Willing to kill millions.

Editor,

Melvin A. Goodman, after a decades-long career in the CIA and teaching in the intelligence community, has laid out in "National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism" a long and depressing list of ways in which American intelligence has been militarized -- by which he means transformed from a civilian discipline whose mission was to aid policy makers into a military discipline whose mission is to provide pretexts for war fighters.

This book makes the reader feel by turns outraged and sick at heart, especially when thinking about the young men and women who have been swept into the military and committed to unnecessary military adventures on false pretenses.

Mendacity is by no means limited to Wall Street sharks. War is a business, too, and it is promoted and run by characters no less mendacious than the CEO's of too-big-to-fail banks and their enablers in Congress, Treasury, and the Fed.

The difference is that the United States' most sensitive instruments of intelligence gathering, war planning, and foreign policy have been infiltrated for 50 years by ideologues willing to kill millions on the basis of willful fabrications and deliberately manipulate the American public with misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and outright lies.

Re: "Americans and Their Military, Drifting Apart" (5/27/2013)