Reply #128: You would know more than I do, I bet. The person I know was there as a Catholic Worker

[Leopolds Ghost]

Like I said, most of my limited knowledge on the subject comes from acquaintances. I'll ask him or my former pastor for background info sometime.

I do exercise a degree of common sense tho. I maintain (and I think
many people agree) that many of these agencies can't be controlled,
not because they are run as a secret criminal enterprise of some sort,
but because they are vast bureaucracies with a lot of money being
thrown around ending up in all sorts of dark corners. Most people are spending most of their time trying to protect their fiefdom. The criminality comes from the top. If overthrowing dictator X and looking the other way as general Y massacres people (like Clinton did in Rwanda) if doing so allows them to protect their little fiefdom, then they will stamp the forms and proceed to do everything (or in the case of Rwanda, nothing) on a need-to-know basis. If one hand doesn't know what the other hand is doing, then nobody sees the true magnitude of the evil, who is paying and motivating the "evildoers", in this case, the people doing the massacres. It all becomes so complicated that when muckraking journalists expose it, no one can understand it and no one gives a good god damn, it just gets blamed on "those people over there are like that". It's like the movie Darwin's Nightmare, a favorite of mine on the subject.