William Casey and the GID

Casey won the GID’s [General Intelligence Department of Saudi Arabia] personal loyalty to the extent that Saudi intelligence, with permission from King Fahd, agreed to secretly fund Casey’s riskiest anticommunist adventures in Central America.

— Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, (New York: Penguin, 2004), 93.

„Anticommunist adventures.“ Boy, that takes me back some thirty years. As it happens I was thinking of Casey’s anticommunist adventures just a couple months ago when consulting a doctor about mild arthritis in my knee. The visit took me back to the 1980s and another doctor’s office, where I’d explained that my knee was so swollen because the SFPD had cracked it with a nightstick. I’d tried to explain to the officers that I had a First Amendment right to be on the sidewalk protesting the solicitation of money for the contras who Americas Watch charged with programmatic rape, torture, and murder of civilians, that the International Court of Justice in The Hague had ruled against Ronald Reagan and the US, making Reagan an international war criminal, and that under the Nuremberg Principles I had not simply a right but a duty to resist my government’s sponsorship of the contras, but the boys in blue had been unimpressed and continued their clubbing. I remember the pain had been so intense I’d have fallen if a colleague hadn’t supported me.

So now I find myself reading about Casey’s collusion with, among other noble anti-communists, Osama bin Laden, and Coll throws off an aside about anticommunist adventures in Central America, while Barack Obama vows to destroy Isis’s „brand of evil“. Bill Casey where are you now?

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