Sibel Edmonds interviews Douglas Valentine: The CIA as “Bureaucracy”

“Bureaucracy?” Sounds boring, yes? Wrong.

I asked housemate (and librarian) Dan to get me a book or two by Douglas Valentine, since Jerome Corsi speaks so highly of him. That was a few days ago. Dan forgot. But my unconscious need to absorb Valentine’s material did not! On twitter today, I notice a Sibel Edmunds interview with him. Yes! This slightly over one hour presentation became my companion this afternoon as I moved through my daily yoga/chi kung/tai chi exercises.

So, my assessment:

Extremely brilliant and provocative. And it makes me look at my own stuff too, especially the need for heroes. As Valentine puts it: “There are no heroes.” Or: heroes are manufactured as controlled opposition, because the CIA knows that people need heroes.

This author has been studying the Deep State, as a vast interwoven global bureaucracy, for decades. And this, he says, distinguishes his own work from other authors and Hollywood dramas that feature particular nasty CIA deeds but then always end with the message that we have to do it because in order to win we have to be even badder than the bad guys. Notice, he says, that Seymour Hersh, a celebrated investigative journalist, despite his decades of covering the CIA, has never outed even a single CIA agent’s name. Huh? What does that say about Hersh?

Lore has it that JFK famously said, only months? before he was assasinated, that he would like to “break up the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind.” But, as Sibel Edmonds comments, vividly,  in that case, since “the CIA recruits serial killers and pathological liars, how would we like it if tens of thousands of former CIA agents were released into the public? U.S. crime would go way up!”

This video doesn’t cover the CIA as a drug-running operation (for that, see his earlier books). Rather, it focuses on how the CIA, now 70 years old, functions as “capitalism’s invisible army,” inserting agents with cover stories into politics, corporations, and social conditions world-wide to engender and exploit unstable situations for the benefit of “American” transnational corporations. Furthermore, as he says, no one ever “retires” from the CIA. Our society is riddled with former CIA personnel who now run security companies, get elected to political office, start Ford Motor franchises, etc., all the while counting on CIA contacts, both current and former. This is the real Deep State as “parallel world.”

Valentine’s most recent book (2016):

Oh, and if you don’t want to spoil your watching of “Wormwood” on Netflix, then view that entire six-part series first, before hearing Valentine’s take, as this video begins, on why it disappointed him.

Because of this single video, I now have a much more nuanced perspective on the CIA.  No wonder JFK vowed to break it into a thousand pieces. And yet, Valentine says, it’s so entrenched that it’s impossible, unless more and more real journalists do relentless and prolonged exposure of the way it actually functions as a bureaucracy.