Jerome Donnelly’s recent history lesson on the duplicitious tradecraft of the CIA seems a misguided attempt to draw attention away from the hacking of an American presidential election, a critical danger to our republic.
He gives short shrift to the war crimes of Hafez Assad and his benignly brutal son, tinpot dictators propped up by another tinpot dictator, Mr. Putin, all to support the dubious value of exposed emails which seem to satisfy Mr Donnelly’s political loyalties during the election — seems like a bad bargain to me that he has made. Whatever Mr. Donnelly’s reasons for his selective reading of the history of Syria, clearly his naive confusion of and failure to recognize the essential purpose of both fake news and recent Russian hacking of our political system (to sow confusion, where, indeed, they succeeded in Mr Donnelly’s case) does not seem to bother him one wit.
He even is in denial about “whoever hacked information” (the identity of the Russians as the hackers is not credibly in dispute by most members of foreign intelligence experts and national security officials) and claims the DNC’s “manipulation of the media” is a good thing as it “reveal[s] information” the “public had a right to know.”
Does Mr Donnelly believe America has a right not to be infiltrated by foreign, hostile and powerful adversaries? I wonder.
His soft-pedaling of Assad’s brutality, and the crocodile tears he sheds by making this pawn of Putin’s have to endure being called a “cruel dictator” is false and shameful. He characterizes Bashar al-Assad, a war criminal who has gassed his own people, including children in hospitals, as a “decent, elected leader.” It’s fashionable for some Pioneer Valley progressives, still besotted with Bernie, to wax warmly about the bad, old days of United Fruit, Bay of Pigs and those mean old Dulles brothers, now decades in their graves. But is it not also disingenuous to draw attention away from real threats to this country while they, all too real, lurk in front of our noses?
The inability of those Americans to see the insidious effort of Vladimir Putin to ally himself with and influence the election of Trump serves to not only place a poodle in the White House who will help to ensure Russia’s national interest at our expense, but will have thereby enlisted Trump’s followers to do Putin’s bidding in attacking Trumps political enemy, Hillary Clinton, who (because of her tough stance on Russia) is also Putin’s enemy.
Mr Donnelly seems like no fan of Trump. But his academic tirade against “The Company” from decades past is blinding him to the dissent being sowed in our country today, which is more dangerous and more urgent than fighting old battles of the New Left.
He claims to want to clarify the effects of a free media from false stories, but instead he confuses the issue, and considers as permissible, and even desirable, the ability of foreign, hostile governments to interfere as a kind of truth-telling. He doesn’t see that the advent of fake news and hacking had the congruent political purpose of destroying Trump’s, and Putin’s, political enemies.
Dan McGrail
Greenfield