(Heather and Liz-S enjoy the Willow reunion at Front Page).
I am really agitated at the moment. I had composed a nice story that combined a Front Page reunion of Willow regulars, the DARPA office party going on around the bar, that Agency’s contribution to Amazon’s latest innovative technology that will put cameras in all our homes and access keys in the hands of their drivers. I presume the delivery drones they have been working on can’t handle the locks.
It is an interesting bit of technology that further invades our privacy. On the other hand, I heard one commentator say that 31% of parcels left on front porches are stolen, so I have no idea what rights the public will give up for Amazon Prime free delivery.
Anyway, the direct reason for the reunion was Heather’s birthday, and Liz-with-an-S managed to come up from her new office down on Eisenhower Avenue to join Jon-Without, JPeter, Thomas, Don and Jamie who was on the arm of a bearded Diplomatic Security Officer we dubbed JR Junior for an impromptu Willow reunion. I then got down to business on the story, connecting the dots on the release of the classified JFK Assassination papers, and the bizarre Trump dossier and the revelations on the Uranium One caper.
I was good, and had all my trademark snarkiness about the relief I felt about not having to worry about the Grassy Knoll, and the famous Tramp, and the Russians and the Cubans and the Mob that has been an occasional fascination for us all for more than a half-century.
Apparently, what was so secret was the embarrassment that legendary counterintelligence Czar James Jesus Angleton felt, along with J. Edgar Hoover, that they had been keeping tabs on Lee Harvey Oswald, knew that the Cubans thought he was a good shot, and that he was physically in Dallas long before President Kennedy’s motorcade passed the Texas Schoolbook Repository.
Like maybe Angleton did not pass that along to the Secret Service or the local police, and didn’t want to look like an incompetent bureaucrat and sully his legacy.
I then swiftly pirouetted into a discussion of the parallel mysteries of the scurrilous Trump Dossier, its disclosure to Buzzfeed, and possible use to justify to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court to justify warrants for surveillance of political opponents and the deliberate ‘unmaking’ of the names of the players, or just outright leaks of potentially damaging information in the last throws of the Presidential election, and the current Resistance movement to impeach the President.
I then did some pithy punditry on why all this activity was carefully firewalled with legal cut-outs, obfuscated with denial, and more than a hundred million bucks were donated by the board members of a company seeking to purchase 20% of American uranium reserves by a Russian entity.
It was a nice piece, didn’t disparage any particular names, and I think accurately depicted some commonality in the desperate desire of my fellow swamp-dwellers to keep things secret, not for national security reasons (it is clear that no such thought crossed the minds of the perpetrators) but just to be clear of embarrassment. or the Hoosegow.
Anyway, I was pretty happy with it, and was mounting some pictures from the reunion when my hands shook a bit as I was toggling back and forth and the story was gone.
I hate it when that happens. I set to work to tell a story about a much better story. Now I remember why I normally create these things on a real document that I save periodically in the event of such fatal occurrences.
Whoever that whistle-blower covert FBI source who claims to have evidence about the extortion and racketeering that was going on during the run-up to the Committee on Foreign Invest,ent in the United States (CFIUS) ought to do the same thing. Given the circumstances, that is certainly no secret. Not here in the Swamp, anyway.
Copyright 2017 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com