Karzai's Personal ATM: the CIA

Dear Mr. President,
In the exhibit “Eye Level In Iraq” that I wrote about yesterday, there’s an Artist’s Statement by one of the photographers, Kael Alford: “Today Iraq is widely regarded as one of the most corrupt and dangerous places in the world.” I looked up Iraq’s ranking on Transparency International’s web site—they’re ranked 169 on the list of 176 countries. Afghanistan is tied with Somalia and North Korea for the most corrupt country in the world. (The U.S. is ranked 19th.) The CIA helped both Iraq and Afghanistan obtain those dismal rankings—those bags, backpacks and suitcases of Ben Franklins delivered direct to Karzai’s office for the past 11 years and planeloads of shrink-wrapped hundreds flown to Baghdad after the U.S. invasion in 2003. Influence-peddling bribes and payoffs to government officials and warlords, corruption on a grand scale, the use of American taxpayer dollars to fund criminal enterprises. Sick, disgusting, outrageous but business as usual for the CIA, just one more criminal activity in a long history of state-sanctioned criminal activities—from the overthrow of governments to covert wars and assassinations, from financing drug deals and drug dealers to secret prisons and torture. These are your people, Mr. President, this is your agency. You gave them carte blanche to kill and corrupt with impunity, no oversight, no accountability, no limits. You even named your own personal Rasputin, death-by-drone Brennan, to head the agency, a lifelong CIA operative, a true believer, architect of kill lists, targeted assassinations and drone wars, defender of torture and phony body counts (“everyone killed is an enemy combatant”). CIA policy trumps official policy but does corruption promote democracy, justice or freedom? Do suitcases of cash to warlords and government officials guarantee justice or do they guarantee continued injustice by corrupt regimes that suppress and deny basic rights to their citizens? Karzai’s your guy too, and he’s appreciative of the “small amounts” delivered to his office every month, a brazen acknowledgment of his—and our—corruption. The warlords are happy, Afghan lawmakers are happy… The only ones unhappy are the 99% of Afghans who live under the corruption and the 99% of Americans who pay for it in the form of austerity budgets, high unemployment and cutbacks in social services and standard of living. Say, could you send one of your CIA people to my place with a bag of Ben Franklins? I could put it to good use.