American foreign policy while running for president would destroy any candidacy.
Twenty years later, nothing has changed. The Republican candidates may be offensive, each and every one of them, and the Democrats may not be conservative right-wing schmucks, but they sure as hell are not going to attack Bush's war in Iraq as an imperialist endeavor. It's enough to attack the war as a poorly-executed mess in which we meant well. The evidence is to the contrary, but no presidential candidate wants to set himself up as a "traitor" and "anti-American." But, as always, the true anti-Americans are the criminals who send our young men to die in a war based on lies and which never should have been started.
