Andrew Sullivan and his Dish compatriots have been doing an admirable job of staying in touch with the whole Torture Report thing. Today’s email to Sullivan have included a few from folks who had or are employed in the Security Surveillance State apparatus.
“…And here’s the kicker: many of them [those who work do intelligence analysis] came into this kind of work directly out of college and were paid pretty well for it. Their entire adult lives have been based on this type of work. They’ve known nothing else. One can’t expect that such a situation wouldn’t have an effect on their political views. A subset of an entire generation has been profoundly affected in ways we don’t discuss enough. To get a full understanding of this period of torture, surveillance, and bungled wars, one must consider the contracting aspect of it and the people for whom such work created the prosperous upper-middle class life that many Americans have come to expect but which fewer and fewer can achieve…”
A reader writes:
From early 2006 to late 2009, I was a part of the post-9/11 corporate-security state serving as an intelligence analyst. This is not a fact in which I take much pride. When the Abu Ghraib scandal became augmented with the information that CACI contractors were involved – CACI being known where I’m from primarily as a tech services contractor – I started to question the incentives and structure of the intelligence contracting field in which I’d become enmeshed.
Over those years I followed the torture and spying revelations closely and I took the same position then that I do now: this is plainly illegal, immoral, and the result of caustic fear, overreaction, and hysteria. Though I was not involved with anything remotely connected to torture, one of the best days of my life was the last time I walked out of that office.
I’m attaching an image…
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CALL ME MAGGIE 