EDITORIAL:
McWilliam, W. Carey
EDITORIALS MURDER, INC. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the story alleging CIA involve-ment in plots to assassinate political leaders in countries whose policies ostensibly offended the...
...Unfortunately, the relevant House committee is bogged down by the injudiciousness of its chairman, Representative Lucien N. Nedzi...
...The CIA story, if true in only a tangential way, is a national disgrace...
...How-ever, there is the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Senator Frank Church, and it is proceeding in spite of White House and bureaucratic roadblocks...
...It is easier to understand these repressions than it is to excuse them...
...Add murder to the narrative of American foreign interference that has recent-ly unfolded, and this country drops below the bottom level of decencies that are expected to exist between nations...
...It is to be hoped that the persistence of the committee as a whole matches that of Mr...
...Here one has an official agency of the United States government, with or without the blessing of whoever hap-pened to be President at the time, going about the business of murder- not in the circumstance of a formally declared, full-scale war, when a ration-ale might be developed for the action, but in peacetime, when no formal state of belligerency exists, and when, presumably, there are avenues such as diplomacy and international forums for effecting change...
...It is almost as though a mass conspiracy were at work, at the grassroots and at the highest levels of government, either to contain the story or block it out of the psyche...
...But suppression of facts about CIA assassination involvements is not going to wipe out the past, nor is it likely to correct the future-pious truisms of Attorney General Levi notwithstanding, along with fresh resolves about the CIA never again being a government within a govern-ment, making determinations about who is to be mur-dered and who not...
...Murder-which is what assassination is, in its bluntest term-is a repre-hensible act, and no one likes to conceive of its being an instrument of our government's foreign policy...
...Like the person with a terminal disease, it might be more comfortable not to talk about the ailment...
...For if assassination is a defend-able tool for the United States, it is for any other nation, and the world is mired in a sickening perversity...
...The very thought does violence to what-ever ideals happen to survive of American diplomatic purity and integrity...
...Yet this story has to battle for attention...
...The cancer must be laid bare, even if it means radical surgery and permanent hurt to the CIA...
...Under the circumstances, it is understandable that the Ford administration should seek to "low-profile" the CIA-assassinations story (except, it sometimes appears, as this story might be useful in reflecting on the Kennedy family image...
...Church, for it is as true now as it was during Watergate: our country is never going to get well until we all know completely what's wrong with it...
...And this is precisely where the United States is if reports are true of American complicity in the assassinations of the Dominican Republic's Trujillo and the Congo's Lumumba, and in unsuccessful efforts on the life of Cuba's Fidel Castro...
...It is an appalling, disgraceful business, one which, if substantiated, testifies to a national political and moral impoverishment...
...If fully substantiated, it could indicate that we are sicker as a nation than was ever imagined in even the darkest days of Watergate...
...This is why it is important that the Congress dig to the bottom of the CIA mess...
...The challenge to the Church committee, in a word, is tied up with the very health of the nation...
...No amount of rationalization or of pragmatic reasoning, such as cited by W. Carey McWilliams else-where in this issue, can obviate the fact that murder is evit and unacceptable as an instrument of national policy, even in the most limited of circumstances and under whatever Orwellian felicity of vocabulary...
...To have matters otherwise is to wipe out last standards of inter-national morality and introduce the law of the jungle to affairs between nations...
...Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the story alleging CIA involve-ment in plots to assassinate political leaders in countries whose policies ostensibly offended the United States is its inability, not so much as to dominate public consciousness in the fashion, say, of the Watergate story, as even to significantly impress it...
Vol. 102 • July 1975 • No. 9
